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Google's Open Source Mobile Platform
As expected, today Google took the wraps off of the gPhone (as the media have for months been referring to the rumored project). Google is "leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers," and will be licensing its software to all comers on an open source basis under the Apache license. (The Wall Street Journal's Ben Worthen demonstrates a miserable grasp of what "open source" means.) Google's US partners include Nextel and Sprint, but not AT&T nor Verizon. Phones will be available in the second half of 2008 — not the spring as earlier reports had speculated. News.com's analysis warns that Google won't take over the mobile market overnight, though they quote Forrester in the opinion that Google may be one of the three biggest mobile players after several years of shakeout.
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Ok, so not reading the article I get, who has the time. I am getting used to people not reading the summary either. But not reading the title of the article is just too much! Thats it, you are expelled from slashdot!
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
For the past 3 days I've been trying to modify and mess with my Motorola V3M Razor and it's a glitchy hell to try and do. Any phone that's more open than the current phone Nazis keep them is fine with me. All those dollar per ringtone and wallpaper people can shove it. Oh and especially that chick on late night TV commercials with the weird accent telling me I can win like $32,000 if I unscramble the word and text it in. I hope Google tracks her down and gets her deported. Now some of you may be asking, "Do you have anger issues with cell phone carriers and their associates" to which I say, "Don't you?"
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
You read the article I take it?
Viruses need to self replicate.
Social Enginnering 'OMG Download this cool app d00dz' doesnt count.
There arent any easy ways to get a phone to send a virus to another phone.
The easiest way is Bluetooth or Wifi and then its still a pain in the ass to make it spread.
With Bluetooth you first need to somehow get another phone to connect to you, without user intervention which is impossible (without flaws in the stack).
Then you need to send data to the other phone in a way which makes it execute the code. Also basically impossible.
Whats the chance of Google's code having fundamental bugs like that? Nil.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Let me be the first to say DUPE.
Come ON! I guess Slashdot's speed at getting the original post on the front page threw you guys off. Usually these things come at least a day after everyone else.
(Not that I don't prefer Slashdot. I flame because I care.)
...welcome our Android overlords.
Good. With that out of the way, I have to say I'm really looking forward to seing what Google can do in terms of getting functionality that has typically been the domain of "smartphones" that typically go for more than $200 w/ contract into the domain of phones that range from free to $50 (again w/ contract). With the minimum requirements set at an ARM9 @ 200MHz, this platform should allow open development on a huge new range of phones. I've already seen people earlier today making dire predictions about how Google is not going to be able to compete with the iPhone or how they prefer phones based on Symbian...and I think these people are completely missing Google's whole plan. I'm sure that initially phones based on Android will fall closer to the smartphone price range, but I can't help but think that eventually Google has to be aiming at the free-to-$50 phones. The "just a basic phone" market is an area in desperate need of a unifyied platform. Between lack of openness and the lack of a properly standardized Java implementation development for a wide range of low end phones is pretty much intractible. If Google can get Android onto low-cost phones *and* ensure "write once, run anywhere" between them I think they will have all the developer support they need. And since they already have the ears of the carriers (T-Mobile, Sprint, etc) they've already ensured they have a way to get this on shipping phones.
Why do I think low end phones are so important to these companies in the open handset alliance, when they don't have the profit margins of smartphones or "feature-phones"? Simple: Emerging markets. For billions of people around the world it is too expensive or impractical to own and maintain an Internet connected PC. It may be because of upfront cost or it may be a lack of Internet infrastructure in their area. For those people a phone will be their first (and maybe only) connection to the Internet. Right now the browsing experience on basic phones ranges from useless to unbearably slow and there is an impressive *lack* of easily accessible third party applications. If someone could change that it would add incredible value to that class of phones. So what's in it for Google? Making sure that their page is the first one a couple billion people see the first time they get on the Internet is probably worth it.
^I'm with stupid.^
No, it's not at all harsh for what is supposed to be a professional writer. He starts off with an idea, a dangerous beginning in the first place, that there should be some sort of software security specifically for interfacing phones and PCs in the office. A good idea (perhaps even a profitable one) and doesn't think it through at all. He starts off, not with the good idea, but with a broad, one-sided assumption that all open applications are prone to security issues simply because they are open. If he were somewhere in the ballpark range of competent he would have reversed the two topics and stated that we need security software for smart phone to PC interfaces and that the result of not developing it could be rogue open applications creating a security nightmare. But he didn't. He speculated on something that went well in hand with his idea, but he didn't have a clue about it worked, and also didn't do any research on it to get more knowledge. He even pretty much says all this (sans admitting that he doesn't know what he's talking about and didn't do any research, but that much is very obvious) in his rehash he added to the article to address the people who e-mailed him about his mistake. The update is almost as large as the article itself. I'd say he pretty much deserves to be criticized on his grasp of Open Source as it is demonstrated by this article.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I don't have any experience with Sprint but T-Mobile is probably the best in terms of being "open" of the big four mobile operators in the US. For example, until a few years ago you could get free web browsing through them by exploiting a hole in their free WAP access service. Instead of just shutting the hole and ignoring the people who didn't want to pay for a full Internet plan, they decided to shut it while transitioning to tiered Internet plans so people who didn't need to tether could still get the full web on their phones at a reduced price. Most phones also apparently will still let you tether with their cheap service, though T-Mobile will cut off your access if you use too much bandwidth while doing this.
They use GSM which is a big plus if you want to buy your own phone. I haven't yet needed to because, while all of their phones that I've owned were locked and had T-Mobile logos and "premium services" everywhere, none of them were in any way crippled like Verizon is infamous for doing. I even added a custom ringtone to one of my phones using only a standard USB cable and the manufacturer's ringtone transfer software. Their coverage is pretty good, the only time I've had trouble with it was when I was traveling through West Virginia which is a hard area to cover with cell phone service anyways. Their biggest problem is that they don't yet have any 3G service available anywhere (they're waiting for the spectrum they bought for it to become available for their use) and their customer service is nothing to write home about, but that's pretty much par for the course in this industry.
What if this signature were clever?
So I suppose instead of hot spots if you have a gPhone you look for gSpots....
Google have been running (on a small scale) something conceptually similar in Japan with one of the major carriers -- KDDI -- for a while now. KDDI have integrated google search as the default search system, and google mail as one of the "official" mail options for that service. In effect there is a KDDI co-branded Google.
/.
As far as I see it, Google mobile platform is the same thing inside an OS package. The platform will be "open" to carriers and makers who are participants of the Google alliance. However, nowhere in the Google materials have i seen a commitment to make the phone open to the outside developers. Nor does it make any sense for them to open it.
Depending on how it is rolled out, we may see some sources, but likely we'll never have a chance to apply a patch to the OS actually in the device, or build an application outside of whatever sandbox they put in the OS. There will likely be APIs and widgets tied to the google servers and services, but hardly much freedom beyond that.
Obviously that is very good for google, if they pull it off. It is less obviously good for the carriers or the makers, but the carriers will eventually agree to this in exchange for revenue-sharing, and because they have nowhere to go, and the makers will be arm-twisted by the carriers. The end result may be that only the "google internet" will be available on the mobile phones that use android. Sorta like an enhanced WAP, imode or EZ web.
I see no problem with this if one is very-very happy about storing their data on a google server and accessing it via the google phone OS. But I wouldn't call it free in any of the senses of that word we're accustomed to on
But I guess we'll see what it really is when they release the SDK.
Google has never called it the "gPhone"; Bloggers and press came up with that name since they needed to call it something. Google's name for the platform is Android.
This guy is so clueless, his Betamax VCR is still flashing 12:00...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Are you kidding? He's fast approaching the Ideal Slashdot User, who to this point has only been simulated mathematically - he who reads nothing at all.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
Both Nokia and Google have announced iPhone-killers and neither of them is going to ship one unit before the second half of 2008. Microsoft will need at least that long to shrink Surface down to the size of a Zune.
Nokia is promising touchscreens and multimedia and Google is promising open source and the Web. Like we already have in our iPods. And they're going to get that to us real soon now. Like in another year from now.
It shows how miserable Palm has become that Google didn't even buy them. Not even for the name.
Things might change if this platform becomes ubiquitous. I'm not saying it's likely, mind you, and anyway the same arguments could be applied to the iPhone SDK (once the bad guys yoink themselves a copy of those dev tools).
It's not the 'openness' of the platform that matters. It's the openness of the end-product, that is delivered to the customer [namely you and me] that matters [well, to you and me]. And that's an issue that's pretty much independent of what OS the phone is running. Particularly in the US.
And Sprint being part of this 'group' means nothing w.r.t. how open the shipping product will be.
The US wireless carriers will fight tooth and nail to NOT be treated as what they are: wireless service providers.
On the other hand, if anything this could make customer demand for 'openness' more difficult, because this fractures the market for developers a bit more. Now, to develop a ubiquitous app, you need to support another platform. One that with the source available, developers can't necessarily count on a given set of API's even being available on a 'googleos' phone...
I think it'll still take quite a while before the US wireless carriers permit much advancement. Even Apple had to deliberately cripple iTunes support on the iPhone so you can't use it over your "unlimited data plan" EDGE connection.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Nope, it's Linux based, and any add-on Google writes will be under the Apache license. The video also seemed to indicate that linux hackers will be comfortable in the system, as well. Compared to just having some crap Java virtual machine, this could be huge. Hacked iPhones made rapid progress partly because they run real *-nix, and Apache was ported before any of the traditional toy web servers, and SSH before telnet, and even a VNC viewer (with a somewhat broken control interface). I guess we'll see in about a week what's under the hood.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
There are already plenty of phones that you can install your own software on and not have to pay for ringtones (I can't believe that people are stupid enough to do that). For example, I have a Treo (Windows Mobile) - I can install any software I want on it, and easily create my own Compact .NET Framework apps for it if I want to - it doesn't have to be signed by the carrier or anything. I believe I can use any MP3 file as a ringtone, though I just use one of the MIDI's that came with it. Song ringtones annoy the hell out of me. Text messages aren't free - but that obviously has nothing to do with the phone and isn't going to ever happen. You'll always be paying a service provider for text messages - whether its per text, for unlimited text messages, or bundled in with some plan.
If Google is really successful it'll be because they are able to lower the price of smartphones from several hundred dollars to where the cheap toy phones (that don't let you install software/ringtones/etc) currently are. While I do not know how much of the cost of smartphones is for the OS, I highly doubt that a free OS will make smartphones that much cheaper. Maybe they'll subsidize some of the cost through AdSense or something, though I personally would hate to have a phone that forced me to look at ads.
More competition is a good thing though, at the very least it'll hopefully drive prices down a bit.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Well if it does end up being called a gPhone, I reckon it'll hit Apple right in the iSpot.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
First, look at the guys forming the "alliance": Broadcom, NVIDIA, Wind River, who are all acting towards closing linux (Wind River was even a vocal opponent to linux some times ago). Furthermore, look at why they choose Android's licence:
Why did you pick the Apache v2 open source license? Apache is a commercial-friendly open-source license. The Apache license allows manufacturers and mobile operators to innovate using the platform without the requirement to contribute those innovations back to the open-source community. Because these innovations and differentiated features can be kept proprietary, manufacturers and mobile operators are protected from the "viral infection" problem often associated with other licenses.
There. You can dream all you want about an open platform, like your traditional Fedora or Ubuntu desktop, but that won't be it. Go for Openmoko instead.