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Predicting The Google Phone
An anonymous reader writes "Inside The GPhone: What To Expect From Google's Android Alliance (an article at Information Week) argues that you can predict what the GPhone(s) will look like very easily, simply by listing the technologies of the Open Handset Alliance partners. According to this theory, the phone will have a user interface from Sweden's TAT, VCAST-like multimedia capabilities powered by PacketVideo Corp., and an iPhone-like capacitive touch-screen, from Synaptics. Hardware-wise, it'll probably be built around Texas Instruments' OMAP processors, which enable a single-chip world phone (GSM/EDGE/GPRS). "While the GPhone won't be revolutionary, it'll connect the pieces in pleasantly new ways," argues author Alex Wolfe. Should Apple be concerned?"
and its can be on sprint?
Yes, Apple should become concerned.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
No. Apple should not be concerned because they are great are doing hardware... :-)
According to some patents, Apple may be working on cooler stuff like pressure sensitive screens etc.
Also, the resolution of most Open Handest/android applications are going to be for QVGA screens since that is what the SDK encourages. It will look like shrunken crap on VGA or WVGA screens, so dont expect any handset vendors to make decently priced phones above QVGA.
So, in short, the iPhone 2 will be 4 years ahead of any Google Open Handset Alliance phone.
-Johan
PS> Maybe google should have made this platform good for non mobvile phone stuff too like for in cars or whatever
The processor used in the first Google phones will more likely be the Qualcomm 7200. This is the new chip going into the latest HTC phones (such as the AT&T Tilt/Kaiser/Tytn II/whatever). It is a dual CPU that integrates the Imageon hardware for 2d and 3d graphics acceleration. I believe this is HTC's current choice for their first "gPhone."
Although Qualcomm hasn't released a proper SDK for the processor yet, so hardware acceleration is not fully implemented.
or else!
Another cell phone! Woot! The market was so sparse!
Maybe they can release an MP3 player next! Boo-yeah! Or a WW2 FPS game!
"Texas Instruments' OMAP processors, which enable a single-chip world phone (GSM/EDGE/GPRS)"
Funny how that is a "world" phone. GSM is only a standard for Europe. In North American you have both GSM and CDMA, Korea is mostly CDMA and I think Japan is also uses a lot of CDMA.
Also Sprint is one of the carriers that is involved in this and they only do CDMA.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Has any one tried running android on a Neo1973?
The cool things is to have windows that bounce up and down like a good tits.
Apple's iPhone is a single, phone that's very well-designed and includes a slick interface. Oh yeah, and it has the Apple brand (and the corresponding price tag). Reports are that Apple's phone managed to successfully establish itself a niche in the mobile phone world, but that they failed to sell as many as they had hoped.
Google's Android platform, on the other hand, is more than just a single gPhone, as they like to say it's 'thousands of phones', made by dozens of companies, spanning the super high-end iPhone killers to the low-end cheap free-after-rebates you get with your carrier subscription. The operations that Google has set into motion - departing from the traditional JCP standards process, releasing a new non-Sun Java-like Virtual Machine - these moves have a huge potential to transform the entire mobile phone industry as a whole - and, though it's still early to say for sure, the transformation will more than likely be for the better.
So Apple's iPhone is a great, very well-designed product for a few people, but it is overall much less significant than the potential Android has to seriously shake up and inject innovation into the mobile industry. The two are honestly nothing alike, as much as the media would like them to be.
-Will
Funny, I would have said:
Apple makes hardware that works
Google makes software that works
You misinterpret the iPhone's initial market if you think it is suitable for business (it isn't), for instant messaging (it doesn't have that feature), or social networking (unless you want to use the built in Safari web browser).
All the iPhone does (for now) is:
Phone
Internet
Media
A light smattering of accessory applications
And I only paid $300 for mine. $600 was so four months ago. The 8GB iPhone is only $399.
And at the things it does, meaning phone, internet, and media, I have never seen another phone nearly as good. And as time goes on, Apple will be adding more and more features with, I presume, the same usability and polish that the first three applications shipped with.
There is significant overlap between Google and Apple, in this case, in that Apple provides the ultimate prototypical platform for a gPhone while Google provides the ultimate framework for developing the applications and UI that the iPhone OR gPhone would need.
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If you download the Android SDK, and run the emulator, you will see what the phone will almost certainly look like.
Am I the only one to think that the "sleek user interface" looks like Winamp pimped up by a Paris Hilton loving teenager? Not exactly a sleek user interface.
I think that Apple has nothing to worry about in this regard.
TFA goes a long way suggesting the GPhone will sport Opera Mini as its default browser. Although it will be possible to run any piece of software (according to Sergei Brin), in its current form, the Android platform already has a quite capable browser, based on WebKit. I can't see what Opera Mini can do that it's not possible within the built in browser. I was testing it yesterday on the Android emulator and the browser is both fast and accurate in rendering. I am sure Opera will make a Gphone version, but I bet Mozilla will too. In other words, it won't matter what browser will be ported, because the user will have a great deal of choice.
This is no iPhone (which is Safari only...).
I remember when ACE was announced. For you youngin's, the Advanced Computing Environment was an alliance of Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Santa Cruz Operation to build the next generation of computers in 1991. Basically, they wanted to wrestle control of the industry away from Intel. Steve Jobs was famously quoted as saying industry alliances always fail because there are just too many competing interests. He challenged people to name some successful industry alliances.
Can anyone name some successful computer industry alliances composed of competing members? This alliance has tons of members who compete directly with each other: handset manufacturers, software companies, chip manufacturers. The idea that these companies are going to align all of their interests, come together and produce anything is pretty far fetched IMHO.
Not after the cellular provider is done with it...
Well, you could do all that or go to the Android site (code.google.com/android) and download the SDK as well as watch the developer videos that are posted. Having done this, you can see the UI as it stands now. Which, by the way, is very different (and much more pleasant, IMHO) than what is shown in the images linked from TFA.
In addition, you can also see from the SDK's emulator what chip is being emulated (ARM926EJ-S [41069265] revision 5) and how much ram is available (96MB) and so on.
Why so much pure speculation when there is much more accurate data available from the published SDK?
SIGFAULT
Given the number of flash-based ads and overlays on this site, it's safe to assume that if Google can come up with a mobile platform that is capable of handling the page with TFA, they're geniuses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb2N0QzX1NI
This doesn't look particularly revolutionary from an end-user perspective. The video uses a bunch of different buttons to do stuff, so I don't know how a touch screen would improve matters dramatically.
If someone says, "Just wait. It'll be great!" I dunno, there appears to be a bunch of gui-stuff already done and that's the hardest and least sexy part of the work that hardly anyone is willing to re-do.
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They should run Multics on it! I made a funny...
The phone itself, if ever created as such (and not just a dozen platform-compliant phones from different manufacturers) won't be revolutionary by and in itself.
...and a thousand more which are just too difficult with Symbian and iPhone.
It's the software it can come with that is the true revolution. You'll get a fully programmable, and EASILY programmable device providing you with mostly everything you desire. And because of the 'free software' idea, you won't be limited by silly patents.
Imagine this:
Combine GPS capablity (positioning relative to specific BTS, not the satellites) with ringer phone settings: entering theatre or lecture hall turns "silent" on.
Hack the GSM connection or even bluetooth, and you have a functional walkie-talkie for short-range talking for free.
Port Gameboy, NES and some more emulators.
Allow for morse code SMS text input (way faster than multitap, often faster than T9) and readout (read SMS without taking the phone off your pocket)
Skype->VoIP could come cheaper than most mobile connection rates (especially interntational)
GPS without GPS module - use BTS pings to triangulate your location and find yourself on Google Maps.
All kinds of weird shit you can pull out with the multitap, including fingers-smearing OpenCanvas-like multiplayer painting.
Combine a few of these for a bigger screen.
Use a bluetooth full-size PC qwerty keyboard. Maybe somehow a 17" screen too.
Emulate iPhone (and annoy the shit off Mac users)
Combine it with some GPIO hardware and use it to drive stuff remotely (a car?)
Get a handful of simple hardware (maybe Chineese will produce something that will plug into USB), run the emulator with modifications and change your laptop or even desktop into a (rather big) gPhone.
Build your own. The specs are quite open.
Run a modified manager process that keeps 95% of the phone's features powered down unless you specifically switch them on (including screen and most of the software) keeping the phone to run two weeks on a single charge (all power used by other chips goes to GSM).
Stream mp3s from your home server.
Use internal temp sensors and battery controller for a "hand warmer" function.
Scanner, Mouse (using camera) or Trackpad (using touchscreen) for PC.
Precisely tune the vibration motor timing, accelerometer input and the camera input and change the phone into an RC/autonomic vehicle moving using vibrations of precise waveform making it slide in a specific direction...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
We need today's technology unhindered! Every time you turn around, the phone companies reduce or remove functionality built into the phones so they can make more money somehow... preventing people from sending attachments, preventing people from creating and transferring their own ring tones to their phones from their PCs and on and on and on.
We don't need anything that's not already available. We just need something unbroken.
I think that calling this an alliance is just PR. Maybe I'm missing something, but they don't all have to produce the same thing. They don't have to use exactly the same application software, they don't have to use the same form factor, they don't have to agree on which features to ship or enable.
This seems more to me like the industry following Compaq and standardizing on the IBM BIOS in the early 1980s. With that decision out of the way, you could produce computers in a variety of form factors with whatever software you wanted. There was a base on which to build.
In this case, Google seems firmly in control because they've already built a basic and extensible software platform. They're not asking for agreement, they're saying here it is, who wants to use it, and who wants to extend it?
It seems to me that what's critical is gaining critical mass before the platform forks (which it will eventually).
Yeah, all they've done is create a company with a market cap over 200 billion. They're dumb. You could have done that. What you're forgetting is that "being advertising middlemen" required them to create a huge, scalable infrastructure that spans the globe. Then they had to figure out the distributed software architecture to make it all work. I love when people say Google doesn't innovate or that they buy all their products. What few people realize is that Google is the Walmart of technology. They've innovated by engineering massively scalable, highly distributed systems AND they've figured how to incorporate dozens of great applications into that infrastructure. They have essentially streamlined the "information supply chain". What have you done?
Sales of the iPhone are are currently around 1.35 million units. To put that in perspective, in 2007 about 1.13 BILLION handsets will be sold worldwide. So Apple's market share could be generously estimated at about 0.2%--they just aren't a real player in the phone market.
Apple shouldn't be concerned about the Google phone. They should be concerned about what will happen in a year or so when the media hype has worn off and there are a dozen viable (and more functional) iPhone equivalents.
PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance, known as AIM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC