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EEtimes Speculates on The Initial gPhone
jetpack writes "EETimes goes Inside the gPhone: What to expect from Google's Android alliance. Based on the membership of the Open Handset Alliance, EETimes makes an educated guess as to what the first offering from Google and its new buddies might be."
Here is the one page verision.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
I did some J2ME work for a customer years ago, and played with Android recently - looks good, and I very much like the idea of making advanced cellphone devices into a cheap commodity.
hits G-Spot.
Anyone know the difference in terms of features between Android and the most current version of Windows mobile? I hope that the introduction of Android will spur all companies to introduce more and more innovations. The gPhone will be more of a competitor to smartphones that are NOT iPhones. iPhones are more of a status symbol and their users will not be really in the market for other phones. I like the iPhone because they are cool and do things that other phones can't match yet, but feature for feature they lose to other smartphones.
Speculation is for Digg. On /. I want news. These "insider idiots" know no more than you or I do. When they've got news I'll listen. Not when they're crying for publicity with speculation.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
well its a long shot but i really think that motion sensitivity is the way smart phones should go.
It Greatly amplifies a cameras abilities to take panoramic shots, scan documents, perhaps even allow for 3d images. It would also allow for films taken on phones to compensate for motion that is inevitable when using such a small device.
It could also be useful for "advanced users" tweaking their UI, or allow average users to shake the device to go up levels in the interface. And it could be used to view/write documents.
The Article also mentions games, well if the WII is anything to go by then average people really enjoy games that involve physical interaction.
Security? If you drop the phone it could protect itself, if the phone is yanked out of your hand it would be able to lock the screen. OR for those of us who want to look cool, imagine unlocking your phone with a secret handshake
I really see it being included as users don't 'need' it but to be a truly revolutionary phone the enhancement a motion sensor would allow endless possibilities.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
These people are just blind. Just blind. They are enlisting features that have been in phones for many years and nowdays virtually all smartphones from Nokia to Sony-Ericsson carry most of them. My god just look at N95, N82, 6500, N81, E51, E90, E61 and so on.. The market is full of smart phones with features that are just being dreamed to be included in gPhone, and this is just a list of one manufacturer, and a list that will in few weeks time be updated with new phone models again.
I just really can't see the point of this hype. There are only sketches on what should be coming, but no production ready system nor delivered devices. The worst part is that I really even can't see what's the advantage of gPhone? Major firms like Nokia and Sony-Ericsson won't be using them. Samsung just flip flops from system to system, and Motorolas whole future is in question. There isn't going to be huge uptake, and no, having small firms like HTC take it doesn't mean a scracth as their ability to compete with total costs are weak as they don't have the needed economies of scale that the likes of Nokia enjoy. I also don't see that they can leap with features as all the features they are planning to include in gPhone are already in S60, and as S60 is rapidly developing, now including QT in some time, I can't see that they could pull a head in software.
So.. sick and tired of hearing and reading hype about a system and devices that haven't been delived yet and in the end can end up just as vaporware. Why can't we go back in days when we reported about real things, not speculation and hype about something that is maybe going to one day come out and somehow revolutionize the world, but nobody really understand the reason why.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
I hope someone releases a model with a keyboard and then I will be in coding heaven
FTA: This story originally appeared on Nov. 13, 2007. So it's not just pure speculation, it's a reprint of (old) pure speculation.
I have several Nokia phones. The hardware is wonderful: lots of features, great cameras, etc. Windows Mobile devices, too, have great hardware. The trouble is the software: Symbian sucks, both as a user interface, and as a development platform. It's slow, it's buggy, it's counterintuitive, the desktop software is a PITA, it has bad error messages, ... And Nokia knows it, which is why they bought Troll Tech.
So, what does the gPhone do? It takes the great Windows Mobile hardware that companies like HTC develop and makes it available with better software.
And the software is here: you can download it and run it. I would expect the first actual Google Phones to come out in a few months at the most (actually, I think you can already get small quantities if you really want to).
Sun now has Orbit, which is a GUI layer atop JME (which is the mobile phone multimedia Java) that runs OpenLaszlo LZX code. Android ran around Sun to make its own JVM, Dalvik, but its DEX files directly correspond to Java bytecodes, and can be automatically generated by a tool in the Android SDK.
OpenLaszlo can also be compiled into SWF (Flash) and DHTML. But the JME itself is also included in every Blu-Ray player (now the only HD disc format) as BD-J. And JME is also the execution environment for DVB, OCAP/ACAP.
OpenLaszlo can target what looks like the most complete range of devices, all from a single codebase. Is that the future of all GUI programming as the "convergence" finally comes together? Is all other programming going to be used "under the hood" on servers, and by "plastic surgeons" tweaking all that generated code into working properly on every device it gets tested on, once it's "written once"?
And where's the OpenLaszlo GUI IDE already?
--
make install -not war
Is an OS. Sure it'll be phones with and w/o GPS, with and w/o touch screen etc. The platform is prepared for all that, it supports accelerometer, compass (here); and any other thing that can appear, is easy to manage from the platform. Nothing to envy to iPhone software, sliders boxes (like combo boxes) already has the behavior of "slide" as the iPhone and it already plays videos and sounds in mp3 (on others) format. Now, what "GPhones" (hate that word) will give you, will vary in function of what hardware builders wishes to include in each phone with Android OS; and about software, whatever you want to develop for the platform using the APIs they give you. Don't you like the "heavyweight" navigator it has built in? ok, get a better one or just do a better one, don't complain.
The Android team has put out an SDK complete with emulator. They've held campfire events where they've disclosed details about their plans, and this article manages to get it wrong on almost every point.
For intance: the web-browser is based on Webkit (same as the iPhone) not Opera. In this sense Google 'owns' the browser they are developing. You can get that little gem of information from about 30 seconds of reading on the main android page (http://code.google.com/android).
GPS: While we fully expect most phones to have GPS on the phone, it's not a guarantee. Although all phones will support location via tower-triangulation, so every phone should have some level of location support. Something the article should probably mention.
Processor: The Android team has been forthcoming about the fact that they are developing the system to be more or less platform independent. Right now they have everything up and running only on ARM cores (OMAP included). They are providing multimedia support via acceleration interfaces (OpenGL ES), which means that yes it should run very well on an OMAP processor... but there is little preventing another architecture from being put into use. I fully expect to see OMAP gPhone's, but that is unlikely to be the only configuration in the wild.
Overall, the article was light on research. Very little meat here, and most of what they speculated about was just wrong.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
MHP is based on Java SE, not Java ME. It's based on Personal Java, which is a smaller version of Java 1.1. This was created before Sun invented J2ME/J2SE/J2EE, which are based on Java 1.2 (aka Java2). As far as I know, they did some cleanups of the API when creating the GEM spec, but BD-J is still based on Java SE.
I'd speculate that Nokia has never user-tested their phones, at least not the one I have (E61). The thing simply does not work as advertised - and the UI is anti-intuitive. There is no consistency. Cut and paste is present in some apps and GUI elements, not others. You can shut down messaging by restarting it, but no other application works the same way. You can't tell the difference between a successful and unsuccessful attempt at connecting to the Internet. Leave email running in the background, and your phone crashes hard. I could go on, but I can't wait to get rid of this Nokia piece of crap.
I don't think that Trolltech will help, unless they're given authority over the user experience. And existing Qtopia based devices don't indicated that things will completely improve over the miserable experience that Nokia currently provides.
I've heard from a source at a carrier that HTC is planning on launching an Android based phone with T Mobile in the US in Q4 2008 and that the device will be Google branded.
2. Android platform has the potential to become THE Linux platform for smartphones.
Android is Linux Kernel + BSD libc + Custom Java + other stuff.
This is only Linux by the kernel and marketing.
3. One problem that Linux has on the desktop is that there are no big brand-names associated to it.
Android is not a Desktop OS. Many big brandnames use Linux internally. Linksys, Motorolla,
4. The openness of the Android platform makes it a real possibility that the smartphones of the future will NO LONGER be crippled by the Telecom Service Providers.
So far this "openness" appears to just be marketing. Many Linux based phones have tried to use this marketing, while having many non-open components.
OpenMoko appears to be the most open at the moment.
6. Never before have so many manufacturers and telecom service providers been brought together. And thanks to the potential of Android and the companies supporting it, and thanks to the iPhone, there's a good chance that the smartphone will finally become a commodity.
Does the the marketing kool aid taste too sweet?
I don't think that Trolltech will help, unless they're given authority over the user experience. And existing Qtopia based devices don't indicated that things will completely improve over the miserable experience that Nokia currently provides.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I've had a few of Qtopia devices, and while they were somewhat better than S60, they were nothing to write home about.
The best UIs I have seen on mobile devices have been the the Hiptop, the iPhone, and Palm. And Hiptop 2.0 is effectively being released by Google as Android.
FTA
So how about the top few screenshots on their concepts page labelled "Sneak previews of MWC-2008 demos" http://www.tat.se/conceptlab/
Could these be Android/gPhone related? If that's going to be the sort of look and feel to expect, sign me right up! (it's sorta-kinda iPhone, but perhaps a little less fluffy/perhaps better use of screen real-estate with seemingly a little more on screen at once without going too far, and the thin status bat at the top..?) :)