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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.
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.
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?
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make install -not war
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.
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Isn't HTC the world's largest smartphone maker? At a very high level, there are not many REVOLUTIONARY features in the android platform. The growing interest that this platform is getting is because of:
.. because of their unawareness. A Google platform called Android has a big brand-name. People trust Google .. in fact, more so than Microsoft. So, they won't worry about buying a Google Phone.
.. not desktop based. What does that mean to the smartphones? That means that we will no longer have the unnecessary tie-ups of the smartphones to the desktop. Those of you who have used smartphones enough know what I am talking about.
1. Software on the mobile devices / smartphones is usually terrible. Use any Symbian / Windows Mobile device for a few weeks and you will see how slow, counterintuitive, buggy and unintelligent the platform / user-interface is.
2. Android platform has the potential to become THE Linux platform for smartphones. Although Linux didn't get as successful on the desktop as I was hoping, it did get tremendous support from the development community. Looking at the limited market-share that Linux has on the desktop, it is heart-warming to see how many developers are working to provide all kinds of amazing applications to the Linux user. You do not have that kind of community in the smartphone market yet (Although there are some people developing Symbian and WinMo applications). If Android turns out to be a genuine platform, then we can be rest assured that a huge community will develop applications for it. Having Java as the language of choice helps as well.
3. One problem that Linux has on the desktop is that there are no big brand-names associated to it. Every Tom, Dick and Harry knows about Microsoft. And at least Tom and Dick know about Apple too. But none of them would be comfortable using Ubuntu or Fedora
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. Even if they do, it will hopefully be easy enough to install a fresh Android platform on the phone. This is tremendous in itself.
5. Google is an internet based company
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.