EEtimes Speculates on The Initial gPhone 47
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."
Print version (Score:3, Informative)
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The Android SDK looks good (Score:2)
Google vs Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google vs Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
There are some people experimentally bypassing the JVM, but AFAIK no-one has succeeded in making a GUI application which does this.
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I think that if Google can make the Android stuff run crisply on phone hardware, then the ease of Java programming and nice GUIs will give Apple a run for their money.
I'm not sure, though, tha
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Handing over data (Score:2, Insightful)
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It is also much faster to develop an application in Java than in C++, unless of course you have a lot of old C++ that you could make use of. This mean
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It might be a hassle, but I don't think that anyone with OOP training will have any problems adapting to the gPhone.
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I think the key to being a really good software developer is knowing the point at which you have to let go, because to cling on to old programming paradigms no matter how familiar and productive they may seem is only going to slow you down in the long run, with newer technologies offering faster development times (even with a steep learning curve).
I'm s
Re:Google vs Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Android is the second phone platform by Rubin; his first platform was the Danger Hiptop [hiptop.com], also written in Java. You can get a good idea of how it works there: it's much more user friendly than Windows Mobile, and it does all its synchronization over the air.
The biggest change is that Android is much more open: it will be open source, you can replace any part of the system you like, and do so safely. Most add-ons will likely be replacements of components (connection manager, file chooser, image chooser, etc.), rather than "applications". And, of course, synchronization will almost certainly be to Google's on-line services, with no desktop software required.
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Speculation is for Digg... (Score:3, Informative)
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Motion sensitive? (Score:1)
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 d
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a flip phone could close itself to prevent scratching the screen.
These people are blind (Score:2)
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 [reghardware.co.uk], N82 [reghardware.co.uk], 6500 [reghardware.co.uk], N81 [reghardware.co.uk], E51 [reghardware.co.uk], E90 [wikipedia.org], E61 [wikipedia.org] 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
lots of features, poor usability (Score:3, Interesting)
So, what does the gPhone do? It takes the great Windows Mobile hardware that companies like HTC
Terrible usability, IMO, and probably no testing (Score:2)
Re:Terrible usability, IMO, and probably no testin (Score:2)
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
Re:These people are blind (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Nokia is the worlds't largest mobile phone maker, and the largest smartphone maker. Quotes: Nokia has maintained its leadership position with a 56.4% share of the 70.9 million units shipped in 2006. [abiresearch.com] , Nokia itself enjoys 44.5% of the smartphone market [wikipedia.org] and Nokia market share breaks 40 per cent threshold [mobilemonday.net] . HTC is very small, they are so small that they are not even cited in global market share reports [mobileisgood.com].
1. I partially agree, the user interface of in example S60 has been buggy sometimes and it has a lot to
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Old news (Score:3, Informative)
OpenLaszlo (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. And JME is also the execution environment for DVB [wikipedia.org], OCAP [wikipedia.org]/ACAP [wikipedia.org].
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?
BD-J (Score:1)
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Is not a "phone" (Score:1)
This article is just.. bad (Score:4, Informative)
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.
First device in Q4 2008 (Score:2)