Published by Head Robot on 29th November 2007
Mike Butcher wrote at TechCrunc.com.
Dave Burke, an engineering manager within Google’s mobile team, stood up today at the Future of Mobile conference in London to talk about Android and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the new open mobile platform initiative from Google. This is the the first conference presentation in Europe on the subject since Google’s announcement on November 5th, and was live blogged by TechCrunch UK.
But if you were expecting much new information on all this you would probably have been disappointed. Burke introduce the OHA, outlined how it has 30+ industry leaders on board and how there is no gPhone, just a phone built by partners using the Android platform - this we already know. There was a run-down of what the platform will be capable of and a reminder that the SDK is a only a few days old and that we will probably not see handsets until the second half of next year when the full open source platform will be released.
He also did a fairly impressive demonstration of coding an application (in this case a mobile browser) inside 8mins (or 7mins 58 seconds to be exact - he timed it on stage).
Read the rest of, Google Pitches Android to European Developers.
Technorati Tags: Google, Android, Europe, SDK, Developers
Published by Head Robot on 28th November 2007
Blogger Richard Monson-Haefel writes in, Application Platform Strategies Blog
You won’t hear Microsoft say this out loud, but secretly they are celebrating Google’s contribution of the Android mobile phone platform to the Open Handset Alliance - at least they aught to be. Android is perhaps the best thing to happen to Microsoft since they won the browser wars in the 1990’s. And given Verizon’s announcement yesterday that they will be opening up their network to any device and operating system that meets a “minimum technical standard” it seems that Android may have legs even if Google doesn’t secure the 700 MHz spectrum.
Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the software development industry has been, for the past 12 years, Sun Microsystems’ Java Platform. Starting in the mid to late 1990’s Java began to gain mind share among developers in every area in which Microsoft has an interest. Today, with over 6 million developers (according to Sun) Java clearly dominates the software development industry. Point in fact, Microsoft had to completely revamp their software development platform in 2000 to mimic the Java platform in order to complete; enter Microsoft .NET. While Microsoft .NET has been extremely successful at winning back a portion of the developer community from the Java platform, Java has remained the darling of the enterprise and perhaps the most successful software development platform in the history of computing. Microsoft really doesn’t like the Java platform very much. Java is Microsoft’s biggest competitor in software development and is arguably the platform to beat.
Read the rest of Why Microsoft Loves Google Android.
Technorati Tags: Google, Sun, Microsoft, Java, Software
Published by Head Robot on 23rd November 2007
Posted Thursday by Phil Manchester
Like it or not, Google has achieved something that none of the established knitting circles has managed so far; it has created a single target platform for developers to aim for. One early view of how you can build Android applications [link] illustrates this.
But a unified standard does not necessarily play well with the established mobile Linux players. The LiPS Forum [link] , for example, says it “regards OHA as complementary” and acknowledges [link] that Android and the OHA have confirmed the popularity of Linux in mobile and embedded applications. LiPS also says that Android shares in its mission “to reduce fragmentation among Linux-based mobile platforms” - only with a different approach. While LiPS aims to unify the development of mobile Linux through open standards, it sees the Android and OHA team as working to the same end with shared code.
Continue reading the article, Inside Google Android Paranoia
Technorati Tags: Mobile, Handset, Android, SDK, Palm, Windows, Java
