Google Android Platform - The Android Log

This could come in handy for Android Developer’s. Found at The Wall Street Journal On-Line

According to the Wall Street Journal this morning Google’s preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives - such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images. Or, as CBS News says it, “Google Wants To Be Your Hard Drive.”

Here is how the Journal summarizes the imminent development:

“Google is hoping to distinguish itself from existing online storage services partly by simplifying the process for transferring and opening files. Along with a Web-based interface, Google is trying to let users upload and access files directly from their PC desktops and have the file storage behave for consumers more like another hard drive that is handy at all times, say the people familiar with the matter.”

Read the rest of the Wall Street Journal’s article, Google Plans Service to Store User’s Data.

Technorati Tags: Google, Storage, Servers, Internet, Applications

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

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