The Army is 20 years and a half-billion dollars into a star-crossed effort to build custom communications and digital-mapping gadgets for its soldiers. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is taking a simpler approach: They’re planning to use Android phones.
Well, patent-troll Oracle is suing Google over bits of Java in Android. It will be interesting to see how well they fare when they try to sue the US Army.
Maybe Oracle needs nuclear weapons.
Most of the “offending” code in Dalvik is straight from Harmony…
Hmmm… curious.
It’s not. Try to keep up.
My MISTAKE!
Making a few android apps instead of building custom hardware is hardly “betting” on anything.
BTW, non-us militaries, welcome to pick up MeeGo
.
… with long term support of Android?
Version 1.6 will do. Version 2.1 with the faster JITed VM would be even better.
Waiting,
pica
In theory this could happen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It would make economic sense for the army to adopt android of a certain version, add in the necessary security enhancements and library routines, then mandate all future mobile stuff be built on top. This would be something like the approach to using a standardized Windows rather than building a custom army OS, but more so due to the differences in mobile and the ability to customize at a deeper level.
This would save an enormous amount of effort. But at the moment this is just a small experiment by one group and not an army initiative. I don’t know what it would take to make that change but I’m thinking it would be a huge political effort since it would mean major changes to funding. Nobody likes to see his half-billion-dollar project get pulled and given to someone else.