Wireless Archive

Neil McAllister delves into the Android and iPhone SDKs to help sort out which will be the best bet for developers now that technical details of the first Android smartphone have been announced. Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse. And because most tasks can be performed with command-line tools, you can expect third parties to develop Android SDK plug-ins for other IDEs. 'By just about any measure, Google's Android is more open and developer-friendly than the iPhone,' McAllister writes. This openness is essential to Android's prospects. 'Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice — especially when ISVs can translate that market share into application sales,' McAllister writes. 'In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'

After months of anticipation T-Mobile and Google have unveiled the G1, the first commercially available handheld to run Google's Linux-based Android mobile operating system. The smartphone, made by HTC, will be available on Oct. 22. The G1 will support 3G, EDGE and WiFi, includes a wide touchscreen besides of a slideout QWERTY keyboard, a 3-megapixel camera, a music player and applications like Google Maps with Street View. More applications are expected soon, developed by the community.In response to Android's entry into the market, the leading cell phone maker Nokia is planning on freeing and making its Symbian platform royalty-free too. Nokia's David Rivas, head of technology management at Nokia's S60 business sees little future for the practice of billing handset vendors for each phone sold with a particular operating system.

Consumers increasingly want more sophisticated handsets, and smartphone sales are expected to grow 52% this year compared to last year, according to Gartner. Overall, 190 million units will be sold this year, accounting for about 15% of the total handset market. In 2012, Gartner predicts, smartphone sales will reach over 700 million units, accounting for 65% of all handset sales. This will represent nearly $200 billion, Gartner said.

The day after Google announced its answer to Apple's iPhone App store, it has announced the winners of a contest wherein developers win $275,000 or $100,000 for developing a top app for Google's upcoming Android mobile phone OS. To get an idea of where the trend in mobile computing is heading, all of the top ten use location-based data via GPS. Check out the winners.

On August 1 2007, I published an article called "My Month with the iPhone" wherein I examined the iPhone's now well-known advantages and deficiencies and speculated extensively on where Apple was likely to take the phone, development-wise. Now that the new iPhone and the iPhone 2.0 software have been out for a few weeks, and there's been a whole new storm of praise and gripes raging, I thought it would be illuminating for me to re-visit my prognostications and take my lumps.

I have recently been in the market for a new smartphone. The iPhone looks like some nice hardware and I'm already an AT&T customer, but after Apple's trend of pulling Apps from iTunes lately I'm just not buying. Apple has proven to me that I don't want to live in a closed ecosystem. It made me realize what my real issue with Apple is: their business practices.

Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.

Although Mobile Safari is more than adequate at rendering normal Web pages, many Web developers created versions of applications aimed at the iPhone. Here in Part 2 of this series learn the common use of drill-down lists as a navigation method. Part 1 of this series took an existing Ruby on Rails Web application and began the process of augmenting it to serve iPhone users.

Giga-byte and and mobile phone service provider Chunghwa will launch the M528 MID ('mobile internet device') in Taiwan this August. The Linux-based device will have a 4.8-inch touchscreen and use an 800MHz Intel Centrino Atom processor.

"The mobile phone operating system world was rocked recently by the announcement that Nokia had acquired all of the shares of Symbian that it didn't already own, and that it planned to transition the OS to an open-source licensing model," says DeviceGuru.

"A year ago, page after page of ink was spilled by prophets of doom fretting about the iPhone and how it would surely not be as good as this or that other phone. Were they right or did the first year of the iPhone live up to its hype?"

"Looks like there's only room for one mobile Linux standards body in these here parts, and LiMo's recent momentum and partnership deals have apparently swept up the members of the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) -- the two groups just announced that as of July, LiPS will be folded into LiMo", reports Engadget. This piece of news, with the recent Nokia/Symbian news too, prompted me to write this opinion piece that I had on the back of mind for a while now, where I offer an analogy as to how today's smartphone OSes compare to the 1985 personal computer OS climate and where does this may lead.

Back in 1996, Palm released its first Palm Pilot PDAs onto the market, and quickly became a household name in the PDa business - so far as that Palm and Palm Pilot became synonyms for any PDA device. The company has hit some rough waters lately, but if it's up to CEO Ed Colligan, that's all going to change in the coming years.

OpenMoko, the project that creates not only a Linux operating system for phones but the hardware to run it as well, has announced some major changes to its software stack. Traditionally a Gtk+ endeavour, this is all going to change rather drastically.