I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
As widely reported it looks like Android phones could be out later this year.
I hadn’t paid a lot of attention until I saw this photo. It’s looks like a HTC prototype but interesting it looks like standard Windows Mobile hardware.
So this is very significant as the manufacturers don’t have hardware to redevelop or even customize. All they need to do is develop the software layer that links Android to their already developed Windows Mobile hardware.
In fact it’s all upside from the manufacturers as there is little risk. Consumers can choose what they want.
So this open sourcing of the Phone OS is a very aggressive move to marginalize Microsoft on the phone. By having advertising baked into their Open Source Phone OS Google can give it away.
Fascinating.
blog
In fact Android was hacked back in January to run on an ARMv5TE chipset, with the video to prove it. Link is http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/09/android-hacked-to-run-on-real-hardware/
> looks like standard Windows Mobile hardware
It is all a linux stack from what I understand (and expect from Google). All the apps are Java based.
There’s a $10 million developer app-writing challenge currently…
http://code.google.com/android/adc.html
Android apps run on a non-standard Java Virtual Machine called Dalvik.
The stack is based on Linux and currently the Dalvik VM is built for an ARM processor with instruction set version 5 (not all ARM9 processor can run it at present).
Android will create a very interesting situation for both handset manufacturers as well as industry groups such as Symbian or even OS vendors like Microsoft. I’m not sure how everything will finally come together, but I don’t see either throwing away their investments in their respective operating systems. To be fair, Android has a reasonable large backing by handset manafacturer in the open handset alliance, but don’t forget how long it takes to create a truly stable and well-built mobile phone operating system.
I think Symbian is pretty much there with s60 and Nokia’s own implementation of s40, but remembering back to the first years of Windows Mobile and Windows Mobile for Smartphones… terrible. Can anyone rembemer to HP’s Journada 928 - probably the most unstable mobile phone ever.
I’m not saying Android is not going to fly - I’m sure it will at some point. But it will take quite a while because the world of mobile phones seem to work differently from the world of desktop computers. The pure fact that it’s Google and open-source and Linux and a Java-derivate language is not everything here.