Android Crunch

TuneWiki the announced the it goes Android, for now on the Android simulator though. This is after their announcement of putting TuneWiki on iPhone.

If you are not familiar with TuneWiKi but you are a music fun, then you should know TuneWiKi. “TuneWiki is about changing the way humanity enjoys music. Our goal is to have the lyrics always on, always available, always synchronized to music - on any device that can play music back and connect to the internet.”

See, it’s about access the lyrics when ever you want them. Now you know why they go mobile.

HTC, a OHA member announced its first Android phone to be called Dream. There were lots of talks about Google was making gPhone, before the Android OS went to public. Well, it’s kind true after all.

The HTC Dream is said to have a large touchscreen (after iPhone, touchscrren is de facto now), full QWERTY keyboard and will be internet browsing friendly. This Android babe will have 3 by 5 inches in size and could be in market at end of 2008. The expectation is that HTC could ship 1 million Android handset in 2008. Could be a interesting event when such real Android phone come out.

Android will Java native. How about the others? Following hot on the heels of Apple’s iPhone SDK announcements, Sun has jumped into the fray and announced that they’ll be making sure that Java plays nice with Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. The company famous for championing the standardized Java Runtime made the announcement after taking a look at the iPhone SDK. Upon investigating the possibility of porting the Java Virtual Machine for use on the iPhone, Sun found that they could indeed make it work - contrary to Steve Jobs’ statements about Java being a burden.

Sun’s Java marketing VP, Eric Klein announced the decision to bring Sun’s Java to the iPhone as a variant of the Java Micro Edition - a platform that is used on mobile phones.  The iPhone SDK could be used to make the Sun Java Virtual Machine (JVM) run as an application. And, Sun said that there’s a likely possibility that Sun will optimize the Java Micro JVM to work with the iPhone’s more advanced features.

“We’re going to work to make sure that the [virtual machine] offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible,” Klein said. Furthermore, Klein leaves open the possibility of bringing a variant of the desktop-level Java Standard Edition to the iPhone (which might indicate that Sun will try to make use of the Jazelle technology that’s lying dormant in the iPhone’s CPU). And, Sun doesn’t exclude the possibility of bringing their Flash-replacement JavaFX (!) to the iPhone.

Today at O’Reilly ETech conference, Dan Morrill of Google talked about Android. Even though it’s more or less a marketing session, I think it’s good to hear about Android from the house’s mouth, so to speak.

There are more than 3 billion mobile phone worldwide. In Europe, there are more mobile phones than people. Guess that’s enough reason for Google to start a OS on mobile platform.

According to Dan, Android is a complete modern embedded OS,  provides cutting edge mobile user experience, comes with world class software stack for building app and is a open platform for developers, users and industry.

Dan mentioned that the Web is like gold rush. The reasons the web is a gold rush are:
   open platform
   easy dev model
   easy distribution model
   ubiquity

Android is exact the same as above.

With Android, all apps can integrate deeply with the system, don’t need anyone’s persimmon to deploy an app and the developers can replace the entire look and feel, which is open a big aftermarket for creative thinkers.

It’s easy to build Android apps because:
   declarative UI layouts (similar to HTML)
   application code manipulates the UI
   not just “AJAX on a phone”: full-featured platform
   optimized for mobile

Android give freedom to integrate:
   Android provides a client platform but how you integrate with your service is up to you
   data representations: JSON, XML, custom,..
   Webb API: GData, SOAP, XML-RPC, SOA…
   server-side technologies: java, .net, lamp, rails…

Android is easy distribution:
   no onerous certifications for apps or developers
   multiple routes on the device: browser, SD card, USB connection to PC

Android is beyond ubiquity: always on, always with you. Android is link to the cloud that fits in your pocket.

SDK maturity? There is no alpha or beta version to avoid expectation. Not for building business on current SDK. The current SDK is just to give developers exposure.

Money for Google? Money is not a high priority for Google.

It’s announced today that a new open source project has been created on Google code hosting called apps-for-android.

The first application to be included in the new project is called WikiNotes for Android.

WikiNotes for Android is a form of wiki known as a personal wiki. These run on desktops or (in this case) mobile computing devices, and many people like them. They bring a bit more structure to your notes than just a list of subjects. You can choose to link notes or pages up in any manner you like.

This is a good start. Open source code is not only a place to share development, but also is a place to learn new technology such as Android.

WikiNotes for Android was written to demonstrate a number of core concepts in Android, including:

• Multiple Activities in an Application (View, Edit, Search, etc.)
• Default intent filters for View/Edit/Search based on MIME types
• Life cycle of Activities
• Message passing via Bundles in Intents
• Use of Linkify to add Intent-firing links to text data
• Using Intents within an application
• Using Intents to use an Activity within another application
• Writing a custom ContentProvider that implements search by note title
• Registration of ReST-like URIs to match titles, and do contents searches
• SQLite implementations for insert, retrieve, update, delete and search
• UI layout and creation for multiple activities
• Menus and keyboard shortcuts

RXC is positing that there will be two gPhones coming after Christmas, both made by Samsung (!!). He describes the phones as something like the Pearl with a flip up screen. I’m calling bullshit, as does 9to5mac, but it’s not too hard to make a “gPhone” — just rebadge something in the OEM’s pipeline — but I just can’t see Google selling physical product. They’re positing it will be a Verizon CDMA model with Wi-Fi and potentially VoIP along with a GSM version on T-Mo.

Android is Google’s open source operating system designed to run on mobile phones, in particular those with ARM processors inside. What is to stop someone from taking Android and creating a UMPC like device or an ultra crazy thin subnotebook? Android applications should run on all devices and I’m sure Google Gears can be ported to enable offline access to the various Google services.

Intel is trying to get into the mobile phone space and their latest announced processors use 2W idling, which sounds impressive, until you realize that an entire Nokia N95 runs on less than that.

I know nothing is free and integration (making the software work on the hardware) costs begin in the low millions of dollars, but maybe, just maybe, someone can make a long lasting (12 hour battery life with heavy WiFi usage and bright screen) all day computing, full QWERTY keyboard equipped device that weighs less than 2 kilos and costs less than $1000.

If Palm only released the Folio I wouldn’t be making this request.

RXC is positing that there will be two gPhones coming after Christmas, both made by Samsung (!!). He describes the phones as something like the Pearl with a flip up screen. I’m calling bullshit, as does 9to5mac, but it’s not too hard to make a “gPhone” — just rebadge something in the OEM’s pipeline — but I just can’t see Google selling physical product. They’re positing it will be a Verizon CDMA model with Wi-Fi and potentially VoIP along with a GSM version on T-Mo.

From gPhone rumors heating back up…

While the rumor that Dell’s working on an Android phone isn’t new—it was sorta smashed, even—this is a slightly different (and maybe more promising) spin on it. An Alienware-designed Android phone. I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, or hell, even looks that good, but it’s definitely more striking than anything Dell would probably come up with. Would you carry this thing, especially with the much-improved look of the new Android SDK? [Dialaphone via /.]