Mobile

After I received an email, this imaginary story came to my mind: Kiddo>Mom, my friend G. Android came today at school and said “he is Open Source and it’s cooooool”. Not everyone understood in it and ignored him. Then we all got it, and he became very popular. Can I do it too? Pleeeeeease!!! Mom>Ok S. Symbian, but don’t forget that you need to explain IP, binary compatibility, Active Objects, Descriptors… and you can’t give away all the secrets of your mommy away to those Open Source folks. Kiddo>But moooom, this is not really… Mom>Hey young man! This is my house and I say what you can do and can’t do. You do Open Source, but in my way! Nokia way! ...

I was sure that is was just a matter of time, before we started to see Android spreading all around into every possible flavour of Mobile (only?) piece of hardware. It started when just the first versions of the SDK were out in the wild: people were “just” recompiling the kernel, and boom! The magic was happening. That was a demonstration of really good and effective layering: just adapting the kernel to the hosting hardware was making it up and running. Now, with the source code available to everyone, the porting festival is becoming even larger, with small-medium company, as well as university guys, porting Android everywhere. ...

Nvidia today left me wordless! They are jumping in the mobile, smartphone and netbook market in a very “noisy” way. The NVIDIA® Tegra™ family of computers-on-a-chip, brings the power of advanced visual computing to a broad range of handheld and mobile platforms—from phones, MP3 players, and portable navigation devices (PNDs) to mobile internet devices (MIDs). NVIDIA Tegra enables intuitive user interfaces and advanced multimedia features, all while delivering longer battery life. ...

Google finally announced the winners of the First Round of the Android Developer Challenges. There are 10 x $275,000 prizes and 10 x $100,000 prizes. $3,750,000 in prizes!!!. Not bad I must say. There are some pretty cool apps, with a very clean and nice UI: demonstration of the power and flexibility of the Android Graphical Widgets Framework. Take a look at them in the official gallery. Congratulations to the Winners!!!

About the news itself, I invite you to spend 2 minutes to read directly from the words of Eric Chu on the official blog. Said that, what is not defined yet (just the screenshot you see here) is Security. Better, what exactly they have in mind? Just put on the Market WHATEVER the developer will come with and leave to the final user the burden of reading, understanding and accepting/rejecting the application. Based on just some words written on a little screen? Words that sounds like C3PO? ...

No, not that Love! That one has no price! This one. For £255.00!!! Anyone wonders why? ;)

An impressive video from the Nokia Research Center: it shows a concept technology called “Morph” based on the usage of NanoTechnology for mobile devices (I feel that continue to call them “phones” is becoming very reductive). I’m sorry I can’t embed the video in this post: you can find it here.