Predicting The Google Phone 205
An anonymous reader writes "Inside The GPhone: What To Expect From Google's Android Alliance (an article at Information Week) argues that you can predict what the GPhone(s) will look like very easily, simply by listing the technologies of the Open Handset Alliance partners. According to this theory, the phone will have a user interface from Sweden's TAT, VCAST-like multimedia capabilities powered by PacketVideo Corp., and an iPhone-like capacitive touch-screen, from Synaptics. Hardware-wise, it'll probably be built around Texas Instruments' OMAP processors, which enable a single-chip world phone (GSM/EDGE/GPRS). "While the GPhone won't be revolutionary, it'll connect the pieces in pleasantly new ways," argues author Alex Wolfe. Should Apple be concerned?"
No, actually that's wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Although Qualcomm hasn't released a proper SDK for the processor yet, so hardware acceleration is not fully implemented.
Ummm.. CDMA? (Score:3, Informative)
Funny how that is a "world" phone. GSM is only a standard for Europe. In North American you have both GSM and CDMA, Korea is mostly CDMA and I think Japan is also uses a lot of CDMA.
Also Sprint is one of the carriers that is involved in this and they only do CDMA.
Apple's iPhone is much less significant. (Score:4, Informative)
Apple's iPhone is a single, phone that's very well-designed and includes a slick interface. Oh yeah, and it has the Apple brand (and the corresponding price tag). Reports are that Apple's phone managed to successfully establish itself a niche in the mobile phone world, but that they failed to sell as many as they had hoped.
Google's Android platform, on the other hand, is more than just a single gPhone, as they like to say it's 'thousands of phones', made by dozens of companies, spanning the super high-end iPhone killers to the low-end cheap free-after-rebates you get with your carrier subscription. The operations that Google has set into motion - departing from the traditional JCP standards process, releasing a new non-Sun Java-like Virtual Machine - these moves have a huge potential to transform the entire mobile phone industry as a whole - and, though it's still early to say for sure, the transformation will more than likely be for the better.
So Apple's iPhone is a great, very well-designed product for a few people, but it is overall much less significant than the potential Android has to seriously shake up and inject innovation into the mobile industry. The two are honestly nothing alike, as much as the media would like them to be.
-Will [ohadev.com]
Ad-free printer-friendly version (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the gPhone and the iPhone are different markets (Score:1, Informative)
Google makes software that works.
Opera Mini? (Score:3, Informative)
This is no iPhone (which is Safari only...).
Re:No, actually that's wrong (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a dual core CPU. There's a second coprocessor core that is for radio functions ONLY. It's not an SMP dual core CPU.
Re:Ummm.. CDMA? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny how that is a "world" phone. GSM is only a standard for Europe. In North American you have both GSM and CDMA, Korea is mostly CDMA and I think Japan is also uses a lot of CDMA.
Also Sprint is one of the carriers that is involved in this and they only do CDMA.
CDMA: US, Canada, Japan, Korea.
I think your point about GSM only being for Europe is very much wrong. GSM covers a great deal more countries then CDMA. It's a world phone because you can take a GSM phone to nearly any country with cell service and buy a sim card and get connected. With a CDMA phone coverage is sparse or non existent in anywhere but the 4 countries I listed.
uhhh (Score:3, Informative)
In addition, you can also see from the SDK's emulator what chip is being emulated (ARM926EJ-S [41069265] revision 5) and how much ram is available (96MB) and so on.
Why so much pure speculation when there is much more accurate data available from the published SDK?
Why Predict? Here's a Demo (Score:3, Informative)
This doesn't look particularly revolutionary from an end-user perspective. The video uses a bunch of different buttons to do stuff, so I don't know how a touch screen would improve matters dramatically.
If someone says, "Just wait. It'll be great!" I dunno, there appears to be a bunch of gui-stuff already done and that's the hardest and least sexy part of the work that hardly anyone is willing to re-do.
Re:good luck (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ummm.. CDMA? (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, it's really only Western Europe that is GSM-only (barring Portugal, Iceland, Ireland and those listed above). The rest of the world is pretty much dual-standard supporting both CDMA and GSM.
Re:good luck (Score:3, Informative)
Successful computer industry alliances (Score:3, Informative)
The PowerPC (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC [wikipedia.org]