Mobile Linux Group Releases First Specification 46
narramissic writes "Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs. The group, comprised of companies including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access, announced Monday that it has completed the first release of its mobile Linux specification, adding components including APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components."
Re:Too little, too late (Score:2, Interesting)
Android will win (Score:3, Interesting)
Android will be the Linux on mobile phones, and it will be great.
Access Screwed Up Linux on Palm Phone (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Android will win (Score:3, Interesting)
EVERYONE says that about their new upcoming mobile OS. Then it gets released, and we discover something seriously flawed about it. No APIs for custom hardware. Difficult path for porting pre-existing applications from other platforms over to it. Poor performance. Security flaws. Vendor lock-in. Insufficient API. Nonstandard. If you've ever seriously written an enterprise mobile app, you'd have a clue about this already. You frequently have to work with very custom hardware and software solutions, requiring a very major amount of flexibility and language/API maturity. So, if Google does it, that means everyone will just drop everything they're doing and furiously work to be compatible with it? Ha. Everyone will rewrite their application that their customers have been using for years because Google made a mobile OS? Nope...every company I've worked for in the past couple years decided when getting me to work on their project that Windows Mobile "might be worth investing the time into". It takes a heck of a long time to catch on, and an even longer time to get companies to devote resources into developing for it. If you aren't following an open standard with plenty of information readily available, it takes even longer.
That's most likely the road that Android is going to take. Just because Google is behind it doesn't mean that it will be used by anyone. Lots of Google's side projects end up by the wayside. And just because it comes from Google doesn't mean it'll be "great", either. Maybe Android will end up on Blackberries in a couple years or so.