EEtimes Speculates on The Initial gPhone

jetpack writes "EETimes goes Inside the gPhone: What to expect from Google's Android alliance. Based on the membership of the Open Handset Alliance, EETimes makes an educated guess as to what the first offering from Google and its new buddies might be."

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[Simon (S2)]

Here [eetimes.com] is the one page verision.

Speculation is for Digg...

[dotancohen]

Speculation is for Digg. On /. I want news. These "insider idiots" know no more than you or I do. When they've got news I'll listen. Not when they're crying for publicity with speculation.

Old news

[imasu]

FTA: This story originally appeared on Nov. 13, 2007. So it's not just pure speculation, it's a reprint of (old) pure speculation.

Re:Google vs Microsoft

[nguy]

Anyone know the difference in terms of features between Android and the most current version of Windows mobile?

Android is the second phone platform by Rubin; his first platform was the Danger Hiptop [hiptop.com], also written in Java. You can get a good idea of how it works there: it's much more user friendly than Windows Mobile, and it does all its synchronization over the air.

The biggest change is that Android is much more open: it will be open source, you can replace any part of the system you like, and do so safely. Most add-ons will likely be replacements of components (connection manager, file chooser, image chooser, etc.), rather than "applications". And, of course, synchronization will almost certainly be to Google's on-line services, with no desktop software required.

OpenLaszlo

[Doc Ruby]

Sun now has Orbit [java.net], which is a GUI layer atop JME (which is the mobile phone multimedia Java) that runs OpenLaszlo LZX code. Android ran around Sun to make its own JVM, Dalvik [wikipedia.org], but its DEX files directly correspond to Java bytecodes, and can be automatically generated by a tool in the Android SDK.

OpenLaszlo can also be compiled into SWF (Flash) and DHTML. But the JME itself is also included in every Blu-Ray player (now the only HD disc format) as BD-J [wikipedia.org]. And JME is also the execution environment for DVB [wikipedia.org], OCAP [wikipedia.org]/ACAP [wikipedia.org].

OpenLaszlo can target what looks like the most complete range of devices, all from a single codebase. Is that the future of all GUI programming as the "convergence" finally comes together? Is all other programming going to be used "under the hood" on servers, and by "plastic surgeons" tweaking all that generated code into working properly on every device it gets tested on, once it's "written once"?

And where's the OpenLaszlo GUI IDE already?

This article is just.. bad

[enjo13]

The Android team has put out an SDK complete with emulator. They've held campfire events where they've disclosed details about their plans, and this article manages to get it wrong on almost every point.

For intance: the web-browser is based on Webkit (same as the iPhone) not Opera. In this sense Google 'owns' the browser they are developing. You can get that little gem of information from about 30 seconds of reading on the main android page (http://code.google.com/android).

GPS: While we fully expect most phones to have GPS on the phone, it's not a guarantee. Although all phones will support location via tower-triangulation, so every phone should have some level of location support. Something the article should probably mention.

Processor: The Android team has been forthcoming about the fact that they are developing the system to be more or less platform independent. Right now they have everything up and running only on ARM cores (OMAP included). They are providing multimedia support via acceleration interfaces (OpenGL ES), which means that yes it should run very well on an OMAP processor... but there is little preventing another architecture from being put into use. I fully expect to see OMAP gPhone's, but that is unlikely to be the only configuration in the wild.

Overall, the article was light on research. Very little meat here, and most of what they speculated about was just wrong.