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."

Google vs Microsoft

[PolarBearFire]

Anyone know the difference in terms of features between Android and the most current version of Windows mobile? I hope that the introduction of Android will spur all companies to introduce more and more innovations. The gPhone will be more of a competitor to smartphones that are NOT iPhones. iPhones are more of a status symbol and their users will not be really in the market for other phones. I like the iPhone because they are cool and do things that other phones can't match yet, but feature for feature they lose to other smartphones.

Re:Google vs Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows CE allows you to develop in C++ or the .NET languages if you prefer. So far, Android only supports Java. This is annoying for someone like me, with a large C++ codebase targetting Win32, CE and Symbian as it means rewriting the application from scratch in a different language.

There are some people experimentally bypassing the JVM, but AFAIK no-one has succeeded in making a GUI application which does this.

Handing over data

[MtHuurne]

I'm not sure, though, that I want to hand over *yet another* part of my life to Google. We all probably will though.

From what I've seen, Android is very modular: it is designed to allow the user to replace an application by another application that serves the same purpose. So if you do not want to hand over your data to Google, you can just replace the applications that talk to Google's servers.

Re:Google vs Microsoft

[hot soldering iron]

I'm learning Java right now, and even though I love it, I also know it's not great for everything or everyones cup of tea. There is one thing that might help mitigate the gPhones jvm-only structure - bytecode. Jython lets you write your Python code and compile it into intermediate-level bytecode. Same for Ruby, and other languages.

It might be a hassle, but I don't think that anyone with OOP training will have any problems adapting to the gPhone.