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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: mobile
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
November 9th, 2009
The importance of Sixth Sense going open source
No one can say Sixth Sense is not innovative.
The creation of Pranav Mistry, a PH.D candidate at MIT’s Media Lab, it’s described as a “wearable gesteral interface” whose hardware comprises a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera.
(The illustration is from Mistry’s Web site.)
Mistry’s idea is that these components will be worn like pendant, with the computer they’re wirelessly connected to kept in a pocket.
Using Sixth Sense, data is displayed in the air and manipulated using hand gestures. When Mistry is demonstrating it, he looks like a magician.
It’s cool. And it’s going to launch as open source.
“I don’t want this to comply with some corporate policy,” he told Rediff while in India demonstrating the interface at the TEDIndia Conference. “I want people to make their own system. Why not?”
Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source.
There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time.
November 4th, 2009
LiMo has a second phone
The LiMo Foundation has delivered its second mobile phone to the market under the second release of its software.
The Vodafone 360 Samsung M1 looks uncomfortably like an iPhone, only with three buttons below the screen. The name is a hybrid — Vodafone 360 refers to the carrier’s service platform, Samsung M1 the phone manufacturer.
And it’s the Vodafone 360 that is at the heart of it all. The company calls this its “web services strategy.” Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless of the U.S.
Version 2.0 of the LiMo platform was announced in September alongside another Samsung phone, the H1. While Android stories revolve around developers and phone makers, LiMo seems proudest of its agreements with carriers.
The M1 itself seems to be a dumbed-down version of the H1, with less memory, a smaller screen, and presumably a lower price. It seems the idea is to hit the low-end of the market with something that looks like an iPhone, but isn’t, and a network that seems like the Internet, but isn’t.
LiMo press announcements also tend to carry a breathless quality that hasn’t been seen in America since the 1980s, except among recent college graduates. Here’s a taste:
This latest handset developed by Samsung offers mobile consumers a unique mobile experience presented through Vodafone’s stunning feature-rich, highly customizable Vodafone 360 user interface (UI) – providing a new set of Internet services for the mobile and PC that gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favorites in one place.
You would think these people invented the handset.
Snark aside we are starting to see the dimensions of contrasting strategies among the various Linux handset groups. Android is about the makers, LiMo the carriers, and Moblin the developers.
Which will win the customers?
October 29th, 2009
Qualcomm joins open source movement at head of parade
Qualcomm, which has long had a major position in mobile chip sets and standards, has joined the open source movement with an eye to leading it. (Picture from Whenpigsfly.info.)
The company formed a new unit called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), under a senior vice president, and it joined the board of directors of the Symbian Foundation.
The idea behind the QuIC is to push open source, including systems like Chrome, Webkit and Android as well as Symbian, the company said.
Qualcomm is doing this to support its Snapdragon chip set, a CPU and graphics chip package designed for low power and handheld devices, most based on Linux. These include what Qualcomm calls “smartbooks,” netbook-phone hybrids on which Chinese manufacturers like Acer, Asus and HTC are already working.
The move should also be seen in light of recent moves by Intel to support mobile open source. Matt Asay writes that “pigs are beginning to fly” and he’s right.
But where are they heading?
The efforts of Qualcomm surrounding Snapdragon seem to prove that the “waiting for Godot” story of “desktop Linux” may finally get an appearance by its title character appearing on the stage in the form of a telephone-laptop hybrid.
But open source advocates should also take a jaundiced view of this, not just because it has been delayed for years. As Matt notes, combining open source and proprietary technology in the way Qualcomm wants to do, while legitimate, does threaten to maintain the vendor lock-in that open source is meant to fight.
Just because you draw a picture does not mean the pig is really flying.
October 26th, 2009
Why Android is beating Windows Mobile
Most analysts have it wrong. It’s not about a balance of power and it’s not about Google becoming what Sun promised to be and it’s certainly not about that dread word free.
It’s about the game that the two companies are playing. Google is playing, and Microsoft is not. (Here, one of the 16 “masterpieces” in the dogs playing poker series, from Wikipedia.)
With Google Android you see where all your competitors start from. You can innovate from there. You can differentiate your phone from other Android phones.
With Microsoft there is less wiggle room. The only people who see the code are Microsoft and (maybe) the manufacturer. You are betting that Microsoft can out-innovate Apple. (Stop laughing.)
No one in the mobile business throught Apple could out-innovate Apple back in the day. Remember when Apple was playing footsie with Motorola? No one in the mobile business thought Apple had what it took to be a “lead dog” — they all wanted it in harness with an unchanging view.
So Apple did its own phone, its own way, and Apple won.
Microsoft lacks the courage to do this. It won’t compete with its own ecosystem. It doesn’t understand that hardware is software. So it plays the game the way Symbian did five years ago, even though Symbian has abandoned that game, so there is no reason to fear Microsoft, and no “there” there.
The days of control are over, unless you’re willing to bet big. Apple did, and wound up playing Monopoly on its own design. What’s Microsoft playing, Blind Man’s Bluff?
By contrast, think of Google as dealing hands of poker.
All the players at the Android table can see one anothers’ cards. Not all the cards, but enough to get a feel for what’s happening. They can keep their aces in the hole, they can innovate or compete in some other way.
The dealer is patient, you can play all day, and guess who ends up with most of the chips at the end of play?
The dealer.
Google is betting that carriers and manufacturers will play enough hands with it that it can gain some market share. Right now that looks like a pretty good bet.
Microsoft is like a gambler with a fistful of dollars that can’t find the game.
October 19th, 2009
Motorola goes all-in for Google Android
What makes the World Series of Poker compelling is that it ends.
TV poker has specified stakes and players going “all-in.”
Business lacks such climaxes. You seldom see such a grand gesture. There’s always another quarter. It’s a grind.
That’s what makes Motorola’s gamble on the Google Android, and the grand gesture of its “Droid” launch, worth a second look. The company is going “all-in.” There is no backup plan. If the sales parachute does not open the company falls like a rock.
Failure might be embarrassing for Google, but it has other partners and many other opportunities. For Motorola this is do or die.
Even if the company itself doesn’t go under with a Droid failure, this is its last shot at cellphone glory. Its phone sales have been cut in half the last few years, its market share is a shadow of its former glory, and the vultures are circling.
Having followed Motorola off-and-on for over 30 years I find this a fascinating spectacle. The company has been around for over 80 years, producing its first cellphone back in 1973. Motorola’s corporate history claims it invented Six Sigma, and among its acquisitions over the years were General Instrument and Symbol Technologies.
Now Motorola is betting on Google to help make it a player in radios again, its original niche. The first pictures of the platform are out, and were enough to send the stock soaring. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
How do you think it will taste?
October 12th, 2009
Why the big Android bandwagon?
We have had open source mobile platforms for years. Why has Android become a bandwagon, one big enough that people are wondering if it’s not growing too big for its britches.
One word: marketing.
Thanks to its low-cost structure, Google can subsidize the marketing of its products to a degree even experienced rivals can’t match. As I have said before there is a price lower than free, and Google is uniquely positioned to pay that price.
Why? Look at the ad above, for the HTC myTouch, from Vimeo. All those celebrities aren’t just selling T-Mobile, or HTC. They are also selling Google. Android gave Google an excuse to do TV ads, with others’ help. Even if it doesn’t sell phones it sells the Google brand, and Google benefits from that.
It’s all about the sharing. By spreading the development effort through open source, Google also spreads the marketing cost as various players vie for position. But Google’s size and budget are what make this a good deal for everyone else.
Symbian and RIM can’t pay this price to the degree Google can. Symbian was spun-out to become self-sustaining, and its developer outreach efforts may be all it can do. RIM has a proprietary background, and proprietary profits, so for it to grab open source may easily be seen as desperation.
Google has both the money and the reputation to push product through the channel that has its roots in open source. Its multiplicity of developers means all of them have an incentive to drive down the open source incline and the open source development incline.
Google may eventually seek to monetize all this with online services, but it is developing the market before showing its hand in that area. Meanwhile, the ad revenue from having Web pages appear on more mobile kit is all it really needs. (Yes, this means the iPhone is subsidizing Android.)
Google’s cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
To succeed, however, it will have to deliver products as good or better than the iPhone, at the same or less cost, with just as many apps. That risk to its reputation is all Google is laying on the line here, but since failure will also hurt open source that risk is also shared.
October 8th, 2009
Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple
Those of a certain age will remember an early Steve Jackson game called Ogre. It was a two-player game where one player had a single piece, a powerful piece called the Ogre. The other player had everything else.
This pretty much sums up Google’s Android strategy against the Apple iPhone. Apple in this case plays the Ogre. (Picture from Steve Jackson Games.)
The combination of Apple’s proprietary iPhone design and its exclusive deal with AT&T has proven financially powerful. Apple created a market no one thought existed for a data-driven mobile Internet client and everyone else is playing catch-up.
With Dell now agreeing to supply AT&T with its version of the Android, Google now has game pieces on all four major U.S. carriers, including the one Apple plays on. T-Mobile was the first carrier to carry Android kit, Verizon is being promised a bunch of it. Sprint and Samsung will be in on the game in a Moment.
Everybody gets to play the way they want. Carriers can get exclusives on designs, and negotiate any deal on the resulting data flow they wish. Both new and old manufacturers get to play in the phone game and try to innovate on the margins.
All this work feeds back into the Android ecosystem, and all content sales feed into the Android marketplace. Google just wants a place to advertise alongside the content.
It’s a fun game, whose knock-on effects are a direct challenge to Microsoft, Symbian, and the Blackberry folks. Google seems destined to be the market’s #2 player by early next year, #2 with a bullet.
But please note this. All Google’s pieces taken together don’t yet add up to the power of Apple’s iPhone. The Ogre still has the power. But Google has the dice.
October 6th, 2009
How Verizon might ruin Android
Verizon makes Apple look open.
But they are one-half the U.S. mobile phone duopoly (T-Mobile and Sprint are minor players) so the kids at the Googleplex are doubtless celebrating news that Verizon will be working on bringing Android phones to market.
Verizon has a ton of incentive to make this work. Apple’s iPhone is the 800-pound gorilla in the wireless room, and since it’s exclusive to AT&T Verizon has been hemorrhaging market share (especially on the high end) for many months now.
Both sides were saying the right things today, but Verizon Wireless has based its corporate identity on maintaining control of its wireless environment.
Old habits will be hard to break.
Top management at Verizon seems to have decided that in its pursuit of market share it will throw everything it can at the wall and hope something sticks.
But what if Verizon succeeds? What if it starts selling a lot of Android kit, and those users start making heavy use of apps for which Verizon isn’t getting its usual cut?
What happens when those in Verizon middle management, raised on the iron belief that Verizon must get a cut of every bit on its wireless network, see Google spreading its open source gospel on its network?
I think I know. And I don’t like it.
It will take more than a few words at a press conference to remove my suspicions. How about you?
September 11th, 2009
Will new Motorola Google phone Cliq?
The code name for what is now the Motorola Cliq was Morrison, and I’m sure during its development some Chicago wags were asking “Tommy or Marion?” (This is Tommy. Use the link to find Marion.)
Its release, as a T-Mobile device, revealed the Android strategy. The phones may run open source, but they are being sold as Google proprietary.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Brands sell. Brands are a shorthand for all sorts of features and benefits, and when you’re marketing millions of units priced at just a few hundred dollars in a mature marketplace you need a brand to push through the clutter.
Motorola was once such a brand. It’s not any more. The hope is that Google is. So on Google Maps, on Google Voice Search, on Google Picasa and GTalk.
That last is also a hint as to where this goes. You release by Labor Day and you’re selling heavily for Christmas. The units sold at the Mobilize show yesterday were black, but expect them soon in red and green.
For carriers, the key question remains the data load this phone delivers, and the money they might make from that data. It’s called ARPU — average revenue per user. But these days it should called ABPU — average bandwidth per user.
By that measure, of course, the iPhone is John Wayne. What will Morrison be?
August 24th, 2009
Nokia brands a netbook
One thing I learned at CompuTex is that any brand can have a Netbook.
All you need is marketing and a supplier. Suppliers are thick on the ground. You can do your business from Taipei and have gear with your name on it coming out of Shanghai within a month.
Nokia is just the latest to follow this strategy. (Picture from CNet’s Crave blog.) There is nothing terribly special about the unit being offered — an aluminum case, an Intel Atom processor, weight under 3 pounds.
So why do it? For the same reason AT&T has former newsman Bill Kurtis sitting in a motorcycle with an HP Mini — to sell services.
In Nokia’s case, it’s to sell its Ovi data services, Maps, photo exchanges, data syncing — sure sounds like PC data. So why not put it into a PC while you work on a handheld people will buy?
It’s the connection between hardware and services that makes this story of interest to open source users. Services are the key open source business model. You can’t make someone buy a support subscription, but if they are buying the services provided by your software their checkbook is open to you.
This is what Moblin is about, what Android is about, and what Nokia’s own open source Symbian is about. Service revenue driving open source adoption.
But it’s going to be a multi-corner race among open source, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. The Netbook gets Nokia into that game. Can open source win it?
August 14th, 2009
Will mobile Linux distros hang separately?
HTC has had its Android phone out for months now, and there’s great excitement over the coming kit from Motorola.
Panasonic and NEC are out with new LiMo gear. Intel and Novell are both pushing the Moblin platform. Nokia is pushing Linux in the new Maemo phones.
But what are the chances you will be able to move software among these various phones? (Tux is holding a Treo in this picture from Palminfocenter.com.)
I am not a programmer. The job may be trivial. But until we know what is involved in doing the job the job cannot be done. And right now we don’t know what will be necessary.
The question for this weekend is, are these mobile Linux vendors making a big mistake by not collaborating more? Apple is still killing them, developer attention is not unlimited, Microsoft hearts developers, and Palm is still in the game.
Even taken together, the market share of all these Linux phones by the end of next year may be trivial next to what is being piled up by the competition. But these Linux phones can’t be taken together. They are all tied to different distributions. They all stand alone.
This is just what happened with Unix back in the day. The software was great, but each vendor had their own way of doing things, so the market never really developed. Unix did not hang together and so each vendor hung separately.
Is this about to happen with mobile Linux?
August 4th, 2009
Funambol to monetize cloud sync for mobile VOIP
How’s that for a headline, if you just came here from Google News? Let’s break it down:
- Funambol is an open source software company. They specialize in software for synchronizing mobile devices, and claim they serve over 2 billion of them.
- Monetize is a verb form of making money. But it doesn’t just mean making money for yourself. In technology it often refers to turning on some invention so it can make money for lots of people.
- Cloud. A cloud is a big hosting center. Your stuff no longer runs on a particular computer using a specific operating system. It’s just in the system somewhere. It’s in the cloud.
- Sync is short for synchronize. Synchronizing, in this case, means making two things the same. The file here is the same as the file there, and they’re kept the same even after one side changes.
- Mobile is what Europeans call cell phones or cell-like devices. Funambol was originally Italian, but they’re now based in Redwood City, Calif. I think there is an Olive Garden in Palo Alto.
- VOIP is an acronym, short for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Make a phone call using your Internet connection rather than a regular phone line and you’re making a VOIP call.
Now, dear visitor, what does this mean to you?
Let’s say you’re traveling to Toronto or Taiwan. To avoid your carrier’s hefty “gotcha” fees, you call home using a local number and an Internet connection through a service like PennyTalk. You’re doing big business so you collect a lot of business cards, and put those contacts into your phone.
With Funambol software, you can now synchronize those contacts with a big system somewhere on the Internet, and share that synchronized file with co-workers, who may start calling those contacts before they even get home, before they have had time to deal with your competitor.
Or, when you’re visiting grandma in India, you can take some pictures of her and share them immediately with the whole family back in Duluth, Georgia.
This is a valuable capability. Funambol hopes enough money is made from all this that its software can earn a chunk as well. You may never know Funambol is involved in this, or (if you use their myFunambol portal) you may indeed know their name.
It’s a business model, and if you want another acronym it’s SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service. You don’t pay for the software, but what the software does.
By saving you money and making profitable new services possible, companies like Funambol keep their open source projects alive. You may not pay for that open source package directly, but you do pay for it, and they make money on it.
And that’s what makes the world go around.
August 3rd, 2009
What the FCC can do for open spectrum
Larry Dignan is afraid the FCC may be doing too much, just looking at possibly anti-competitive deals, trying to stay on top of the news instead of sleeping in a corner, as it did for a decade before Julius Genachowski (right) came to town.
It’s a mark of just how knee-jerk the opposition to government action in markets has become, that a mere investigation can lead reporters to fingering their worry beads.
To most people it’s pretty obvious why Apple shut down Google Voice. VOIP is competition with cellular minutes, just as it was competition for wired phone minutes, which it destroyed.
I’m old enough to remember the monthly chore of auditing my phone bill each month, creating expense bills for various publishers, with the cost of each call written down and photocopied. I don’t do that any more. The cost is rolled into my cellular plan as minutes which neither I nor my publisher has to see.
But running phone calls — a low bandwidth service — over the Internet rather than the wireless network is still a cost savings, which some customers would like to capture. Only the cell phone companies don’t want them to.
This is just one of many ways in which companies have succeeded in frustrating Moore’s Law over this decade. There is no technical reason why the price to move bits should not be going down, going down constantly, and going down rapidly. The cost of equipment, the efficiency of technology, it’s all there to make it happen.
What isn’t there are competitive markets with incentives for investment and no tolerance for monopoly.
Politics has squandered the advances of Moore’s Law, and it will take more than the FCC’s meager politics to bring them back.
So let me offer a simple guideline. Call it Dana’s Law of Technology Regulation:
Regulation should conform to the trends of Moore’s Law and maintain maximum competition in the market.
It will take real changes, not just investigations, to make that happen. We need more unlicensed channels, we need wholesaling in the last mile.
Bits may not be free, but they should be as cheap as the technology creating them allows. The goal should be encouraging the market to expand opportunity, and not making anyone’s life easier.
June 23rd, 2009
Intel-Nokia deal boosts open source
Whatever Nokia and Intel focus on it will be open source.
That’s the key takeaway from today’s announcement between the chipmaker and the mobile phone company to develop new devices to compete with the Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry and Google Android.
Software development will be centered on two open source projects:
- Moblin, originally an Intel project but now run by the Linux Foundation.
- Maemo, a Nokia implementation created for an Internet tablet.
Delivery of gear will have to come fairly quickly, however, because Apple and its smartphone competitors are rapidly taking away market share from ordinary mobile phone producers like Nokia.
Basic to the concept are a touch screen, plenty of chip memory and an intuitive interface. Based on what I saw at CompuTex you can also expect to see waterproofing and (perhaps) support for WiMax, which Intel boosted heavily at the show.
Intel has been trying to gain share in the Taiwanese OEM market throughout this decade, and this year’s CompuTex was its best showing to date. But that was mainly in the area of laptops and netbooks, where it was aligned with Microsoft.
The Nokia alliance, combined with Far East manufacturing, give Intel a chance to innovate on a major player’s behalf and gain a place at the smartphone table.
But time is of the essence, because the market is ebbing away fast.
Question is, if you’re a developer, are you interested in helping them?
June 17th, 2009
Will Ubuntu remain a minor player
Click2try announced it is hosting a version of Ubuntu, and applications, which people can try free and rent if they like it.
It’s the most innovative thing I’ve seen from Ubuntu in months. And, yes, they didn’t even do it.
It is time for open source advocates to take off the rose-colored glasses and ask if Ubuntu — more appropriately its Canonical business arm headed by Mark Shuttleworth — is ever going to be a factor below the server level.
I have always assumed that Ubuntu was the desktop play, but it has been blown out in netbooks and seems to have no presence in phones.
Part of the problem is the channel because, as I have written here before, there is a price lower than free. Acquiring a retail presence costs money, and since a free operating system has none it’s not happening.
This is doubly true in mobile, where subsidies have to go up the stack to carriers and even manufacturers. The market is a bazaar where everyone wants you to pay before you can play.
This limits Ubuntu’s options. You can only get so far on downloads and the charisma of your chairman. Can Ubuntu get farther, or is it doomed to be a minor player?
I know Ubuntu has many friends here. I like to think I’m one of them. Ubuntu has opened many markets by offering localized versions of its software in many languages.
It can rely on others’ efforts, like the Linux Foundation, to draw in applications by supporting the Linux Standard Base. It is also supporting Moblin, hosted by the Foundation, as its mobile phone solution.
But all this is low-hanging fruit. If Ubuntu can’t gain any retail foothold, if it can’t win share in netbooks or on phones, how far can it really go? And how should it get there?
May 18th, 2009
Linux and the channel
Linux Pundit Bill Weinberg has produced two posts this weekend asking why we don’t have Linux laptops, what I would call Netbooks running Linux.
His answers are conventional. Microsoft price cuts. Ubuntu looked less than impressive. Maybe it will go from the phone up rather than the desk down, he concludes.
The answer, I’ve found, comes down to one of the first terms I learned when I joined the computer press, over 25 years ago.
The channel.
We think of stores as being the home of demand. They are not. They are where demand is satisfied.
The home of demand lies on the other end of the telescope. It lies in the marketing collateral, the co-op dollars, and the mass advertising strategies of manufacturers.
In PC manufacturing there is only one name that counts. Microsoft. Everyone else is an OEM.
Everyone suffers from this.
I tried out some Linux laptops last year and, while there were some glitches they held promise. But when it came time for me to lay down cash, there was no Linux kit on the shelves.
What I learned from a month owning a Microsoft Netbook is that I wish I had a choice. Despite a lack of moving parts, my HP Netbook is a battery hog. I could get 10 hours with a Linux laptop. The same box running Microsoft runs for fewer than three.
There’s more. My Linux laptop booted almost instantly. This Microsoft monster takes two minutes to get there.
Want to talk cost of ownership? You have no choice with Windows but to load the thing up with anti-virals and registry cleaners. They all have to load before you can do any work.
And then there’s the cost of time. They all have to check things out for you. Any nasties out there — any updates? Come back when we’re done, junior — get a cup of coffee or something.
When I get back from China, I’m erasing the 8 GByte stick memory “hard drive” on my HP Netbook and starting over.
All this changes when you move from the phone down. There you find there is a different manufacturer. Your mobile phone carrier. And everyone else is an OEM.
Who do you hate more, Microsoft or the phone company? Because those are your choices. Even Apple must, in some ways, dance to the tune of the carriers. There is no free market for phone tech — just a carrier oligopoly.
In mobile devices carriers control the channel.
We can cry about that if we want, but that’s the reality. And this gives Linux its opportunity. Because carriers don’t want the headaches of Microsoft any more than we do. Since they create the demand, they get to decide.
By handing the design job off to variations on a Linux distro — LiMo, QT, Android — carriers get flexibility with no loss of control. It’s still true that nothing gets on their network without approval, but in their world Microsoft becomes just another OEM, like Apple for AT&T.
So is Bill right? Will the Linux laptop fit within the palm of your hand?
Maybe. But so long as carriers control the channel it won’t be Linux as you know it. It will be Linux as they want it.
May 12th, 2009
oFono is Intel hail mary play in mobility
Those seeking to hit Intel with antitrust charges conveniently ignore there are huge and growing markets where it remains a bit player.
Mobility is one of them.
Now the company is trying one more time with oFono, an attempt by both it and longtime market leader Nokia to remain relevant on a playing field now dominated by Apple and Google’s Android.
More than just another high-tech misspelling, oFono seeks to define a new mobile stack which, while efficient, also limits the technologies that can be layered on top of it. (Get a bigger copy of the illustration above at the oFono Web site.)
From the announcement post of Marcel Holtmann, from the Intel Open Source Technology Center:
oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with Open Source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”
Sounds pretty open source-y, no? Sounds more open source-y than thou.
But if Intel and Nokia are defining what goes in the center of the stack, it’s a real hardware power play.
I may well be wrong, but I suspect the lower levels of the smartphone stack have already been spoken for. Bringing out a new one, even one built at the lowest level of the open source incline, may no longer be enough to win out over Intel’s and Nokia’s rivals.
It may be, as Barney Frank once observed, “the biggest hail mary play in the history of football. Or marys.”
But as a lover of competition I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
May 11th, 2009
Pushing change with Android.
While everyone eagerly awaits their Android 1.5 Cupcake, here’s a question worth pondering.
How will updates of open source code level the mobile playing field?
(Picture from the Mars Hill Torah Club. While on the site watch for Easter eggs.)
I ask this because Apple firmware updates are not treated like Christmas. Quite the opposite. Often as not Apple uses its update process to turn features off, or reverse hacks brought out by the community.
This may or may not always be true with Android. Certainly I expect Cupcake to deliver a lot of new features. But these roll-outs are, in the end, controlled by carriers, which likely as not retain a certain veto power, not only over what improvements they might push down but on everything else.
It’s another reminder of the stark difference between the Internet you’re probably reading this on and the mobile Internet. Even when Internet access is censored, the motivation is not commercial advantage. With the mobile Internet it always is.
To what extent might Android change this? Can open source act as a lever long enough to lift the rock of carrier self-dealing?
Discuss. And don’t forget to blow out the candle.
April 28th, 2009
The campaign for real keyboards
The latest Netbook rumor is out, this one straight out of Goangzhou and involving a unit running Google’s Android operating system.
Once again, there is something important missing.
A keyboard. (The picture is from an excellent review of keyboards at our Australia affiliate, CNET Australia.)
Westerners need keyboards. Real keyboards. Keyboards you use 10 fingers on, the 8 main digits held up like you’re about to play the piano, the thumbs resting comfortably on the space bar.
I want my index fingers to feel a line or at least a bump beneath them, so they know they’re properly placed on the f and j keys. And I want enough real estate on that keyboard so my fingers aren’t bumping into one another on their appointed rounds.
And I want enough travel when I press down the key so I know I pressed it, and don’t have to guess.
I want a real keyboard.
This should not be hard to do on a Netbook. It should not be that expensive. OK, so you make the case bigger, and maybe the screen bigger. But the case width can be wider than the screen if screen cost is the issue.
I have a theory as to why we are having this problem. I have yet to meet a Chinese or Japanese business associate who types the way I do.
Typing an ideogram means a multi-step process to get something on the screen, but each ideogram is a word. The languages are saved using two bytes, not one. You keep your head down and work out the formula for each ideogram. It’s a different process, more mental than physical.
Not so with English, or similar alphabetic languages. For me each keystroke just gets me a letter, it takes several to make a word, so a Chinese hunt-and-pecker may be a faster typist than an American 10-finger dude, assuming he or she has some practice.
Whatever the cause of the problem it is becoming something of a personal cause for me. When I read reviews complaining that Netbooks are “toys,” regardless of their operating system, it’s the keyboard they are really talking about.
What CompuTex needs is a campaign for real keyboards.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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