Mobile Platforms

The Inquirer has an exclusive walththrough of the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 being dubbed as the Windows Phone operating system. The operating system is running on the new HTC Touch Diamond2. The demo shows off some of the new features of the OS, the Market Place (online app store for mobile phones based on Windows Mobile), A demonstration of the “My Phone” service which allows users to archive their phone data, remotely wipe data on lost or stolen mobile phones based on Windows Phone OS and restore your data to a replacement mobile phone.

All BlackBerry mobile phone users can now start downloading the new BlackBerry AppWorld v1.1 software into their BlackBerry cell phones. One feature of the new AppWorld that stands out is the ability for BlackBerry users to archive the applications they have into a microSD card. Apps on a BlackBerry smartphone is installed in the mobile phone’s flash memory, with the new archiving feature, you can store the app on the microSD™ card and restore it when you want to use it.

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Motorola has gone a long way since I first read about the news that it’s hiring some 300 Android developers. It has heavily invested in the Android open mobile platform that Google has initiated. Recently it has opened up it’s web site for Android development in preparation for its upcoming mobile phones based on Android. It has even started beta on its new MotoDev Studio for the Android platform.

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Choice is good!? Not that we don’t have a lot of operating system choices these days. Even so, Google has just announced it’s new operating system project — the Google Chrome OS.

According to Google, the new operating system, which is scheduled to be released next year, will focus on netbooks and desktop PC’s. The operating system will be an open source software based on Linux. Google Chrome OS will focus on lightweight, speed, simplicity and security as the driving force in the creation of the operating system. It looks like Google has already been talking to several manufacturers to come up with netbooks using the OS.

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This is really getting exciting, the upcoming models of connected phones will soon be able to display a web page like this one here at connectedphone.com without having to scroll horizontally. I think this is one of those features that essentially blur the line between what a computer is and what a mobile phone is.

EE Times has written an article that the next iteration of the Android open mobile platform, version 2.0 aka Donut, will support QVGA, HVGA and WVGA resolutions, developer’s revealed in one session. Google developers were reluctant to provide details, but WVGA generally refers to an 800 to 854 x 480 pixel resolution.

It looks like June will be a busy month for mobile platform updates. Besides the announced availability of the Palm Pre on June 6, the Android open mobile platform version 1.5 cupcake revisions has been bumped off to early June.

Windows Mobile 6.5 is now finished and will soon be available according to the Windows Dev Team Twitter updates. What’s even more interesting is the upcoming Apple Development Conference in June which has raised speculations and discussions on the Net that not only will it feature the iPhone OS 3.0 release but also a new iPhone HW as well. The Apple WWDC has been sold out as of now.

Just read over at CNN that T-Mobile has sold it’s first million Android based mobile phones. Don’t get me wrong, I like what Android is doing to change the mobile space but 1 million in six months just doesn’t deserve any applause — Apple did it on the iPhone 3G in just weeks and Nokia is selling its 5800 XpressMusic at 1 million a month. If this goes on at this rate Nokia will have sold 15 million 5800xm’s compared to 2 million T-Mobile G1′s.

I’m still waiting for an Android mobile phone to be available locally — maybe I should stop waiting and get an Apple iPhone or Nokia 5800xm. The Nokia N97 might even be first to market globally than the Android mobile phone. This is not good news for me who wants to learn how to create mobile applications on the Android platform but no mobile phone available in the market. I just hope all those pre-announced Android phones will reach the market soon and I mean real soon.

The guys over at Symbian Customer Operations decided to tinker around and make the Symbian operating system run on an ordinary Intel Atom based PC. Showcasing Symbian’s capabilities of being able to run on even a desktop computer presents a world of possibilities. Not that Symbian is already running on majority of the mobile phones out on the market.

I wonder what this tells us of the future of Maemo –the Linux operating system running on it’s N8xx mobile gadgets. Nokia does have a quite power list of software in its arsenal — Maemo, QT (which Nokia acquired a while back) and Symbian to name a few. It would be nice to see how Nokia would come up with these to introduce the next major development towards a truly connected phone.

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Just read from Arstechnica that Apple has released iPhone OS 3.0 beta 3. Several changes have been included in the third beta build that includes changes in the notification types, XIB files and the IDE for creating dashboard widgets. Apple seems to be on track with the June final release.

As most of the Apple iPhone users already know by now, the iPhone OS 3.0 update is a very welcome update since it will be bringing things like search, cut and paste and MMS to the iPhone. These features have been a few of the most requested since the iPhone was released. Also, iPhone developers will be able to do more with the new iPhone OS with the addition of about 1000 API’s. Even single person iPhone developers have been successfully raking in the income from the Apple Apps Market since it allows them to sell directly to the iPhone users and earn 70% of the selling price.

I’ve just read an announcement that the Android SDK 1.5 will be released around the end of the month. In the mean time developers can get access to a pre-release version to enable them to start using the Android SDK 1.5 during development. It looks like a bunch of Cupcake mods will be made available in SDK 1.5 of Android. Some of the new features in Android SDK 1.5 include soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition.

In addition, the new SDK’s from version 1.5 forward will now contain different platform versions. For instance version 1.5 of the Android SDK will also contain version 1.1. One very nice thing about this new structure is that developers can create versions of their products that allows them to target different platforms.

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