Unless you’re Google, these look like rough times to launch a mobile operating system. That puts Palm in an awkward position. Things have not been going well for the beleaguered smartphone maker, whose founders arguably kick-started the smartphone revolution 12 years ago.
So T-Mobile’s G1 has been unveiled. It looks neat–and it looks like the most serious rival to the iPhone yet, though the BlackBerry Bold could be a contender once AT&T starts selling the darn thing.
T-Mobile raised some eyebrows Tuesday when it disclosed that buyers of its highly touted new Internet phone, the HTC G1 that uses Google’s Android software, would face restrictions if they exceeded 1 gigabyte of cellular data a month.
To describe the segmentation of the mobile phone marketplace, analysts and industry professionals use a common lexicon to group similar devices by their relative features and capabilities.
I spent this morning at the unveiling of Google’s (GOOG) first phone using its “Android” software, hosted on a phone made by HTC called the “G1,” with service from Deutsche Telekom’s (DT) T-Mobile in the U.S. The phone is to be made available in the States on Oct. 22 for a price of $179 with a two-year contract.
The phone is an ugly, faceless black–or white–brick whose display swings open to reveal the typical junky plastic keyboard.
Carriers have long worried that they’ll be relegated to being “dumb pipes” as more developers churn out applications for mobile phones. But some new figures are now making those carriers change their stance.
Mobile software operating system Android is coming soon, at least on one device–and that device will have a way for third-party applications to get access to users. The Google-led software initiative will offer a service called Android Market, a way to find, maybe purchase and download third-party applications (and maybe other content?). This is like [...]
Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.
Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.
When last we looked after the big 700 MHz spectrum auction wrapped up in March, Team Google was congratulating itself for successfully winning open-access requirements for the desirable “C Block” without actually having to spend billions of dollars, clearing a path for devices powered by its open Android platform even though Verizon Wireless won those airwaves. The search sovereign should have known it wasn’t going to be that easy.
What do Cliff Stearns, John Shimkus and Fred Upton have in common? They’re all members of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, and they’ve each publicly accused Google of having “duped” the Federal Communications Commission by “gaming” a recent multibillion-dollar auction of wireless frequencies, shortchanging federal coffers. They also have this in common: Each has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions over their careers from telephone and cable interests locked in a battle with Google over the use of those frequencies.
There are a couple of announcements Tuesday that point to a major technological battle: the race to become the platform for mobile applications. This is happening at two levels. There are mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple’s mobile version of OS X and Google’s forthcoming Android. And there are environments that live above the operating system that are meant to allow applications to run on multiple operating systems. Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet. For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.
Microsoft is in some of kind of spending mood. First they offered up $45 billion for Yahoo (not enough for some!). And then there was that Danger acquisition. But how much did they spend on the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company started by Android leader Andy Rubin? No one at Microsoft is talking, nor are the guys at Danger. So I spent most of my day yesterday dialing-for-information, and have come up with the price from a fairly solid source. Microsoft spent a cool half-billion dollars ($500 million) on Danger, making it a nice payday for investors of the SideKick maker.
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