Database Users

Google launching linux O/S for mobiles

From el reg.
Google has unveiled its phone platform, Android. It's yet another Linux OS, freely licensed, that will appear in devices in the second half of next year. Google has signed up over 30 partners including Qualcomm, Motorola, HTC and operators including Deutsche Telekom for the "Open Handset Alliance".
CEO Eric Schmidt described it as "the first truly open platform for mobile devices." Android, named after the start-up company Google acquired in 2005, encompasses middleware and applications as well as the base kernel. An SDK is promised for download next Monday under an Apache license. However, the ad-supported model will take awhile to shake out.
"Contrary to a lot of speculation out there, we won't see a completely ad driven cellphone based on Android for quite some time," said Andy Rubin.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is.
Two such alliances appeared in 2005, and two more this year. The LIMO Alliance, backed by NTT DoCoMo, Motorola and Samsung was unveiled in January. ARM announced yet another industry Linux OS coalition just a month ago.
Despite clocking up a healthy air miles account for all involved, real momentum has stalled for Linux on mobile phones: you'll look for a 3G Linux phone in vain, today. Motorola made a strategic bet on open source in 2003 but discovered that integration complexity and costs outweighed the advantages: the company recently returned to Symbian for its smartphones. Nevertheless a wide alliance of industry backers have come to Google's launch.
Currently Symbian dominates the smartphone business. It's painfully built-up almost a decade's worth of integration expertise, in giving manufacturers what they want, including a successful Japanese business where carriers dominate. Symbian's chief technical advantage today is the platform's maturity, and more recently, its real-time kernel. This permits manufacturers to build lower-cost single-chip phones, while running their older proprietary baseband stacks as an OS personality.
With Nokia, whose volume drives lower component costs, pushing Symbian into its midrange feature phones, Android faces a stiff challenge competing in this market.
And as we pointed out earlier this today, it isn't clear that failure of rich mobile data services isn't due to anything on the supply side - people just don't find them very useful.
There's a significant gap, however, for "two box" solutions that only Blackberry and Apple fill today, as phone companions. Rubin said the system requirements supported QWERTY and large screen sizes, and Schmidt hinted at bringing the PC experience to mobile devices.
Android may yet find a niche in which to flourish.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/google_android_announcement/

Wounder if it will be compatible with our devices... lets hope!

dferreira said:
Wounder if it will be compatible with our devices... lets hope!
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Everithing is possible... even in our dreams

I think I’m having a Gene Amdahl moment

Recently, there’s been a lot of misinformation in the press about Android and Google’s role in supporting the ecosystem. I’m writing in the spirit of transparency and in an attempt to set the record straight. The Android community has grown tremendously since the launch of the first Android device in October 2008, but throughout we’ve remained committed to fostering the development of an open platform for the mobile industry and beyond.
We don’t believe in a “one size fits all” solution. The Android platform has already spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices – many of which were not originally contemplated when the platform was first created. What amazes me is that the even though the quantity and breadth of Android products being built has grown tremendously, it’s clear that quality and consistency continue to be top priorities. Miraculously, we are seeing the platform take on new use cases, features and form factors as it’s being introduced in new categories and regions while still remaining consistent and compatible for third party applications.
As always, device makers are free to modify Android to customize any range of features for Android devices. This enables device makers to support the unique and differentiating functionality of their products. If someone wishes to market a device as Android-compatible or include Google applications on the device, we do require the device to conform with some basic compatibility requirements. (After all, it would not be realistic to expect Google applications – or any applications for that matter – to operate flawlessly across incompatible devices). Our “anti-fragmentation” program has been in place since Android 1.0 and remains a priority for us to provide a great user experience for consumers and a consistent platform for developers. In fact, all of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance agreed not to fragment Android when we first announced it in 2007. Our approach remains unchanged: there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs. There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.
Finally, we continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.
The volume and variety of Android devices in the market continues to exceed even our most optimistic expectations. We will continue to work toward an open and healthy ecosystem because we truly believe this is best for the industry and best for consumers.
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Source: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/04/i-think-im-having-gene-amdahl-moment.html

Google I/O Announcements

Thought I would make this thread per request. So here we go, what goodies you bringing to the table Google
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/android-momentum-mobile-and-more-at.html
This morning at Google I/O, the Android team shared some updates. It’s hard to believe a little more than two and a half years ago, we were just one device, launching in one country, on one carrier. Thanks to the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and carriers, the platform has grown exponentially. There are now:
100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market
Mobile—one OS everywhere
Over the past two and a half years, we’ve shipped eight releases of Android and there are now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes. This morning we talked about our next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.
We also launched Music Beta by Google, a new service that lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud for streaming to your computer and Android devices. With the new service, your music and playlists are automatically kept in sync, so if you create a new playlist on your phone, it’s instantly available on your computer or tablet. You can use a feature called Instant Mix to create a playlist of songs that go well together. You can even listen to music when you’re offline: we automatically store your most recently played music on your Android device and you can choose to make specific albums or playlists available when you’re not connected. The service is launching in beta today to U.S. users and is available by invitation.
We’ve also added Movies for rent to Android Market. You can choose to rent from thousands of movies starting at $1.99 and have them available across your Android devices—rent a movie on your home computer, and it’ll be available for viewing on your tablet or phone. You can rent from Android Market on the web today, and we’ll be rolling out an update to Verizon XOOM customers beginning today. We’ll start rolling out the update to Android 2.2 and above devices in the coming weeks.
The Android ecosystem has been moving really fast over the last two and a half years and rapid iteration on new and highly-requested features has been a driving force behind Android’s success. But of course that innovation only matters if it reaches consumers. So today we’re announcing that a founding team of industry leaders, including many from the Open Handset Alliance, are working together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release, and also for how long they will continue to be updated. The founding partners are Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T, and we welcome others to join us. To start, we're jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows...and that's just the beginning. Stay tuned for more details.
More—extending the platform beyond mobile
From the beginning, Android was designed to extend beyond the mobile phone. With that in mind, we’ve developed Android Open Accessory to help developers start building new hardware accessories that will work across all Android devices. We previewed an initiative called [email protected], which allows Android apps to discover, connect and communicate with appliances and devices in your home. We also showed a preview of Project Tungsten, an Android device for Music Beta to give you more control over music playback within the [email protected] network.
You can watch the entire Android keynote from Google I/O on our Google Developer YouTube Channel shortly. On behalf of the team, we want to thank the entire Android community of developers, OEMs and carriers who are pushing the platform into new areas and building great experiences for consumers. Without you, the Android platform wouldn’t have grown so large in the past two and a half years. We look forward to seeing where you take it next.

I'm convinced I saw 'MUSIC' on the Android Market this morning/early afternoon today too - I re-set up my phone and noticed it appearing (which it didn't before) as installed... didn't think much of it.
Now I notice its US only too for now
If it's anything like the Amazon AppStore, UKers might see it in a year's time?
looking forward to USB host I wonder if SD card may get enabled soon too...

Why copy-paste the text of a website you just gave a link to?

slack04 said:
Why copy-paste the text of a website you just gave a link to?
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1. To give a source to where I got it, 2. because I know some noobs aren't going to click the link because they are too eager to fill up the forums with hearsay haha.
And it was easy just to put both haha.

windows 8 requiring secure boot on arm devices pc aint much better

so i was checking out the windows 8 requirements that have released and came across the whole arm 8 dvices being required to hve a secure boot that cannot be unlocked to block non windows oses and the pc aint much more open looks like its gonna be up to communities to do what we want on devices anymore.....damn microsoft taking lessons from apple or what this really jkind of bumms me out, it seems like at every turn big business is trying to stifle developement. it seems for every advancement that could stimulate innovative developement theres several things implemented to directly oppose those advances can we say one step forward two steps back.
ive been hearing all the hype of arm windows tablets just to hear this....is somebody afraid of what android or linux might do on a tablet running pc specs.....

X86 devices will be ok. Running sth other than Windows on any ARM device will become probmatic.
I'm more concerned what this means if we get a proper mingling of chips (at long fraking last) in the domain of netbooks and low cost desktop/nettop systems, then I am for W8 phones and tabs.
Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk

Granted this will be a step backward but in the same respect, as usual, microsoft is late to the party. Everything I have read and heard through the grapevines are pointing to a Q1 2013 release of Win8 ARM tablets. By that time the A15 based beasties will be out running Android 4.x or possibly even Android 5.x. In essence all MS has accomplished is shooting themselves in the foot.

well i've got a alternate view of this. Sure ms is late i the app/phone/tablet market. But you still have to remember that they still have the largest piece of the market in the computer department. And if they could deliver a system similar to windows..well that will give them a big chunk of the market today. Due to a large userbase which know how to handle windows applications.
Even analystics has given out reports about this. That ios and android have reached their top. But what do i know ^^i'm just hoping for the best, and userfriendly applications.

Except the majority of closed source programs people use, will not get ported to Win8/ARM. Many of the cross platform open source ones already compile on Linux and/or *BSD's ARM targets.
Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk

Darkseider said:
Granted this will be a step backward but in the same respect, as usual, microsoft is late to the party. Everything I have read and heard through the grapevines are pointing to a Q1 2013 release of Win8 ARM tablets. By that time the A15 based beasties will be out running Android 4.x or possibly even Android 5.x. In essence all MS has accomplished is shooting themselves in the foot.
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I seem to remember hearing the same thing about game consoles. People said Nintendo and Sony had a lock on the market and Microsoft was wasting time trying to break in with the XBox.

[Q] Ubuntu Adoption for Yu Yureka ???

Hello,
I recently came across this "LOW-COST-ULTRA-POWERFUL(LCUP)" device.
I immediately started looking for an Ubuntu Mobile OS port for this device.
Unfortunately there seems to be none, then i came across this
https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/start/ubuntu-for-devices/porting-new-device/
Would love to see somebody adopt this project and give us a Dual-Boot YU.
I am sure the Ubuntu community would be thrilled to assist you and add another device to their compatibility list.
With its 9K($140) price point and an ubuntu port, Canonical couldn't be asking for a better device to showcase their OS given that this device is still sold out within seconds of its sale window.
CANONICAL SHOULD THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT THIS OPPORTUNITY !!!
RATIONALE :
Officially adding support to this device besides the nexus, wouldn't be a bad idea for canonical, as given its never tiring run at the sales window every week(which lasts only seconds on Amazon, India.) it could soon surpass the nexus device counts.
Besides and MORE IMPORTANTLY i would be more comfortable fidgeting with a device that is $ 140 as against the nexus lineup which is upwards of $350.
THE COROLLARY :
Officially supporting it means no-bugs, no-bugs means people(MOBILE MECHANICS) in India can setup shop and earn out of Ubuntu installations(with Dual-Booting Android) which will translate to a free market to Canonical to lay base for its OS.
India cannot be ignored, given the numbers that we are, success stories get written overnight. Case in point being the maker of this device 'MICROMAX' itself.
BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY :
MICROMAX'S POORER-THAN-POOR SUPPORT COULD BE AN OPPORTUNITY TO OTHERS(Canonical & UBUNTU in this case) , INSTEAD OF LAYING TO WASTE A HARDWARE AS GOOD AS THIS.
A STABLE(OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED) 'UBUNTU MOBILE OS' SHOULD ENCOURAGE USERS TO LOOK AT UBUNTU MOBILE OS AS A REPRIEVE AS AGAINST MICROMAX'S POORER-THAN-POOR SUPPORT SYSTEM.
CONCLUSION(COROLLARY) :
MORE DEVICES means KICK STARTING THE UBUNTU MOBILE OS ecosystem.
AN ACTIVE ECOSYSTEM means MORE OEM'S SEEING VIABILITY IN THE 'UBUNTU MOBILE OS PROJECT'.
PS: Poll added for a reality check of the viability of this request.
thanks,

wrong location of the thread buddy.
and with lollipop on the horizon, the whole project would have to be rebased soon enough. so will have to wait anyway.
requested mod to move the thread

Sorry!
& Thanks,
Moderator Can u please move this to the relevant section ?
--- Sent from my DROID Pro ---

Time to attempt to convert ...
Yu Yureka ... to ... U Ureka(with Ubuntu running on it
--- Sent from my DROID Pro ---