It seems that Google has posted a timeline that outlines past and future milestones for the Android smartphone operating system. There is nothing too earth shattering in the document, but they do mention that a pre-release of the 1.0 SDK will be available next month (September) with the real SDK to follow later in the year. The posting also reiterates the fact that the first devices will be available in Q4 of this year.
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It has been a busy couple of days on the Android front. Latest news is that a new version of the Android SDK has been made available. The new version of the SDK promises a new home screen and “many” UI tweaks as well as new task management.
Also new is the requirement for .APK files to be signed or else the OS will reject them at install time. Local, self-signed apps are acceptable, though, so this change shouldn’t prove to be too much of a burden for developers.
A video and more information are available after the break.
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A Business Week article by Olga Kharif is reporting on recent statements by Moe Tanabian at IBB Consulting, who claims to have seen the first Android phone for T-Mobile. Tanabian has said that the new phone will support the rumored T-Mobile App Store, which we expected, and that the initial device, at least, will probably lack support for Microsoft’s Exchange email servers.
As an avid Exchange user, allow me to be the first to say “ouch.”
Tanabian told Business Week that users will likely have to rely on Gmail for push email support, at least initially. He also remarks on Google powered in-phone advertising:
The phone will come with Google’s advertising software pre-installed. Customers who opt in to receive mobile ads from Google may be offered to buy the phone for a lower price, and may also pay lower monthly service fees. The Google platform will serve ads based on your interests and location, provided by the phone.
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Well, the cat has been let out of the bag, it seems. HTC’s Dream has popped up on the FCC’s website, and it appears to support 3G connectivity on the 1700MHz AWS band that T-Mobile has just recently started rolling out in the USA. As Engadget has also pointed out, a phone with the same DREA100 product name received WiFi certification as well.
Details are still light, and there are no external photos of the device that we can scan for branding, but it does appear to be safe to say that the Dream will be a quad-band GSM/EDGE smartphone that supports UMTS (WCDMA) 3G on the 1700MHz band used by T-Mobile. Other features include WiFi, Bluetooth, and a “jogball” navigation device that would appear to be similar to the trackball used on the Sidekicks and BlackBerry devices.
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It looks like the New York Times is getting into the race for Android rumors. They have just posted a new T-Mobile/HTC Dream rumor that everybody will run with like a dog that has stolen a bone off the kitchen table. The story from the Times is located here, but feel free to read the Reuters rehashing as well the ones by mocoNews or even our sister site MobileBurn.
The gist is that T-Mobile and HTC are awaiting FCC approval for the device that the world knows as the Dream, and are hoping to announce it in September, just as T-Mobile rumor site TmoNews had said. The companies are then hoping to get the phone into the hands of consumers by October, so the story goes. The New York Times also claims to have been told that the phone in the video we posted the other day is, indeed, the HTC Dream running Android for T-Mobile.
I guess we’ll find out one way or another soon enough.
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This is hardly news, of course, but in case you were worried - Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, appeared on CNBC today and reiterated that Android would be ready by the end of the year. You can check out the video directly on CNBC.com if you like. Schmidt spends most of the interview talking about Google trying not to be “evil” and behave better than companies like Microsoft had in the past and how it will make more money from mobile advertising eventually, but if you skip ahead to 7:10 you can hear Jim Cramer ask him about “the Android.” I can save you the time, though, by just telling you he repeatedly answered “between now and the end of the year.”
[via mocoNews]
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This is far from a sure thing, but a device that could be the HTC Dream has been caught on video running Android. This white smartphone in the video looks the part of what we have been led to expect from HTC’s Dream - a slide-up display that reveals a QWERTY keyboard and a d-pad controller that is available at all times.
[via HelloAndroid]
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You may have noticed that I haven’t been covering every single instance of some random analyst claiming to have sources that say that Google or HTC will or will not be ready in time for a promised Q4 Android launch date. I also feel no need to get all journalistic about fantastic stories of the platform being “delayed” until Q4 when the time frame from the start has been “the second half of 2008.”
I don’t cover all of this “news” because, well, these stories are mostly stupid. The truth of the matter is that very few people actually know what is going on, but there are obviously a lot of people that wish to seem important by claiming that they have inside knowledge of the situation. The thing is, HTC and Google both would be crazy if their idea of expectation management was to keep telling the world that everything is hunky dory right up until December 31st, when they would suddenly reveal that “oops, it’s gonna be late.”
It certainly might be the case, but I doubt it. I’d rather place my money on the rumor mills being full of it. The industry certainly has a strong record of being full of crap when it comes to rumors - the thing is, nobody calls anybody on rumors that turn out to be false. So if nobody is keeping score, and people are all hot and bothered to hear the latest industry gossip, truth be damned, then it is easy to see the appeal of claiming insider info.
Of course some rumors are true. My request is that you, as a reader with more than one lonely neuron, simply take everything with a grain or two of salt.
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Today mocoNews put up a story that cites “multiple sources” as informing it of T-Mobile USA’s plans for an open application store for all of its platforms, including Android. The new application store would replace the carrier’s currently closed deck that its customers are restricted to.
Supposedly the plan is to do something similar to Apple’s App Store for the iPhone. In the Apple store, Apple takes a 30% revenue cut from the sale of any non-free application, with the remaining 70% going to the developer. It is claimed that the T-Mobile system will work similarly, though the rev share percentages will vary based on the type of application and how heavily it relies on data. For example, an application that computes tips would not rely on the network at all and would result in T-Mobile taking a smaller share, but a streaming radio player would use the network a great deal and T-Mobile would want a bigger piece of the pie as a result.
People have been saying for some time that Android needs something like Apple’s App Store in order to thrive in the smartphone market. Hopefully this report about T-Mobile’s plans are true, and other carriers will feel compelled to do the same just as we saw all of the carriers offer unlimited voice plans one right after the other once Sprint pulled the trigger on its Simply Everything plan.
[via MobileBurn]
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Information week is reporting that analyst firm J. Gold Associates is saying that it expects Nokia’s newly open sourced S60 UI and Symbian OS and Google’s Android are going merge starting in the next “three to six months.”
J. Gold states that the merger makes sense because they are both open source and the move would make things easier on developers as well as prove that Nokia’s open source intentions are more than just a PR stunt. J. Gold said that all of this would mean an increase in the number of applications available to end users.
The firm seems to be ignoring the fact that the two platforms have virtually nothing in common in any regard other than the fact that they both run on ARM processor powered smartphones. Symbian, a traditionally difficult platform to develop for, predates Linux by many years and its development platform works in very dissimilar ways. Even Nokia’s own S60 3rd Edition platform is largely incompatible with the 2nd Edition, so I hardly see how a merger would create more available applications. At best, it would create fewer since new apps for the new would-be merged platform would have to be incompatible with at least one of the two existing platforms.
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