Posted by Editor in android, applications, devices
This article by John Lombardo A developer’s perspective on Google’s Android is a good introduction to Googles open Android platform for future mobile devices. Android sounds like an interesting platform:
“Unlike many embedded operating environments, Android applications are all equal — that is, the applications that come with the phone are no different than those that any developer writes. In fact, using the IntentFilter API, any application can handle any event that the user or system can generate. This sounds a bit scary at first, but Android has a well thought-out security model based on Unix file system permissions that assure applications have only those abilities that cell phone owner gave them at install time.”
While you can’t get an Android phone yet, there is still lots to play with Google’s SDK kit and the phone emulator which runs on your pc.
Whether you can make a business out of building Android apps or as a consumer whether you’ll get a chance to use them, depends on how good and how well distributed the devices are once they finally reach the market. With the clout of Google behind the platform, Android could be good.
Posted by Editor in applications, google, iphone
Google made waves yesterday by announcing a new app for the iPhone bundling a whole bunch of google application goodness into a single iPhone application interface. With the google package you get search, gmail, rss reader and more. hmm, one more reason to import a grey market iPhone?
Why else is this interesting? Because this Google application is not really an application at all. It’s Web-app running on AJAX. [Ajax is the set scripting tools that make modern web applications run a lot more smoothly and dynamically than old-school web sites which used to have to refresh the whole page to change any information on the screen - most mobile WAP sites are still very much stuck in this world.] Traditionally, the trouble has been that AJAX is too complicated and computationally intensive to bundle with a mobile browser – but not any longer, with more powerful computer-in-diguise devices like the iPhone.
Through combinations of better browsers, mobile AJAX and Flash, we’re going to see a lot more mobile web that give Java apps (and even their desktop web equivalents) a run for their money in terms of interface quality. In theory, rich web-apps should make it a lot easier for developers to cost effective to roll out better mobile software without having to wrestle with the fragmented mess that is mobile java implementations.
One day, all phones out there will have web browsers at least as awesome.
For the moment though, this particular Google application only runs on one device… the Apple iPhone. Fragmentation problem, not so solved.
