You might think that Sony Ericsson, Samsung or maybe even an upstart like LG or Apple would be considered more direct competitors to the mobile behemoth that is Nokia, but the ever contrary Finnish company sees things differently, declaring Google as it’s main dueler.
It seems however that this is not a presumptive comment about the potential success of Android, but rather some mild chest beating about some of the inroads the company has been making on some of Google’s more established territory.
Specifically, mobile advertising is where Nokia believes it could step up to the plate as it has shipped over 35 million GPS-enabled mobile phones this year all capable of supporting location-based mobile advertising. Google is somewhat interested in this slice of the market as it already commands the lion’s share of online advertising and location-based mobile advertising is a particularly fertile economic pasture at the moment. It’s no surprise that Nokia is making an aggressive play in that area. Continue reading ‘Nokia going after Google…’
T-Mobile have announced that later this year they will start shipping their first handsets running Google’s open Android operating system.
Speaking at the Wireless Innovati0n 2008, T-Mobile USA VP Joe Sims said that they would be releasing a series of Android devices this yeat, but didn’t have any details about who would be manufacturing the handset.
The smart money is on the HTC Dream (pictured, in a probably fake concept version), widely rumoured to be the first retail Android device.
Developers are getting their teeth into Google’s new Android mobile platform, and the results promise to be a cut above most of the mobile applications we’ve seen before. Take Enkin as an example: it’s a GPS navigation application that blends live video, 3D graphics and sundry Web 2.0 services.
It’s been developed by Rafael Spring and Max Braun, two German students entering the Google Android Developer Challenge. The app has three modes: a topdown 2D map viewer, a Google Earth style 3D landscape, and a live video mode. Meanwhile, much of the UI for the application is based around rolling and tilting your mobile phone. Accelerometer-tastic!
So, it’s a work in progress for now, with no commercial launch date in mind. But judging by the demonstration video on the Enkin site, it deserves to be picked up by someone for a big commercial push once Android handsets are available.
(via Wireless Watch Japan)
Orkut? The small green fella who wished he could fly? Nonono. Orkut is Google’s own social network, which isn’t very big in most of the world, but is very big indeed in Brazil and India (which as anyone with a spot of geographical knowledge will tell you, means millions of users).
Anyway, it’s just gone mobile, at the logical address of m.orkut.com. Features include profiles, friend lists and updates, accepting and denying friend requests, and personal messaging. It doesn’t support the Communities forums - apparently one of the most popular features on Orkut - or videos though.
In the countries where Orkut is big - particularly India - going mobile is a big deal, since it opens the way to sign up people out in the countryside who don’t have regular access to a net-connected PC. However, Orkut will face competition from some of the mobile-only social networks who’ve also been targeting these ‘emerging’ markets.
Opera has announced an experimental port of its Opera Mini mobile browser to Google’s Android platform.
The Android version runs in an emulated Java ME session and still has a few small issues, although that’s perhaps understandable when you consider there is no actual Android hardware available to test it on.
This could be a great move for Opera. Symbian, the iPhone and Windows Mobile each have well established browsers with big user bases. While it would see natural to expect the open source Firefox browser to take pole position on Android, the mobile Firefox is dragging its feet a bit and the developers seem to be focusing on the Windows Mobile platform for their initial release.
Opera mini is a very capable Java browser - certainly its better than the default Symbian and WinMo efforts - the problem Opera have always had is in persuading users to leave their comfort zone and try somethng unfamiliar.
With Android offering virgin territory, could this be Opera’s big chance?
Do you remember a while back, we came across a video on the BBC where Google showed off a ‘reference design’ handset running Android? Course you do. Well, the plot is officially thickening as phonemag is reporting that HTC has just announced May 6th as the date for a special event that will be held in London with the tagline “Witness the next wave of HTC Innovation”.
Why is this relevant to Android? Only because HTC has already committed to getting an Android phone into retailers by mid 2008. Here’s where things get really interesting; HTC has already announced a handset called the HTC Dream which is widely rumored to have all sorts of iPhone baiting features such as a full touchscreen interface and onscreen keyboard. The prototype phone demoed for the BBC had just such a design and considering the time frame, it’s not such a dramatic leap of imagination to consider the possibility that what was demoed to the BBC was in fact an early version of the HTC Dream.
Are we right on the money with this, or are we just dreaming (sorry couldn’t resist). Either way, we will be covering the event on May 6th so stay tuned for more info.
Chances are, if you are already thinking of using some of Google’s services on your mobile, then you already have a fair idea of how they work. But that doesn’t mean that a refresher course (or indeed a crash course if you are new to all of this) isn’t a good idea and so Google has obliged with a new YouTube channel called GoogleMobileHelp.
The channel is aimed squarely at newcomers really and contains four videos (not counting the older Gmail test video) covering the basics of Google Maps and YouTube for mobile on S60 and UIQ 3 hardware. You can bookmark the channel by hitting up this link but if you just want to watch the videos, simply hit the jump.
Continue reading ‘GoogleMobileHelp channel launched on YouTube’
Obviously feeling a little overlooked in the aftermath of Apple’s high profile SDK release, Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google, has been doing his best to remind everyone about a little know mobile OS called Android.
Following a presentation on Thursday at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Miner stated that he expects Android to be more successful than the iPhone.
Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone
Miner went on to point out the significant restrictions of the iPhone SDK that will potentially limit the scope for iPhone applications.
There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment
This comes on the back of Apple’s boasts of having supplied 100,000 downloads of its SDK in just four days. Google’s Android SDK has been downloaded 750,000 times which is certainly not to be sniffed at either. Either way, with Windows Mobile and Symbian also thrown into the mix, 2008-09 might set the stage for an OS showdown that makes Apple’s battle with Microsoft back in the day look like a playground scuffle.
(Via Yahoo! News)
So far we have only seen a key driven interface for Google’s Android OS but yesterday, a video that appeared on the BBC website seemed to confirm that there is already a touchscreen version of the OS up and running.
The sleek looking unit pulling this trick is referred to in the video only as a ‘reference design that one of our partners built for us’ by Google’s director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin. Could this be the first ever video of a true Gphone?
Continue reading ‘Android touchscreen ‘reference design’ demoed on BBC’
Hmm. We can’t see this one lasting very long
At first glance, Google2Go seems like a Googlized version of Yahoo! Go - Yahoo’s Symbian and Windows Mobile portal app. And it kind of is. Kind of.
Google2Go is in no way an official Google product, and seems to have been knocked together by a fan of the big G who liked the idea of Yahoo! Go, but who prefers the mobile web to be a bit more, y’know, Googly.
The app is fairly well put together, allowing access to many Google services including Gmail, Reader, Google Docs, Picasa and Google Calender. It runs on Windows Mobile 6 ( there are reports of some WinMo 5 phones working too).
We can’t really imagine that Google will suffer this to live - maintaining the brand identity and all that - but it is a reasonable effort and is available as freeware (thank goodness - I hate to think what would happen to the guy if he tried charging for it).
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