Archive for the ‘Android’ Category
iPhone users aren’t the only ones to get cool apps
September 10th, 2009 | 
Author: The long awaited flood of Google Android devices is about to hit the market, which should help bring more cool applications to new Android phones.
Motorola will be the next big manufacturer to announce its Android phone. The company plans to formally unveil it at an event on Thursday in San Francisco. Motorola has already been reaching out to developers to get them on board to create new applications that it hopes will drive demand for the new phones.
Mobile applications for smartphones are hot. The fact that Apple’s App Store has had more than one billion downloads after only being around for a year means that smartphone users are hungry for applications that make their phones more useful and fun. But developers, whether they are large or small, have limited resources and time, and they must choose which platforms to develop applications for first.
Full story :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10348863-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Google Android: Mobile open source has finally arrived
Open source, despite its community roots, often doesn’t become mainstream until corporations get involved. There are notable exceptions–Mozilla Firefox and the Apache Web server being just two–but often it is corporate self-interest that provides the mechanism to deliver the value of community-developed open source to a mainstream audience.
While the mobile market remains highly fragmented, therefore, I take it as a very encouraging sign that Google has thrown its considerable heft behind Android, its open-source mobile operating platform.
Sure, we’ve had mobile open-source companies for years. I was part of one of the first: Lineo, an embedded Linux vendor that distributed an optimized Linux distribution for PDAs like the Sharp Zaurus. More recently, Funambol has proved popular as a mobile application server, specializing in synchronization technology.
But just as Linux’s big moment on the server came with IBM’s $1 billion commitment to fund its development and marketing, so, too, will the mobile open-source market come into its own with Google Android.
Android has recently pulled ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, according to data from AdMob, hitting a global 5 percent market share (in terms of access to mobile ads, not units shipped), while continuing to grow 25 percent month over month.
While Microsoft dominates on the desktop, with even its not-yet-released Windows 7 beating Linux, according to W3C data, Linux, and increasingly Google’s Android flavor of Linux, is making a big push on smartphones.
To fuel this, Google has been upping its commitment to developers, most recently with an upgrade to its Android Market, but also pushing its handsets into an ever-widening array of handset manufacturers and wireless carriers, most recently Sprint.
I’ve suggested that the only way to beat Apple’s iPhone is with a big commitment of resources. Google appears to be doing this, but in an intelligent way: it is trying to attract a wide community of developers to share the burden of beating the iPhone.
InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister thinks it’s not working, but I’m more sanguine. So long as Google invests marketing and development resources to Android, the open-source operating platform has a good chance.
And, importantly, so long as Google remains committed to mobile, there’s a very good opportunity for other mobile open-source players to draft on its momentum. An entire open-source industry has grown up in the shadow of IBM’s original $1 billion commitment to Linux.
The same can happen in mobile, and this time it will be Google’s turn to lead.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10346387-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Android, Google, Open source | 
Tags: Android, Apache webserver, FireFox, Google, Linux, Open source, Windows Mobile | 
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Android apps show big potential for growth
Android, iPhone and iPod Touch users are all highly engaged with applications and frequently download them to their devices, according to a new survey from AdMob.
However, Android has a much smaller base of devices and thus has more upside ahead.
AdMob, a company that tracks mobile Web and application usage, found that Android and iPhone users download nine to 10 apps a month and iPod Touch users download 18 a month. More than half of the Android and iPhone users spend more than 30 minutes a day using apps, according to the survey results released Thursday (PDF).
That’s some serious engagement and a lot of runway for Android. Why? Android-powered devices–T-Mobile’s MyTouch is the headliner–are hard to come by. However, that’s changing as Motorola will be taking Android handsets to large carriers like Verizon Wireless in the fourth quarter.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10319403-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Android, cell phone, Communication, Google, iPod, Tech |
Tags: Android, apps, Google, iPod, iPod Touch, mobile web, Motorola, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless |
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