YA @ Sadko Mobile

Great Android @ World Mobile Congress coverage at InfoWorld that counted new Andrpid devices:

Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year. The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.

Of these, TI looks the best but is only an emulator, others seem to be genuine deployments but are circuit board devices only. No plastic bodies yet.

The Forbes challenged that Android is likely to have an impact, pointing to LiMo instead, but InfoWorld found support for the opposite:

NEC staff expressed surprise at the level of interest in Android, saying they expected more attention for the completed phones based on the Medity2 at the next table. Manufactured for NTT DoCoMo, those phones contained the version of Linux promoted by the LiMo Foundation.

For me as software developer LiMo is pretty useless: LiMo SDK is only promised for 2H 2008, and to get your hands on the code, you need to pay EUR 40 000 in membership fees… to hell with LiMo for this kind of money!

TheStreet.com found that Android speed is also good, very good! Which is even more important news if true:

From what I saw at today’s short demonstration, it’s very possible that Android phones could give Apple’s (AAPL - Cramer’s Take - Stockpickr) iPhone a run for its money. I was amazed at how well — and how quickly — Android worked on a phone with a simple processor. I can just imagine what it will be able to do on handsets with even more capable, faster, better and smarter processors.

And some good market intelligence:

Developing software for a new phone typically takes 14 to 18 months, said Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager at TI. “Android cuts that dramatically. It’s a disruptor,” he said. Google is shaking the market in other ways, Iyer said. “Android is a single stack. You don’t have to go looking for third-party solutions. Suddenly, they have defragmented the whole Linux ecosystem into one building block,” he said.

“Only Linux offers the combination of modular extensibility, robustness and low overhead that is needed to meet the consumer demands of more functionality on cheaper and smaller mobile handsets,” added Kattilakoski.

Richard Wong of Accel Partners makes a relatively conservative prediction: “It will probably be at least one more MWC before we start to see Android phones in substantive volume. In my view, given the long cycles required to get new phones to market, the growth of Nokia N-Series, Symbian, and Windows Mobile phones will have greater impact than Android in the next 1-2 years.” My estimate would be that in 1 year WMC will be full of Android phones ready to go to market but scheduled for shipment in 2Q and 3Q 2009. In 2 years Android phones either have to be in the hands of at least 3-5% mobile users worldwide or the platform will perish in process. The cycle should be about like this in normal circumstances. I for one do not anticipate any revenue from mobile software for Android any sooner than in 2010.

Motorola and NTT released a number of LiMo models. Both are members of Open Handset Alliance. Diversification - Moto and NTT hedge their open source bets.

On the same day, Microsoft bought Danger. Danger is more an online sync service than a device, and I guess the device stands a good chance to be trashed or die in a corner - it is not WinMobile. I guess, MS just gave online emails, contacts and calendar of Google a nod of approval. However, backup often!

Tags: android, market, mobile

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 12:19 am and is filed under Android news, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.