YA @ Sadko Mobile

Cnet has a good article based on CTIA sppeches of Open Handset Alliance members citing danger of market fragmentation (i.e. every operator coding their own Android version)

Can carriers do it? Quite possibly! It is difficult to see doing business without locking user in 2-year contracts with locked handsets, especially if you are a US/EU carrier (in some countries like my native Russia, mobile operators only sell service, and all GSM handsets are sold free and unlocked, believe it or not).

Well, one man’s man is another’s lemonade. This can be quite a business - tweaking Android for carriers. Thus said, it is still better to avoid it: this really ruins platform adoption. The more apps, the happier is the end user about the platform.

See Apple with AppleStore - SDK mix. I bid $10K on Apple Store having 200+ programs at launch. 200+ games? Easy!

Apple SDK is out (will report on it when the Apple Developer website will stop crashing).

KPCB announced a $100M Apple app fund - that’s 10 times more than Google (actually 20 times, as we only in Phase I now, where the gross prize fund is $5M). Their minimal investment is $100K seed, max $15M expansion. Again, Google min 25, max 25+275=300

http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/ifund/faq.html

The true irony is that the fund is inaugurated by John Doerr, the Real Father of Google.

New SDK v.m5-rc14. Yes, Google timed it to MWC week. Apparently it is a last minute release, the Congress is almost over. Developers say there are some stability issues, and no change to much waited telephony stack. I hold my judgement till we deploy it and test thoroughly.

And screenshots from Zach Hobbs.

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!

Android got some critical press last week - in Business Week:

Still, the success of Android hinges on Google’s ability to get the platform in better working order. One developer who really needs help is Peter Wojtowicz. He and several collaborators are using Android to build a cell-phone game called Wi-Fi Army, where competing teams would hunt each other using Google Maps and location data from the Wi-Fi hotspots nearest the rival camp’s cell phones. Upon finding an enemy, a player uses the phone’s camera as a rifle scope to shoot.

But Wi-Fi Army faces a more significant hurdle than enemy bullets: Android doesn’t yet support Wi-Fi wireless technology. And the lack of support for Bluetooth means that Wojtowicz and his co-developers can’t get going on a feature that would enable team members to strategize their moves using wireless headsets. Writing the game application “is not easy,” Wojtowicz says. “But we are looking at it in the long run. Google has a lot of money to burn.”

and in San Jose Mercury News:

But Google has yet to deliver. “What have they been doing for three years?” said Sean Byrnes, chief executive of Flurry, a San Francisco start-up that offers free e-mail software that makes regular mobile phones more like smart-phones. … For the first time, developers are griping about Google the way they used to complain about Bill Gates & Co. The search giant’s phone software is buggy, they say, and lacks key features.

In fact, Android lacks more than that. Even photos in contacts are not supported yet. For CallFreq, for example, we had to create our own database of associated photos - but Android’s original dialer does not display photos while showing call progress interface.

The press criticism in my opinion is exaggerated. Too much, too soon. But the risk of slow Android development is still real.

We can provide Google with extended time credit on Android development - we are in this business ourselves, and we realize how hard it is. But we still have to deliver critical functions to our customers, and if the OS development lags behind, no one will be happy. Android is a huge investment for Google, and while Google can afford wasting it, it does not mean it should.

So, Google should keep steady progress if it really committed to become a mobile space leader. There are no “years” or “months” in mobile space, rather “weeks”.

A blog reader asks if we plan any more software releases. Yes, stay tuned.

An interesting guest post on GigaOm (that I disagree with) -

http://gigaom.com/2008/01/12/5-who-wont-appreciate-google-android/

- and an even more insightful remark in the comments from Alan Wilensky:

 Boy, did you swing and miss at the fat part of the potential Android adoption curve: Dedicated data devices for verticals and business applications.

While there are a number of mobile data platforms for business, this might be the first open source environment that is widely adopted. I believe that all of the other mobile linux environments are a bit here, a bit there.

Boy, he is right all along. Yes, where extra security is an issue and need for flexibility coupled with always-on-networking outweighs coolness and form factor, it will be a killer.

Looking through the blogosphere review of A La Mobile presentation of a Qtek 9090 running Android, it seems to me that there is a correction that has to be made to the original US News and World Report story. A La Mobile is not a software company, it is a hardware company. What they really did is got Android to run properly on a standard machine and interact with all principal hardware elements - GSM radio, sound card, camera and so on. This basically proves that Hardware Abstract Level (HAL) of the platform is operating properly and software written for it can be expected to operate fine.

Based on the only available screenshot (courtesy of openandroids.com), it is difficult to say what kind of applications they got to run - we can only see a iPhone-like launcher. They could have used a number of open source applications or write their own prototypes (a primitive media player, for example, takes less than an hour to write and is available as a tutorial; browser and maps are provided by Google with the platform) . Porting Android to hardware has already been done before.

What is important, though, it that we now have proof that all basic functions of Android work with standard issue hardware (or at least are claimed to be working). To which degree, A La Mobile deserves recognition.

Android Challenge opened, with a 24-hour delay. Some quick thoughts on the criteria.

d. QUALIFICATION: For the First Round of the Challenge, the Judges will consider each Entry under the following equally-weighted judging criteria:
(1) Originality of Concept - Does the application introduce a great new idea; for example, a new angle on social applications?
(2) Effective Use of the Android Platform - Does the application take advantage of Android’s unique and compelling features, such as built-in location-based services, accelerometer, and always-on networking?
(3) Polish and Appeal - Is the application easy to use and aesthetically appealing?
(4) Indispensability - Is the application compelling and essential, such as a game the user just can’t put down or a utility she can’t live without?

I dare say that Google team is not thinking about its own innovation in a very innovative way - seems they are very much under the influence of the experience of existing communicators and mobile OSes, in particular Windows Mobile and Apple iPhone. Why? See remarks below.

(more…)

So, here we go, ladies and gentlemen. I am starting the Sadko Mobile blog with news that it is January 2, 6-01 pm Pacific standard time, and Android Challenge is LATE. Android homepage states clearly “Android Developer Challenge I: We will accept submissions from January 2 through March 3, 2008… A submission form will be available on this page starting on January 2, 2008.” - and the submission page is nowhere to be found. In places like Europe and Asia it is already December 3. So we now have the first major failure on behalf of Google to deliver.

Google Android challenge Usenet group was abuzz about the page from the very morning - see this discussion, for example.

What is most interesting about the Challenge is not the opportunity to submit ASAP itself - although many developers, including myself, already got submission-ready applications and stand ready to go - but rather, what the submission package will look like and what will be the terms of the contest.

I am looking forward primarily to legal stuff that can be either very favorable to the developer or get us sign away all our precious IP - depends on how the contest terms are phrased. A lot of us in the Android community bet heavy on the new platform and might be very willing - or very reluctant - to play the Challenge, depending on what’s in it for us (except for a check, which is relatively modest for Phase 1, compared to expected business benefits).

One more Challenge homepage refresh… no form. “Publish”.

PS. It turns out the problem is not legal but with the software.

Hello, Developers!

As you probably know, the Android Developer Challenge submission period for the first round is scheduled to run from today, 2 January, through 3 March.

Unfortunately final testing revealed some cross-browser bugs in the application we’ll be using to allow you submit your work. We’re fixing those now, and will have the site up and running as soon as we possibly can. At the same time that the submission application becomes available, we’ll also make the final Terms and Conditions of the competition available.

We apologize for the delay, and thank you for your patience!

- Dan

http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge/browse_thread/thread/5fbad987d2b67145