Hasta La Gadget!

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft and Apple have been trying to get into your living room for years, with a variety of television-oriented products.

Now Google thinks it can succeed where other computer companies have seen only middling success. The company announced a new set-top box platform here Thursday: Google TV will marry television and the web, so users can search and view both TV and web videos with a single click.

Google TV, which is based on Google’s Android operating system, will have access to Flickr, gaming sites such as Club Penguin, and music sites such as Pandora and Rhapsody. It will combine that with a streaming media interface similar to that offered by companies like Boxee and Roku.

“There are three big limitations with the streaming media devices that exist today,” said Rishi Chandra, senior product manager at Google, speaking at the company’s developer conference, Google I/O. “They try to dumb down the web for TV. They are all closed. Many of these devices have to choose between TV and the web.”

Google has formed partnerships with Sony, Logitech and Intel to create hardware that will run this “smart TV” Android platform.

The Google TV software will be available on TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes through Best Buy in fall this year. It will be independent of the cable service providers. All devices running the Google TV software will have Wi-Fi and ethernet connectivity, a keyboard and a “pointing device” or a mouse.

Google has also partnered with Dish Network to integrate Google TV into Dish’ digital video recorders (DVRs).

Google TV can also be controlled using an Android phone as a remote, says Chandra, and the mobile version of the Android market — Google’s marketplace for Android-compatible apps — will be accessible on Google TV.

“It’s a blockbuster announcement,” says Ken Dulaney, an analyst with research firm Gartner. “Google is bringing its brand and openness to a space where Apple and Microsoft haven’t done much with.”

Google also announced at the conference the release of the latest version of Android OS, Android 2.2, aka ‘FroYo’. It will support Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1, so the mobile operating system’s users can access all those Flash video and animation-heavy sites that are inaccessible to the users of other smartphones. FroYo will also have tethering and hotspot capabilities, enabling phones to share their broadband data connections with other devices, such as your laptop — assuming your carrier permits that use.

“We have big dreams for Android,” Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering of Google told attendees at the conference.

Three years after Google introduced Android as an open source mobile operating system, it has become one of the fastest-growing mobile platforms. A host of Android-based phones grabbed 28 percent of the smartphone market in the United States, trailing Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices (36 percent) and ahead of Apple’s iPhone OS (21 percent) in the first quarter of the year, according to research firm The NPD Group.

More than 60 devices run Android today, says Google, including handsets from major phone makers such as Motorola and HTC. Now, more than 100,000 Android phones are activated every day, says Google. And more than 50,000 applications are available on the Android Market now.

Interest in Google’s sold-out developer conference has been so high this year that tickets were auctioned on eBay and Craigslist.

Google’s move into TV platforms comes at a time when its rivals such as Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo have faltered. Apple’s Steve Jobs has famously declared its Apple TV as a “hobby,” while Yahoo’s Connected TV project that brings widgets and apps to TV sets hasn’t gathered steam.

Google could succeed because the company is making the Google TV platform open source and building a broad coalition of partners, similar to what it has done with Android, says Dulaney.

“Apple basically says I will do it all myself and it will be tightly controlled,” says Dulaney. “It provides one dimension in usability but also slows the pace of adoption. There’s also a huge marketplace outside of Apple that wants to participate and feels left out of anything Google does.”

Google TV though is likely to hurt Microsoft the most. Microsoft’s digital media player is shipped with every copy of Windows operating system, but it hasn’t been able to capture consumers’ attention, says Dulaney.

Also at the conference, Google stated that FroYo will have a just-in-time compiler to speed up apps, making them two to five times faster with the same hardware. It will also be Microsoft Exchange–friendly so it will have better security policies for business users and a better way to manage corporate devices running Android.

Android will also offer wireless internet-based downloading of music albums.

Google will also offer AdSense for mobile apps with different ad formats. These formats include expandable ads that will offer more details of the product, and a click-to-call feature next to the ad.

“If Google didn’t act, we face a draconian future. One man, one company, one device would control our future,” Gundotra told attendees at the conference, making a clear swipe at Apple — without mentioning Apple by name. “If you believe in openness and choice, welcome to Android.”

See Also:

• Android Comes of Age at Google Developer Conference
• DIYers Hack Windows Mobile Phones to Run Android
• Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says
• Android Fragmentation Declines, But Older Versions Still Rule
  
• Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’ Features USB, Wi-Fi Tethering

Photo: Google

Well, what have we here? A friendly tipster, who just so happens to be a registered Palm developer, has sent us the latest informational email from the recently-swallowed outfit, and while the tone here may be gentle, the implications are certainly serious. According to the memo, a new webOS update is “coming soon,” and developers are being alerted that they’ll need to be prepared to test their apps when it hits. Sometime early this month, devs will receive a specific launch date for the SDK release candidate, and while we’re told that the “scope of the changes in this [forthcoming] update is limited,” it’ll be particularly important for coders to “test PDK apps against this release candidate.” Seems like that promise of seeing PDK apps hitting the Catalog by mid-year is on track, acquisition be darned.

Continue reading webOS update coming soon, PDK apps likely to land

webOS update coming soon, PDK apps likely to land originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 00:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There couldn’t possibly be any less fanfare from Apple on this, but the company’s recently released Technical Note TN2267 for OS X 10.6.3 might just be the GPU-sized opening that Adobe and, consequently, Flash users have been waiting for. Here’s the key bit:

The Video Decode Acceleration framework is a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. It is intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames.

Now, we’re not exactly “advanced developers,” but it seems pretty clear that this is designed to give developers access to some inner workings of OS X that have previously been restricted to Apple itself — access that has been evident in Flash tests that show it performs much better in instances where it can access a computer’s GPU. No word from Adobe on this just yet, but we’ve got to guess they’ve already taken notice.

Apple Technical Note TN2267: an opening for GPU-accelerated Flash? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now, we’ve all been concerned about recent updates to the iPhone dev agreement — you haven’t been sleeping and your parents are, quite frankly, worried for your sanity. And it’s a heady subject: “what is the fate of PhoneGap in the wake of the iPhone OS 4 beta SDK?” Well, worry no more, little one — it seems that Jesse Macfadyen, a contributor to the project, pinged Apple to make sure that users of the mobile development platform wouldn’t find their apps rejected simply for using the tool. As you remember, the agreement states: “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine” (and of course HTML and CSS are cool), so PhoneGap — which indeed sticks to HTML, CSS and Javascript — is totally safe. Now developers can get back to having their apps rejected for any number of other silly reasons.

[Thanks, Bea]

PhoneGap framework fine for App Store development, sez Apple originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At its dev-focused MIX10 event kicking off today, Microsoft’s closing the loop on some of the Windows Phone 7 Series third-party development details it started sharing in the days leading up to GDC last week — and as you might expect, Silverlight and XNA are the stars of the show. XNA will naturally be the core, critical element of Redmond’s gaming story while Silverlight is serving as a catch-all for the “rich internet applications” that make up much of your other mobile activities for those rare moments when you’re not… you know, blowing up aliens or navigating a race course littered with your opponents’ destroyed vehicles. To that end, Microsoft is kicking things off on the right foot by offering a free package of developer tools to would-be WP7S coders that includes both Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and the Silverlight-focused Expression Blend for Windows Phone, pretty much everything you need to start building apps in preparation for the platform’s anticipated launch toward the latter part of the year. The beta dev tools are available today.

Developers are going to be treated to a host of must-have services out of the gate, including accelerometer support, location-based APIs using Microsoft’s own Location Service, a newly-announced Microsoft Notification Service for pushing notifications regardless of whether an app is running (sound familiar?), hardware-accelerated video with integrated DRM and support for Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming tech, multitouch, and camera / microphone access.

On a related note, Microsoft has shared some important details on the revised Windows Phone Marketplace (notice the subtle name change) for WP7S-based devices today. The revenue split remains unchanged — 70 percent goes to the publisher, 30 percent to Microsoft — but the developer portal for managing submissions has been “streamlined” and some of the incremental costs associated with it have been killed off; what’s more, students enrolled in the DreamSpark submission will have their registration fees waived altogether. The Marketplace has evolved from an app store to a content “destination,” housing apps, casual and premium Xbox Live games, music, and customized carrier stuff in one spot. We’ll be wandering MIX10 throughout the day, so stay tuned as we get more of the story.

Microsoft tells its Windows Phone 7 Series developer story, tools available today originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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