Hasta La Gadget!

Two prominent Android enthusiasts aren’t taking Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ tirade against the Android mobile operating system lying down.

Iain Dodsworth, the CEO of TweetDeck, and Andy Rubin, the brains leading the Android OS development, have both refuted Jobs’ claims about the effect of fragmentation on users and developers because of Android’s open source philosophy.

“Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t,” tweeted Dodsworth Monday evening after hearing Jobs say that “Twitter Deck” faced a major problem with fragmentation.

“A Twitter client, Twitter Deck recently launched their App for Android,” Job told analysts on the conference call. “They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets.”

Dodsworth is not the only one rebutting Jobs’ strange trash-talking of Android. Android creator Rubin took to twitter to post his first tweet, a coded message to Jobs:

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

Those are the commands needed to compile Android on a home Linux machin–a way for Rubin to emphasize that anyone can take Android and play with it.

Since it debut in 2008, Android has grown into a major operating system, gathering support from phone manufacturers and wireless carriers. Android is now the most popular operating system among people who bought a smartphone in the past six months, while Blackberry RIM and Apple iOS are in a statistical dead heat for second place among recent acquirers, according to August data from The Nielsen Company.

With its rapid growth, Android could eclipse Apple’s iOS and iPhone. It may be one reason why Jobs seemed to launch in to what seems like a long rant against Android.

“We think Android is very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day, and as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator,” told Jobs. (You can listen to the entire conference call here.)

But data shows Android fragmentation, caused by the different versions of the Android operating system on devices, is on the decline. The Android OS is coalescing around three major flavors: Android 1.5, aka Cupcake; Android 1.6, or Donut; and Android 2.1, nicknamed Eclair. As of June, almost half of all Android devices ran on Eclair.

Still Jobs tried to convince listeners of the superiority of iPhone’s walled garden, tight control approach over Android’s open philosophy.

We also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than 100 variants. They can put their time into innovative new features rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets, so we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed. And we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.

Developers such as Dodsworth disagree. Dodsworth tweeted his company has just two developers working on the Android app.

“That shows how small an issue fragmentation is,” he says.

See Also:

• Why Windows Phone 7 Will Make Android Look Chaotic
• Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Everything We Know So Far About Amazon’s Android App Store

On the tenth day of the tenth month in the tenth year (read: today) Ubuntu Linux has hit its 10.10 revision, though it’s mostly more of the same. The new Unity desktop interface makes cramped netbook screens more organized, software purchase support might legitimize Ubuntu as an app platform, Ubuntu One brings a free 2GB of Dropbox-like cloud storage to automatically synchronize files and folders, and streams music to Android and iPhone devices too… for a price. There’s also full multitouch support, if you’ve got the hardware. “There’s never been a better time to try Ubuntu,” the open-source community cries, and they’re probably right — early reviewers claim this Maverick Meerkat build is one of the best they’ve tried. Find the 700MB downloads at our source link, or in torrent trackers all around the world.

Read (1), (2) – Expert Reviews
Read – ExtremeTech

[Thanks, Bobby]

Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ officially released: get your cloud storage, paid apps and Unity UI now originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Oct 2010 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Webinos is a new project funded by the European Union that aims to create an open source platform that will “enable web
applications and services to be used and shared consistently and
securely over a broad spectrum of converged and connected devices,
including mobile, PC, home media (TV) and in-car units.“

The three-year, 14-million-euro project hopes to create a new open source, web-based platform that would allow the same apps on your smart phone to transition and translate to your car, to your PC, and to your TV, etc. Basically a universal OS. The motto: “A Single Service for Every Device.” The project has several industry players involved including Samsung, Sony
Ericsson, and BMW, along with several of Europe’s top research universities.

On the surface, a universal platform has several advantages. One being adding an added level of ease for consumers and developers who would not longer have to maneuver in an entirely new system with each new breed of gizmo.

The official webinos site makes the additional argument that a universal OS will help protect privacy by giving users and developers a single system to defend and codify. One major problem with that is that a universal platform would also give hackers and other nefarious players only one system to master. And the bad guys are almost always one step ahead of the good guys in the tech arms race.

As it stands now, if one platform becomes compromised, the whole internet won’t become infected. Imagine a room full of fishbowls. If someone drops poison in one of the fishbowl, the contaminant won’t spread to any other fishbowls. However, if there is one single gigantic pool and a virus is released, the entire system may become contaminated.

For an immediate example, we only need look to yesterday’s Twitter attack. The vulnerability stemmed from an update in Twitter’s new web display. But it only affected visitors to twitter.com. If you were to check your Twitter stream via a third party application, there was no problem. It’s the same way a single virus can infect thousands of PCs, but leave Apple computers unscathed. Or if hackers are able to infiltrate a vulnerability in one browser, you are able to switch programs to surf safely until a patch is developed. The heterogeneity of the web is what protects it.

It’s also hard to not conclude that the whole webinos project is a means
to develop a European-wide platform to compete with the Googles, Apples,
and Microsofts of the world–private American corporations that the EU
has no direct control over.

The web is a vibrant marketplace that has never been hindered by competition and disorganization. Rather it thrives in the chaos. There’s no real pressing need for one unified order. This seems to be another case of nationalism trumping the needs of the future web.

Care for a little more insight into Nokia’s smartphone development habits? In an email to our pal John Gruber, a former Nokia software engineer has laid out his perspective on why the Finnish phone maker seems to be struggling in that lucrative high-end smartphone market:

“Here’s the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field.”

He goes on to say that Nokia’s haughtiness extended to the point of turning an assessment of the iPhone’s relative strengths into a list of reasons why it wouldn’t succeed, which — considering that the doc was compiled at around the 3GS’ launch — seems like a distinctly foolish thing to do. The really interesting bit here, though, is where that leaves Nokia today. As far as its Design chief Marko Ahtisaari is concerned, the future’s MeeGo all the way, but that new platform was nowhere to be seen at Nokia World this year, and Gruber raises the question of whether Nokia shouldn’t perhaps switch to the already ubiquitous Android or soon-to-be-everywhere Windows Phone 7. Neither makes a ton of sense on the surface, as Nokia’s proud tradition doesn’t exactly mesh with dancing to Microsoft’s stringent spec tune or becoming yet another Android phone manufacturer. But in the current fast-moving market, a good smartphone software platform today might just be better than a great one tomorrow — more to the point, we probably wouldn’t be pondering this if Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was still in charge, but now that a software guy has finally taken the helm, maybe the winds of change might blow once more in Espoo?

Nokia software engineer says ‘hardware rules,’ software follows originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hello, obvious! Anyone who has actually used an Android-based tablet for any length of time would probably tell you that the experience is far from optimal. It works, sure, but it doesn’t take a CSC major to understand that Google’s existing builds of Android were crafted for smartphones and nothing more. Thankfully for those who are tired of arguing the point, Hugo Barra, director of products for mobile at Google, is stepping up to the plate and giving you some backing. Quoted over at Tech Radar, Hugo noted that “Android is an open platform, and we saw at IFA 2010 all sorts of devices running Android, so it’s already running on tablets; but the way Android Market works is it’s not going to be available on devices that don’t allow applications to run correctly.” He followed up by proclaiming that “Froyo is not optimized for use on tablets,” and while he wouldn’t go so far as to affirm that Gingerbread would be built for use on the aforementioned form factor, he did say that the company’s working “to ensure our users have [the] right experience.” How’s that strike you, Galaxy Tab?

Google: Android 2.2 ‘not designed’ for the tablet form factor originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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