The Palm Centro is now available as a GSM phone. Hopefully you'll be able to get an unlocked version from Palm at some point, Palm is the only US vendor that has sold unlocked GSM phones recently, so hopefully they'll offer an unlocked Centro in the near future. Its a great phone without a lot of hype or a huge price tag, and there's a huge library of legacy Palm apps available. This is the everyman's smart phone.
As widely sprayed on slashdot and elsewhere, new pre-production phone hardware running the Adroid platform was on display in Barcelona (pronounce with distinct lisp for linguistic correctness). No word on when we'll see the new hardware in the states, or when Android phones will be available for consumers, but we'll be waiting patiently.
So far we've only heard about the software side of the so called G-Phone, the actual hardware may not hit the streets until mid-2008, however Information Week has an article about what G-Phone hardware might be like. According to this we should expect to have things such as hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, GPS and video play back and record capabilities. Sounds very promising, but we'll have to wait a few months before the average consumer/developer has hardware in hand. Will the G-Phone change the world of wireless? we'll have to stay tuned.
As widely reported on Slashdot and else where, Google released the SDK for the Android platform. The platform runs on Linux 2.6 kernel, much like Palm Access. It has its own VM and byte code specifically for the platform. Also like Palm Access there are emulators, but no production hardware to run code on as of yet.
A bit more on the G-Phone at USA today . According to this article Java will be the development interface for the phone, whether J2SE, J2ME or some other variant is unclear. I'm betting extended J2ME API, similar to Blackberry/RIM, but we'll have wait to find out. The developer tools will be free also, should be very exciting. As far as when the G-Phone hits the street, maybe mid 2008?
As reported in PC World and elsewhere, Google will be announcing the details of its new mobile platform: Google Phone . Apparantly their will be an SDK, and developer support. Word on the street is a linux based phone, as far as an SDK what should we expect? Native C API's , Java, extended J2ME? or all of the above, we'll have to see. In other news the I-Phone SDK will be out in February, word on the street is some kind of OS-X like Cocoa Objective C API, probably not J2ME support but perhaps J2SE VM for the phone. By Feb we should see G-Phones and 3rd party apps in use, looks like Apple will be lagging a bit in terms of developer support. I'll be downloading the SDK and dev tools for the g-phone as soon as possible, stay tuned!
As some of you may already know, Palm has recently shown off its new next generation OS which will be based on Linux 2.6. I've already down loaded the SDK, so at some point in the future I'll give my thoughts on that. The new 'Palm Access' OS will still support classic Palm 68k asm applications as well as J2ME support built in. The linux ALP toolkit will also be supported to build truly native linux applications.See news at Palm Info Center
It seems that rumors of the death venerable Palm OS are greatly exaggerated! The original PDA OS has endured competition from Windows CE/PC/Mobile as well as Blackberry and even endured the perfect storm of hype, the I-Phone, to evolve into the OS for the lean and low cost Palm Centro For as low as $99. and a huge archive of Palm OS apps available, this is could be the everyman's I-Phone.
In this blog I'll post my thoughts and recent developments in portable devices, PDA's and phones, running 'Smart Phone' operating systems such as Palm, Windows Mobile,and Blackberry RIM. Also we'll discuss the controversial new I-Phone, the mythical G-Phone, J2ME, and other topics in the wireless world! Stay tuned.