Device Development News and Views

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!

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 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.

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.