Android

Lenovo ThinkPad tablet ready for pre-order

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

 

Το θέλω, το θέλω τρελλά! Το χρώμα του πάει με το T420s μου… Θα βγει και με Windows 8 άραγε;  Lenovo ThinkPad Honeycomb tablet ready for pre-order | ZDNet.

Τα highlights πολύ γρήγορα: 10.1″ 1,280×800 Gorilla Glass, 1GB RAM, NVIDIA Tegra 2, Dual camera, SD card slot, 8-hour battery life, Mini HDMI, USB 2.0 host with micro-USB slot, built-in encryption and security (including SD card), anti-theft and remote disable, 2GB cloud storage, Optional digitizer pen. Αν έχετε δουλέψει σε ipad2 landscape φωτογραφία, πρέπει να δείτε που έχει την κάμερα… Οι άνθρωποι ξέρουν από πραγματικό design. To lifestyle το αφήνουμε σ’αυτούς που το χρειάζονται. Μπράβο David!

 

 

 

Windows Phone 7 is the most stable mobile phone OS

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Το ξέραμε αλλά άντε να μας πιστέψουν οι υπόλοιποι. Το κλασικό “ότι είναι microsoft σκάει” έχει πια κουράσει. Μέχρι και τα λιοντάρια δάγκωσαν τους χρήστες τους… Το ZDNet και ο Matthew Miller μας εξηγούν τι είδαν: Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 is the most stable mobile phone OS. Το Android πιάνει πάτο σε stability (λογικό – το έχουμε ξαναδει το έργο) ενώ το iOS απλά δεν σου λέει πότε σκάει – έξυπνο (εεε, τη μπαταρία πως τη βγάζω για reset;). Μέχρι και το απίστευτα σταθερό symbian των προηγούμενων χρόνων έχει πλέον κολλήματα. Ενώ για τα διάφορα WP7 που χρησιμοποιεί, τα πράγματα είναι απλά:

Zero! That is how many times I have seen a reset on ANY Windows Phone 7 device that I have been using in over a year. During that time I have used at least six WP7 devices on all four wireless carriers. This includes running the early tech preview on the first WP7 device all the way through the latest RTM version of Mango I have on my HTC HD7.

Πάει και η Motorola…

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Άκουγα σήμερα το πρωί τις καμπάνες και νόμιζα ότι ήταν για τη σημερινή γιορτή αλλά φαίνεται ότι βάραγαν για άλλον: ανακοινώθηκε σήμερα η εξαγορά της Motorola Mobility από τη Google! Μόνο 12,5 δισεκατομυριάκια δολλάρια με ένα premium 63% στο τελευταίο κλείσιμο. Πάνω που λέγαμε ότι η συνεργασία της Microsoft με τη Nokia και η εξαγορά της Skype ήταν ότι πιο ηχηρό είχε σκάσει στην αγορά. Ο CEO της Motorola προχτές έλεγε ότι δεν χάθηκε ο κόσμος αν η Motorola πάρει πίσω αυτά που έλεγε για τα λειτουργικά της Microsoft και ξανασυνεργαστεί μαζί της. Μάλλον ανέβαζε το τίμημα…

Περιμένουμε νέο iOS (το 5o) και συσκευές με Mango αυτό το φθινόπωρο. Περιμένουμε και πολλά tablets. Αλλά σίγουρα δεν θα δούμε Motorola με Windows Phone 7.1, 7.5 ή όπως αλλιώς θα λέγεται τελικά το Mango.

Τι άλλο θα προκύψει από τις ζυμώσεις αυτές; Η Google επέλεξε να αντιπαρατεθεί απέυθείας στην Apple αλλά δημιουργεί πρόβλημα στις σχέσεις της με τους υπόλοιπους κατασκευαστές. Ίσως να πήγε μόνο για το patent portfolio της Motorola Mobility. H HTC, η Samsung και η LG θα επενδύσουν κι άλλο στο Android ή θα προτιμήσουν άλλες λύσεις από εταιρείες που δεν έχουν άμεση εμπλοκή με hardware; Όλοι τρέχουν να τοποθετηθούν καλύτερα στα χαρακώματά τους. Και κάποιοι έχουν βραδυφλεγείς βόμβες από διάφορες πατέντες πάνω τους που κανείς δεν ξέρει πότε και που θα σκάσουν. Οι δικηγόροι κάνουν χρυσές δουλειές…

Mobility: More patents than in pharmaceuticals?

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Ericsson, RIM and EMC grabbed 6,000 (yes six thousand) patents on wireless technology from Nortel for $4.5 billion! Google was planning to spend just $900 million to get them. The enemy of my enemy… you got it. A blog post has a lot of details on this acquisition:

Some consortium members get patents, some get royalties, and some just get freedom from having to pay royalties.

At the end of the day this deal isn’t about royalties. It is about trying to kill Android.

At the same time Microsoft is getting $5 for each Android device from HTC, Wistron, General Dynamics and is heading for Samsung, Motorola and others. The patent strategy proves to be worthy, too.

A very good reading on smartphone strategy written by one of the best analysts in the industry: One cuckoo, two turkeys and three horses; how the mobile race has changed | VisionMobile :: blog. This article is five months old but I remembered it while reading about the fight over Nortel’s patents.

There will be an increase in the use of patents to fight the cuckoo club and the almighty Apple.

And he continues:

Microsoft + Nokia: running with four legs

In the past few months Nokia realised that in order to halt its slide towards irrelevance, it had to take its head out of the sand and instead take a leap of faith. The brave gamble that Nokia has now chosen is perhaps not the ideal one, but it was the only strategy available for long-term survival and is a bold rejection of the short-termism demanded by short-sighted investors in accepting the call of the cuckoo. In tying Nokia and Microsoft together they have created a rather old-fashioned type of partnership but it will be a partnership of bones not a collection of feathers.

We’ll see…

Do you want Android on your PC? Or Mac?

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

If you are a developer on a tight budget and need access to various Android environments, there is now a solution. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project team you can have your own Android PC or even better a virtualized environment (or two, or more) to test your apps.    You can install Android-x86 next to a Windows installation on an NTFS filesystem but I prefer and recommend to run it alone on a PC or under VirtualBox. I also liked the fact that my multitool Thinkpad X61t is supported (it also runs MacOSX!).

The current version is based on Android 2.2.2 (Froyo branch). Kernel is updated to 2.6.38. For more information, have a look here: Android-x86 – Porting Android to x86.

Mono project: Take #2

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

It’s just a few days after I wrote about the Mono project and seems that my timing was not very good. The whole team was “disassembled” in the beginning of May due to the takeover of Novell by Attachmate. Mono is the implementation of  the .NET platform for Linux.

Fortunately Miguel de Izaca, the developer in charge of the project, took everything under a new startup called Xamarin and they have already started coding again. They promise us a commercial .NET solution for iOS and Android (probably MonoTouch under a new brand name), full support of the open source Mono and Moonlight (the Silverlight implementation) projects and a possible implementation of Moonlight for mobile devices and the Mac appstore. All Novell’s proprietary code will be rewritten. Waiting eagerly…

More here: Mono lives … in new startup Xamarin | ZDNet and at Miguel’s blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/May-16.html.

Linux? What Linux?

Posted on by Andreas Tsouchlaris

You may have not noticed it but nobody is talking about Linux any more (which by the way is not a good thing, because I do not consider a closed and controlled system like MacOSX a competitor of Windows – Linux could offer much more).

The last time that I heard “normal” people talking about Linux was when netbooks where everybody’s aspiration. Netbooks with Linux – because soon they realised that netbooks with Windows could run their favourite (or mandatory) applications. That was more than two years ago in late 2008. The Linux netbook era lasted for about a year and a half…

Now we (almost) all wait for the latest “tablet” with Android. Some wait for a Windows tablet but we need some time to have something decent and remarkable. Android is based on Linux but who knows that? The name of the OS is Android and the company is Google. Who even knows that Google bought the company that developed Android and its star developer Andy Rubin (who by the way had previously founded Danger, the company that cost Microsoft about a billion dollars) back in 2005? There is nothing there for a consumer to know and devs seems to have a very short memory nowadays.

No wonder why Novell has turned the efforts of its Mono project team from Linux to Android. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight for the Linux platform (actually, Mono is the implementation of .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime). Now, it’s the immplementation for the Android platform which makes even more sense. Novell also unveiled MonoDroid, a developer tool for .Net development for Android. Do the older guys remember the fights between Novell and Microsoft? These times have passed and unholy alliances have emerged.

Read the whole article here: Novell’s Moonlight shines on Google Android | Application Development – InfoWorld.