Google "leveraging" with it's Services?

First a little update on the Global IT Club. We missed many of you guys at are last meeting on Wednesday. It's very rare for Professor Drake to give out extra credit and many of you guys missed out on the opportunity as well as an awesome speaker, EMU's new CIO Carl Powell. Dr. Powell was very entertaining and had a lot of advice from his years holding high level IT jobs. Well I know its a little late, but there is another opportunity for extra credit today, Friday March 26th at 2:30pm as we go to Menlo Innovations. Meet us on the 2nd floor of the COB.

Now for the main story. First off, I love the Android platform. Just the ability to be able to download almost any kind of app you can think of and its ease of use. I figured that has to be one of the reasons why every other day I hear of a new Android phone made by this or that phone maker and on this or that carrier. But now multiple sources are coming out with a new reason to why there seems to be an explosive rise of Android handsets.

Google has been enticing manufacturers with a cut of revenue from their other services such as Maps or Search. This is almost the complete opposite of how Apple is bringing the iPhone to AT&T. AT&T pays Apple $400 for every iPhone it sells. So in a way Apple is making money while Google is giving money away. But if you look at it another way, Google has the money to give and this could be a very good investment because people have many, many options of Android handsets to choose from.

Via ENGADGET

Sprint unveils its first 4G phone

Sprint announced the HTC Evo 4G today. I gotta say, I'm impressed. I'm particularly excited because, as everyone knows, I'm a fanboy of Android. And this lovely piece of equipment features Android OS 2.1. I'm stuck with the MyTouch 3g and the lowly 1.6 version of Android. I really wish that they would upgrade the operating system on units that are already owned by consumers.

So, back to the Evo, I'm drooling over this thing. It has a 4.3 inch display. One other thing that it has that my phone lacks is a a 3.5mm headset jack. I'm not sure why the hell they left that out when designing the MyTouch. Other features include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 1GB of internal memory, Assisted-GPS with Sprint Navigation, seven home screens, a personal organizer, a microSD card slot that accommodates cards up to 32GB, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, an HDMI out port. A 1GB processor on a cell phone is freaking insanely fast too, and the HDMI port? Watch videos from your cellphone on your big screen tv lately? Sounds awesome.

I believe that Sprint is going to be the first carrier to offer 4G, which will be this summer. I'm looking forward to it's release, because I think it'll be the most successful Android phone released, so it'll be interesting to see how it fares.

Android Hits 30,000 Apps

The Android app store has finally hit 30,000 applications, which is more than double what was available in December - but they still lag behind Apple rate of application development. The most important factor, however, is still up in the air - with thousands of applications similar to the iFart application within the Apple app store, the difference in the quality of the apps may differ greatly.

The Android platform's app store has a large focus on open source, free applications in comparison to the iPhone's for-profit business model. Many developers attempt to release free applications with reduced functionality within the Apple store, which could effectively double the amount of applications within the store. With that said, there are multiple applications that do the same functions within the store - i.e. there are many text editors or instant messaging programs.

Many developers are releasing Android marketplace versions of their games for free while simultaneously releasing paid versions within the iTunes app store. It is possible that the Android marketplace's limited number of users (in comparison to the iPhone's market share) may be one of the compelling reasons why applications are not being created at a rapid rate, as the potential profit may not be compelling enough to bring developers over to the platform.

Runningman: Gears, Ajax, and Comet

In the GoogleLab API, there are several awesome examples of apps you can build using Gears. For those of you that don't know what Google Gears is, heres a brief history. Google experimented with offline applications and came to a few conclusions. As they developed offline-enabled applications, they typically found the following design flaws:

• isolating the data layer
• deciding which features to implement offline (connection strategy)
• deciding on the app's modality
• implementing data synchronization

What an offline application can do is allow a user to interact with a web-service and to be productive while a connection is unavailable. Gears localizes several server features to give the user as rich of an experience as possible. Items that are localized on the client side include a data switch, server data layer, local data later, database, and a sync engine. While that may seem like a lot of stress to put on the client side, they have modules included that lighten the work load and only marginally decrease the speed of the application. When a connection is made with a server, Gears uses either Ajax or Comet to transfer data.

So back to these cool applications. The one I read into was called Runningman. Runningman is a program designed for the Android OS that allows a runner to time their run and through the use of the phones GPS, track their path on a Google Map. The group working on the mountian biking website might benefit from this example, since they are doing something very similar.

The Runningman application includes Gears and contains a full code sample that you can download and manipulate on your own. They even have a full tutorial telling you have to write the program. Way cool! As you walk through the tutorial, they show you how Gears lets you create a desktop shortcut, use Comet to update data, use the Gears Localsever to operate offline, and much more.

Coding for Mobile Browsers

Previously in class I blogged about some breakthroughs in the mobile market. Since then there has been a rush of more exciting news about new phone releases and more mobile barriers coming done. This will effect all of us either as developers or simply as users of mobile devices. One interesting problem still remaining is the vast diversity of mobile platforms out there. Operating systems such as Android, Apple's iPhone, Windows Mobile 6.0, and Palm are certainly the industry leaders when it comes to mobile OS's. But even among these main players, there is still a huge diversity in devices they are loaded on. Screen resolution, screen size, touch/non-touch screen, and hardware are just a few of the differences out there that can make mobile application development a headache for us.

One option is to provide services on the web whenever possible. In a similar way that desktop applications have moved to thin mobile clients, so too can mobile applications. As mobile browser standards evolve and a major player emerges as the 'go-to-mobile-browser', I think we can expect more robust web services on our mobile devices.

The W3C has a working "Mobile Web Best Practices" page to help get these standards established. While they are certainly far from simple instructions, I think this is a good solution to look to in the future. A simpler guide to web development can be found here: A Beginner's Guide to Mobile Web Development. What is important to keep in mind is that the devices with strong enough hardware capabilities are just now starting to be realized. As the iPhones, Palm Pre's, and Androids continue to advance, expect their web capabilities to significantly increase. Speaking of Android, check out the new Droid for Verizon!! A wicked fast processor, one of the thinnest QWERTY keyboards on the market, and a "Multimedia Docking Station" feature are just a few of the highlights. I'm personally looking forward to a bluetooth-navigation application that I can sync to my car :-)