Google Phone

The deadline for phase one of Google’s Android Developer Challenge closed yesterday, and so the entrants are beginning to show off their wares. One of the more eye-catching is Enkin, an augmented reality app for Android which overlays GPS, motion information and other data over a live camera view of a user’s surroundings. As an idea it’s similar to designer Mac Funamizu’s encyclopedia frame concept, using real-time queries of online information to offer users pertinent information about their environment.

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The quest to get Android running on any hardware possible continues apace, with the gang over at the xda-developers forum working to fettle the OS for HTC hardware. They’ve managed it, too, albeit in a roundabout way; apparently the TyTN II is basically running Android as an emulation: an .EXE on top of the original Windows Mobile OS. That’s a new approach; previous hacks to get the software working - such as on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet we saw earlier in the week - took advantage of Android’s compatibility with things like OMAP chipsets, which are relatively common among mobile devices, to force the OS to install.

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Vincent attended the AT&T Media lunch where Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T discussed the company’s plans to collaborate with Google in producing handsets running the open-source Android OS. In discussing upcoming handsets, de la Vega revealed that, following demonstrations of Android prototypes and discussion with the Google team behind the platform, he was convinced to one day include cellphones based on it in AT&T’s range.

“What I’m saying is I like it a lot more than before … We’re now looking to see when it’s ready to be developed. Now I’m in the camp where I’m positive that it’s something I’d want in our portfolio” Ralph de la Vega today, president and CEO, AT&T

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Flying in the face of the current trend for making cellphones more and more complex, NTT DoCoMo are apparently planning to remove high-end functionality from its handset OS that will free manufacturers to develop simpler designs more suited to international sales. The functionality, which is believed to include i-mode, internet connection services and the FeliCa mobile payment system, has traditionally kept the Japanese cellphone industry at the forefront of development, but recent saturation of the market has seen several manufacturers (most recently Mitsubishi) withdraw to concentrate on overseas sales.

NTT DoCoMo also revealed that it expects to introduce Google’s Android as its new OS by 2010. The two companies previously agreed to load apps such as Google Maps for Mobile and Gmail onto the i-mode platform, with Android-based handsets a possibility still under discussion.

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If Google’s Rich Miner was a developer, he’d be coding for the iPhone; however, he’s actually Group Manager for Mobile Platforms, and as such is more interested in boosting Android’s profile with confident predictions that handsets based on the platform will wildly outsell Apple’s cellphone.

“Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. [Apple is] a single manufacturer, it’s targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide” Rich Miner, Google

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Core Security, who research exploits and loopholes in software releases, have identified eight different security issues in Google’s Android beta, including some that are blamed on the developer’s use of outdated and vulnerable open-source image libraries. The flaws could see a hacker take “complete control” of an Android-powered handset, including exploiting heap overflows and integer overflows, and Core Security demonstrated the issues with proof-of-concept code that worked successfully on the Android SDK emulator.

“Several vulnerabilities have been found in Android’s core libraries for processing graphic content in some of the most used image formats (PNG, GIF an BMP). While some of these vulnerabilities stem from the use of outdated and vulnerable open-source image processing libraries other were introduced by native Android code that use them or that implements new functionality” Core Security statement

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Having gone to Barcelona more than a little ambivalent about Android, Vincent ended up pretty impressed by the state of Google’s mobile OS (you can read all our coverage here); from what he saw, the software and hardware partners Google has managed to bring on board are doing a pretty good job of turning what could be just another Linux cellphone distro into something capable of threatening Symbian and Windows Mobile. It looks like the BBC’s Darren Waters feels much the same way after meeting with Android developer Andy Rubin (and shooting the video you can see after the cut); despite demonstrating an alpha version of the software stack, the handset Rubin brought was still capable of browsing the full internet, smoothly showing Google Maps and even the hitherto desktop-only Street View location-image app.

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Although nowhere near as polished as the offerings from Sony Ericsson, Samsung and the rest, a number of Android prototypes and reference designs are on show here at the Mobile World Congress, and I’ve been shooting exclusive video demos of them for PHONE Magazine. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and ARM all had displays, and in the three videos after the cut you can see exactly what they would - and wouldn’t! - show me. In Qualcomm’s case, the setup might have looked cobbled together and the processor is the last-gen 7201a, but the screen was an amazing WVGA touchscreen running at 800 x 480; that’s the same sort of display Sony Ericsson picked for their XPERIA X1.

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Google has released a new version of the Android SDK, m5-rc14, making significant GUI and API changes that, in many cases, have been prompted by developer feedback. Layout animations have now been included, making transitions within and between apps smoother, a greater number of audio codecs are supported (including Ogg Vorbis and MIDI) and there’s a geocoding process that streamlines location searches in the mapping software.

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On Monday we showed you the video of Texas Instruments’ non-touchscreen Android prototype at the Mobile World Congress; today we’ve got their touchscreen version demonstrated live on video. Two aspects of this demo stand out for me, firstly the hardware itself - TI have put together what they claim is a sub-$1,000 reference platform targeted predominantly at the open-source community - and secondly as this is a great, working example of the “building blocks” menu GUI we saw in the latest Android release.

Check out the TI touchscreen reference platform after the cut

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