Google Phone

One platform, a predicted mass of devices built on it; that’s the future of Android as Google and the Open Handset Alliance would have us believe.  Yet Nikita Ivanov envisages another application, turning the collective deployment of handsets running the open-source platform into an interconnected grid capable of worldwide peer-to-peer processing.  Ivanov works as part of the GridGain project, developing a free, open-source Java-based grid computing technology that can offset CPU-heavy tasks between multiple workstations (or cellphones) operating concurrently, and they’re now looking at how they can leverage Android’s unified APIs to facilitate an ad-hoc swarm grid between handsets.

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Ironically, after preaching about anti-fragmentation agreements and partnership synergy - intended to ensure that no member of the OHA alters the Android platform to an extent where development becomes only partly compatible - it could be down to the Google-led system that Java suffers serious fractures.  Sun engineers are reportedly concerned that the specially modified form of Java that Android uses, as opposed to an off-the-shelf version that cellphones might normally adopt, could lead to a schism of developers creating software for one form of the language or another, spoiling the company’s “write once, run anywhere” selling-point.

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