Possible Google Android phone storms mobile Linux market
By Matt Jansen
A Google Android compatible phone would put the king of search in a strong position to take the mobile OS market by storm. Wistron, a Chinese design house timed it right by announcing its GW4 phone will run Android.
This development brings Google Android in line with competing consortiums like LiMo who already have hardware that supports their version of mobile Linux.
The GW4 “is a slab-style smart phone with a touch screen and QWERTY keyboard” according to PC Magazine. It will include support for GPRS (which is even slower than EDGE), Wi-Fi, VoIP, MSN/Yahoo/AIM, and MS Office and PDF readers. It also sports a 2-megapixel camer.
Couple features like that with Google’s sky high brand equity and the value proposition sharpens.
One potential down side? PC Magazine also mentions “the GW4 we saw had surprisingly low specs, but that’s a testament to the efficiency of Linux, Wistron execs said. The GW4 is based on a TI OMAP 1710 chipset with a 216-MHz processor and only 64 MB of program memory, yet the model we saw ran the Opera Web browser, played video and flipped between a range of Web widget applications like weather and stocks. The user interface was very responsive.”
Google Android is just another flavor of Linux, and its design reflects concepts popular with the open source community. Google provides the diagram below, which illustrates clear distinction between operating system and enabling components like community plugins.
To begin programming for Google Android, “you’ll need to have a development computer with the Eclipse IDE installed (see System and Software Requirements), and you’ll need to install the Android Eclipse Plugin (ADT).”
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January 8th, 2008
There are so many mistakes in this article. First of all, Android is not “just another flavor of Linux.” When people refer to flavors of Linux, there are normally talking about a desktop type of Linux, i.e. GNU/Linux, i.e. a Linux kernel with GNU utilities running on top of it. Android is not that, and if you would look at the little diagram in this article, you would see that. Instead of GNU/Linux, it might be accurate to call it Dalvik/Linux, since Dalvik is the virtual machine that does the majority of the work.
Second of all, you don’t need Eclipse to develop Android apps. If you download the Android SDK, there are utilities provided that will let you build apps without Eclipse. It’s not hard.
Finally, I seriously doubt that someone saw Android running Opera. Opera is a closed-source browser, so the Opera folks would have to modify it themselves to run on Android. Such a modification would be a lot of work. Android already comes with a browser that’s based on the Webkit rendering engine (the same that powers OS X’s Safari web browser).