Apple

The Android Market now offers the $200 'I Am Richer' application.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

An application that did nothing beyond showing a person was willing to spend gobs of money for it didn't last long on Apple's App Store, but now we'll begin to see if Google lives up to its more laissez-faire approach to its rival Android Market.

Apple banned Armin Heinrich's "I Am Rich", which cost $1,000 and only showed a red ruby, from its App Store last August. Now the conceptually similar "I Am Richer" has arrived on the Android Market from Mike DG.

Perhaps owners of T-Mobile's G1 phone are more cost-conscious, or the recession has hurt the market for inane software, or Android programmers are willing to offer greater value, though, because the new application offers basically the same feature set for only $200, a fifth the price of the app Apple banned.

"Prove your wealth to others by running this app and showing them the mesmerizing glowing crystal," the software's description says.

Google has some rules for Android Market--no malware is allowed, for example--but generally has a much more liberal attitude than Apple. While each application on the App Store requires Apple's approval, Google plans to let the world at large sort out Android applications through the mechanisms such as the rating system. Good applications will eventually sift their way to the top of the heap the way good YouTube videos do, Google argues.

Update 7:06 p.m. PST: The $200 price is as much as Google permits organizations to charge, the company said. And yes, Google appears perfectly happy to let people buy the application:

"We check applications for compliance with the Market Content Policies and Terms of Service (in order to remove malware, porn, spam, or profanity)," the company said in a statement.

(Via IDG News)

Safari's built-in search box now shows iPhone-optimized search results for Google.

(Credit: Google)

After revamping the iPhone's presentation of Google search results last month, the Internet giant has spread the change more broadly on the Apple device.

Previously, the new Google search results were available only when people typed Google.com into the phone's browser, then performed the search. Now the results also appear when using Safari's built-in search box, which, given that it's one fewer slow-loading page away from results, is how I use the service.

Google announced the change on its Google Mobile blog. The new results also appear on the T-Mobile G1, which uses Google's Android operating system. In addition to being better-suited to the devices' screen size, the mobile-formatted pages load more quickly, Google said.

iPhone customers can change their default search provider to Yahoo, if desired.

(Via Search Engine Watch.)

The objective of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android operating system may be similar--providing a rich mobile Internet experience--but the philosophy behind the two are just about as far apart as you can get in the technology realm.

That divide was illustrated Tuesday not just by Google's release of the open-source Android software but perhaps even more starkly by its gleeful horn-tooting that even before the day ended, five Android patches from outside programmers had been accepted.

"It's a small start, but knowing that we accepted our first patch from a contributor external to the Open Handset Alliance just 4.5 hours after unveiling the code reinforces to me why open-sourcing this is exactly the right thing to do," Jeff Bailey of Google's open-source team said in a blog post.

Open-source project members often pride themselves on the vitality of outside help--not just in the form of patches, but also detailed bug reports and feedback about developers' ever-changing cutting-edge releases. And with the broad base that contributes to Linux, there is no such thing as "outside" developers.

Apple has some open-source ties, to be sure. For example, the Safari browser used on both the Mac and iPhone are built atop the open-source Webkit project. Google chose the same technology for use in its Chrome browser for PCs and the one built into Android.

But mostly that's the exception that proves the rule. Apple's iPhone is about as locked down as possible.

The App Store, while thriving, is a walled garden compared with the user-ranked, self-governing free-for-all that Google aspires to build with its Android Market download site. Google launched its Android software developer kit before launching Android to encourage people to write applications for the phones, whereas Apple only released its SDK much later and, only recently, partly lifted a nondisclosure agreement that muzzled developers from so much as sharing programming tips. And perhaps most clearly, the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 built by HTC, comes with a USB debugging mode to let programmers peer into its inner workings.

We're about to see what full-blown competition for the future of the computing industry looks like when multiple players get a shot to make an impact.

The next great operating systems wars are about to be fought, as traditional computing companies collide with teams representing the mobile phone industry. Nokia's decision Tuesday to unify, then open-source, the Symbian operating system for smartphones clarifies how today's most-widely used handset operating system will evolve to match the open-source initiatives headed by Google and the LiMo Foundation and competition from companies like Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Apple.

Forget RIM and Apple for a moment, since those companies are taking a different tack than the rest of the industry by building the entire widget themselves: both hardware and software. The Symbian Foundation's goal is by 2010 to develop a royalty-free open-source operating system based on Symbian's existing software that phone makers will license to use on their phones.

Nokia's N95 smartphone, which runs Symbian's operating system and the S60 user interface.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Unless RIM and Apple change their strategy to start licensing their operating systems, Nokia and Symbian will be competing for the affections of phone makers and carriers with Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Google's Android, and Linux-based mobile operating systems from the likes of the LiMo Foundation and others.

"(Symbian) is transitioning from a profit making licensor of the leading mobile device operating system, to an open source provider of a mobile OS that anyone can use on a royalty free basis," wrote Jack Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates in a research note distributed Tuesday. "This is a direct challenge to Google's Android initiative, although somewhat belated."

The opportunity is clear: the smartphone market is growing by leaps and bounds as people start to realize what is possible with an Internet connection and a powerful operating system in the palm of their hand. But despite the fact that Symbian's operating system is used by 60 percent of the world's smartphones--most of which were sold by Nokia--upstarts like Apple and Google have pushed the established smartphone industry to evolve their software with the times.

As Om Malik puts it, and as I've written before, phone makers can't get by on flashy hardware anymore. "Indeed, the mobile industry's old guard is experiencing the business equivalent of heartburn as players like Apple prove that software platforms, and the innovation they foster, are the only way to withstand the whiplash-inducing forces of commoditization," Malik wrote Tuesday.

Prior to Tuesday's announcement, Nokia owned 47.9 percent of Symbian. That close relationship with Nokia--the world's largest handset vendor--ensured its software would appear on a large number of devices sold throughout the world. But application development for Symbian phones was somewhat confusing in that there were several different user interfaces in use, depending on the phone vendor. Nokia's phones used the S60 interface. Motorola's Symbian-based phones used the UIQ interface. Symbian phones that ran on NTT DoCoMo's network used the MOAP interface.

The Symbian Foundation will unify those user interfaces, which will likely make application development easier and more consistent across a wide range of phones. This is exactly what Google wants to do with Android: unify the mobile Linux community behind a consistent interface that's compatible across a wide variety of phones and available under an open-source license.

Nokia, Symbian, and their main partners--Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, and DoCoMo--have all agreed to contribute their user-interface technology under the open-source Eclipse license to any company that wishes to join the Symbian Foundation. Those components will start to become available in 2009, when the Symbian Foundation is formally established, and will be available as open-source projects up until the point when the first formal Symbian Foundation operating system is released in the first half of 2010, the companies said Tuesday.

The Symbian Foundation will also match Android and the LiMo Foundation in a key way: the operating system and its components will be available to phone makers royalty-free. One of the main attractions of mobile Linux was the low cost of getting a mobile Linux operating system up and running, as opposed to paying Symbian or Microsoft royalties or licensing fees for the software. This could cause major problems for Microsoft, who is expected to continue its pay-for-play mobile operating system business, Gold wrote in his report.

Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for mobile communications at Microsoft, said that putting together a modern mobile phone represents a significant investment of time and money even if you choose a royalty-free path, and that Windows Mobile demonstrates enough value in getting that system up and running quickly that certain phone makers will continue to pay for it.

Gold wasn't so sure. "It may be difficult for Microsoft to continue to justify its relatively high license fees for an OS that competes with a fully featured one that is offered for free. While I do not expect Windows Mobile to simply fade away, I do expect that ultimately Microsoft will have to be more competitive (i.e., free or close to free) if it wants to remain a major factor in the wider mobile device platform marketplace. It will have to make its revenues on applications and services instead," he wrote.

It's not immediately clear how the Symbian Foundation will affect the LiMo Foundation, which actually has phones out in the market using a Linux-based operating system developed by a consortium of industry players. Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, called Nokia's move a "strong endorsement of the philosophical underpinnings" of the LiMo Foundation, although the LiMo Foundation focuses more on the plumbing of the operating system rather than the user interface.

But is LiMo now caught between two giants, Nokia and Google? Motorola and DoCoMo were founding members of the LiMo Foundation, but have chosen to hedge their bets by participating in both the Symbian Foundation and the Open Handset Alliance.

Google's Android phone software, scheduled to arrive later this year.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Gillis recognizes that by the time the Symbian Foundation releases an operating system in 2010, some of today's current players may have fallen by the wayside. "The question is really what is the right number of platforms from the industry. Major players say there has to be rationalizations down to some number, but the right number is not bigger than four. ...It's much more efficient to have a small number," he said.

Right now, with Symbian, Microsoft, LiMo, Android, Apple, RIM, Palm, and other Linux consortia all fighting for a place at the table, somebody's going to have to lose. Malik thinks that LiMo, Symbian, and Apple have the best chance of "winning big," with Android and Microsoft fighting for that remaining spot at the table.

The next two years will be fascinating ones for the smartphone industry as processing power increases, software grows more sophisticated, and wireless networks become faster and more prevalent. This evolution of computing will not follow the PC industry's lead and coalesce around a dominant player anytime soon, and there's no better spur for innovation than competition.

The evolution of the mobile operating system is being defined by traditional players like Microsoft and Apple, the younger establishment represented by RIM, Nokia/Symbian, and the Linux consortia, and the 800-pound gorilla of the 21st century: Google. They are raising the bar with features and design while attempting to make sure developers have a chance to participate, and the results of this competition should delight the smartphone buyers of the next decade.

Google has chosen 50 finalists in the Android Developer Challenge, doling out $1.25 million in the process.

As part of a bid to heighten interest in Android, Google's forthcoming mobile operating system, the company has been running a contest for prospective Android developers to submit their ideas for the platform. A total of 1,788 entries were received from 70 countries.

Android is envisioned as a mobile phone operating system for mass-market phones, not necessarily smart phones like the iPhone or BlackBerry Bold. Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance hope to release phones running the software in the second half of this year, although lots of details still have to be worked out between Google and its partners.

Google said 4 companies chose to remain in stealth mode, and therefore aren't listed below. The finalists have until the end of June to submit their entries for the final round of judging, during which Google will award ten $100,000 prizes and ten $275,000 prizes. I pulled together as many Web sites as I could find for the winners; if I missed yours, please leave a comment below or send me an e-mail, and I'll be glad to include it.

• AndroidScan - Jeffrey Sharkey

• Beetaun - Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov

• BioWallet - Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez

• BreadCrumbz - Amos Yoffe

• CallACab - Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger

• City Slikkers - PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems

• Commandro - Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha

• Cooking Capsules - Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss

• Diggin - Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin

• Dyno - Virachat Boondharigaputra

• e-ventr - Michael Zitzelsberger

• Eco2go - Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam

• Em-Radar - Jack Kwok

• fingerprint - Robert Mickle

• FreeFamilyWatch - Navee Technologies LLC

• goCart - Rylan Barnes

• GolfPlay - Inizziativa Networks

• gWalk - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze

• HandWx - Weathertop Consulting LLC

• IMEasy - Yan Shi

• Jigsaw - Mikhail Ksenzov

• JOYity - Zelfi AG

• LifeAware - Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar

• Locale - Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan

• LReady Emergency Manager - Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen

• Marvin - Pontier Laurent

• Mobeedo - Sengaro GmbH

• Multiple Facets Instant Messenger - Virgil Dobjanschi

• MyCloset - Mamoru Tokashiki

• PedNav - RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.

• Phonebook 2.0 - Voxmobili

• PicSay - Eric Wijngaard

• PiggyBack - Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit

• Pocket Journey - Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz

• Rayfarla - Stephen Oldmeadow

• Safety Net - Michael DeJadon

• SocialMonster - Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng

• SplashPlay

• Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive - Niraj Swami

• SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry

• Talkplay - Sung Suh Park

• Teradesk - José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini

• The Weather Channel for Android - The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.

• TuneWiki - TuneWiki Inc.

• Wikitude-the Mobile Travel Guide - Philipp Breuss

• Writing Pad - ShapeWriter Inc

As a wise man once noted, the waiting is the hardest part.

It's been nearly six months since Google sent ripples through the mobile phone industry with the announcement of its plans to develop Android, a Linux-based operating system. But after an initial splash, Google has been pretty quiet. So much so, in fact, that several representatives of companies within Google's Open Handset Alliance professed frustration at the ambiguity of some important details at the CTIA 2008 conference this week in Las Vegas.

Much is still up in the air, just a few months before the first phones are expected to arrive. Google has yet to make crucial decisions about the code base that will accompany Android; such as, which applications are required to make it an Android phone? How will that base be maintained into the future? And how much freedom will Android developers and partners really have to tweak the software?

Google is aiming high with Android. "Android has two goals: First, to be an excellent mobile platform on its merits, and second, to be open and open source," wrote Dan Morill, a Google engineer, on the Android Internals discussion board last week. But in this new world of advanced mobile computing, those goals can conflict.

The details of how Google chooses to release Android will make a huge impact on how it is received by the world. And Rich Miner knows it. Miner is in charge of Google's wireless business and along with Andy Rubin co-founded the original Android. He is presiding over a huge development project within Google, as the company works to develop a brand-new mobile operating system using the Linux kernel, code contributed by OHA members and internally developed code.

Much of the reason for Google's low profile since the November Android announcement is that the company wants to make sure it has everything nailed down before moving forward, Miner said in an interview this week. To date, it has released a software development kit, and is encouraging Android development with cash prizes.

Which applications will be included with Android, Google's first mobile operating system?

(Credit: Open Handset Alliance)

As of now, Google and its OHA partners have agreed on a basic set of parameters for Android, such as the screen resolution to be used and how the software will support various keypad styles like the classic 12-button phone or the BlackBerry-like QWERTY keyboard.

Beyond that, things are still very much in flux, although Miner points out that protracted debate is necessary to make sure all members of the OHA are happy with the final implementation.

"We've all lived through Java and similar initiatives where we've witnessed fragmentation, and it's a major goal to make sure we don't repeat mistakes we all have scars from in the past," Miner said.

Indeed, the need to avoid "fragmentation" came up multiple times in a 30-minute discussion with Miner. Carriers, handset makers, and chip developers clearly want a Linux-based mobile operating system that's pleasing to the eye and allows developers to build applications that can run across different phones. However, Android isn't the first attempt at this idea; it's more like the fifth.

The reason that many others have fallen aside is because a common platform was taken in dozens of different, incompatible directions. Miner was reminded of Sun, who used to hope that Java would be a "write once, run anywhere" tool that lets any application written for Java run on any device. Instead, different companies chose to implement Java in different ways, defeating some of the purpose.

Google, smartly, wants to avoid that. But avoiding fragmentation requires rules and regulations that might not seem so open.

"Open" is relative
For example, what basic applications will handset makers be required to include to call it an Android phone? "(We'll do) what worked well in the early days of PC cloning, we'll all pick a subset of applications that are good challenging applications" as requirements for shipping an Android phone, Miner said. But, the final decisions have not been made on which applications will make the cut.

Different handset makers, carriers, and chipmakers have different ideas about how Android phones should look, feel, and work. Everyone wants something that's easy to implement, but that lets them develop their own identity. Few companies in this industry really wants to be another HP/Dell/Acer clone maker, beholden to Google for incremental advances in features, capabilities, and presentation.

That's part of the reason why Android's open-source plans have attracted attention. AT&T, previously an Android holdout, is now showing signs that it might be interested in Android because the carrier can tweak Android to favor its services, according to AT&T Wireless President Ralph de la Vega.

It's not clear exactly how AT&T might do that, but his comments raise some questions. If, say, a music player running on an Android AT&T phone can only access AT&T's cellular network, or an AT&T-only music service, that application might not work with a Sprint phone.

So, might Google then decide to include a standard media player with Android that prohibits that kind of exclusion? In a way, that's open, since it's preventing AT&T from using its position as the largest carrier in the U.S. from locking developers into its network. But in another way, it's not open, since Google would be placing limits on what its partners could do with Android.

There are other questions about the level of Google's participation in the open-source community. The company will release Android under the Apache 2.0 software license after the first phone is released to the public, Miner said.

Google will open-source just about all of Android's components under the Apache 2.0 license.

(Credit: Open Handset Alliance)

That means that Google-developed pieces, like its Dalvik virtual machine, will be free for use by any developer. But Google has also made changes to dozens of existing open-source projects.

And all of those changes might not be appropriate for those projects, creating "forks" that Google will have to maintain. In the same discussion thread, Jean-Baptiste Queru, another Google engineer, acknowledges that a lot of the pieces of Android might not be useful for the rest of the community.

"I fully expect some of our changes to be fundamentally specific to Android, and fully expect that we will decide that we prefer Android to have those changes while the code maintainers upstream would rather not have those changes in their code," Queru wrote. This isn't unusual, but it will be harder for Google to create a vibrant open-source community around Android if developers aren't interested in Google's code.

Google also seems to be leaving the exact details of its open-source strategy until later, which is a bit unusual. "Our plan is that once we reach version 1.0, we will turn our attention to the squishier issues of releasing source," Morill wrote.

It's getting close to crunch time for Google's Android. To borrow a sports analogy, they're in the third quarter; plenty of time left, but it's time to develop a sense of urgency and figure out a plan for the current situation.

Google wants Android to be an open-source project so that it can marshall the open-source community's ideas and let its partners put their own stamp on the software. But it must also prevent Android from turning into a "25 operating systems for 25 carriers" mess of incompatible fiefdoms that defeats the very purpose behind Android's creation.

Its trump card might be that Android, and the Open Handset Alliance, are not the U.N.

This is not a democratic process; Google is the final authority on anything discussed within the OHA, Miner said. "That's the difference between a standards body and an engineering team."

After all, it's Google first mobile operating system. You always remember your first one.

Q&A For a man staring down Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Symbian's Nigel Clifford doesn't have the deer-in-the-headlights look as much as you might expect.

Perhaps because, at the moment, those three juggernauts are staring up at Symbian. Clifford, CEO of the company since 2005, has a dominant share of the market for smartphone operating systems and a strong backer in Nokia, the world's largest handset maker.

Nigel Clifford
Symbian CEO

Still, Symbian is sitting on top of the market at a time when it appears destined for change. Apple's entry into the market has galvanized the American consumer, who is barely aware of Symbian's dominant presence in Europe and Asia. Google threatens to come at Symbian from underneath, hoping to unify mobile Linux and teasing carriers with the promise of mobile advertising revenue. Research In Motion shows signs it might be able to add consumers to its legion of CrackBerry addicts. And Microsoft is Microsoft; it hasn't replicated its PC success in mobile phones but it continues to steadily improve Windows Mobile and is sitting on a load of cash.

Just before CTIA 2008 kicks off, Symbian hosted the Smartphone Summit in Las Vegas to discuss many of these topics and the broader market at large. I sat down with Clifford for a few minutes during the show, and here's a sampling of what we discussed.

In your view, should smartphones be like computers?
I think it is a very different world. You've got the smartphone, a device which has no access to main power, constrained memory, constrained screen size, and so the necessity of doing things very elegantly is an imperative.

But aren't you making little computers?
If you think back to the origins of Symbian, it came out of Psion, and those palmtops, the Psion 5 and Psion 3, were fully featured mini-computers. They had Word effects, Excel, equivalent data sheets, touch-screen QWERTY keyboard. What they didn't have was telephony.

One of the things our CTO is very clear about is that the multitasking capability on a phone is the most elegant thing on the planet. Because it has to deal with all this stuff going on, and then a call coming in, an SMS coming in, in the future, a video call coming in, maybe a location-based ping coming in from the side.

Why do you think you've gained such traction in Europe and around the world, and what do you have to do to get traction inside the U.S.?
For sure, the work with the top five handsets, including Nokia, has been important in creating attractive handsets that operators like to put on display, and put out at an attractive price because they know they're going to get data services revenue out of that.

In the U.S., there's perhaps been a different avenue for operators in terms of revenue growth for the last five or six years which has been pure subscriber growth. So, the order of the day has been subscribers at the lowest possible acquisition cost, which means the cheapest possible phone.

What we're now seeing is the end of the subscriber land grab--the saturation--so I think in the U.S. we're seeing some of the patterns in the rest of the world coming to bear. Where all of a sudden it becomes: how do I attract people from other people's networks, and how do I attract people to use their handsets on these more lucrative data services, to offset any slowing of the subscriber acquisition.

How does your relationship with Nokia affect your dealings with other handset makers? (Nokia owns 47.9 percent of the company.)
It doesn't. I mean, I guess you'd regard it as a proof point, the fact we can assist Nokia in making compelling devices and making compelling profits is a good thing to be able to put in front of others. But in terms of the business relationship and the ownership relationship, it's kept very, very separate.

We have a supervisory board. Around our governance table, we have Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Ericsson, Siemens, Panasonic--they came together to create an agnostic independent operating system. And that composition has broadly held together for 10 years.

One of the secrets is that we have a really good shareholders' agreement and a really good chairman who makes sure there's no tipping of any decision based on who you are, whether you're big or little, important or not important, shipping or not shipping.

We've had this notion of the mobile Internet for a long time, but now we're hearing more and more about the full Internet, getting the real thing onto your phone. Given the constraints that you face with these phones, how will that play out over time?
In terms of the experience, it's not inferior. If I've got the choice of booting up a laptop and going to the Internet or using the Internet that's resident on my phone, I wouldn't have any qualms about just reaching for my phone.

The intriguing thing to just think about is that there's maybe 3 billion subscribers in the world at the moment, and there's maybe 3 billion who are yet to have the privilege of having a mobile connection.

When you think about the Internet, I can see a whole generation--and maybe half of humanity--experiencing the Internet first through a mobile device.

I think the prospects of everyone in the world having power, and having a PC delivered, and having broadband delivered just isn't going to happen. It's going to happen over these mobile devices.

What do you think about the iPhone? And what do you think of Apple's participation in this market?
I think it validates what we've just been talking about, which is no fixed Internet brand--hardware, software, applications--can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace. Because ultimately the PC is going to be capped in terms of its marketplace.

It's not surprising you're seeing these legacy Internet and hardware brands coming into this mobile world and bringing their smarts with them.

One of the things that Apple is bringing with it is the walled garden, the closed system. What is the role for application development on these devices?
We have a different view. This is about innovations, letting a thousand flowers bloom, letting people experiment, providing SDKs (software development kits) and easy to use APIs (application programming interfaces), and working with a variety of different languages. A vibrant developer network is very important to us and our licensees.

Do you have to make tradeoffs then, with reliability, security, a different experience across these devices?
I think that not so much trade-offs as just different architectural decisions. Things like platform security, we've implemented because that was part of the assurance that operators wanted to have that these mobile computers weren't going to be used in a way that could be detrimental to their overall network security.

We're saying that our checks and balances are as deep and as light as possible in the operating system. Whereas maybe other people are saying, "You're playing in our territory," what we're saying is, "Have as much territory as you like and we'll make sure you're not near the cliff edge"--rather than as soon you get through the front gate, you're in my turf.

On the flip side, you've got Google and what they're trying to do with Android.
The experience we've got of the developer world is there's a curiosity market, which is "we'll go and play and see how interesting it is." But then there's a hard-core, "we actually want to make money out of this."

The advantage we can offer is 200 million devices shipped, 77 million last year. There's a platform for you to go and play with, and it's with a savvy audience, a really lucrative audience who's going to come and pay you if you can provide them a great application.

What do you think of Intel's interest in this market, with its Atom and Moorestown projects?
Maybe something that has gotten lost in the history is that we've cooperated and had projects with Intel. When I arrived (in 2005) we were talking putting Symbian on x86 architecture.

It's increasingly relative; the only SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) that's around right now is devices like the PC. It's increasingly beneficial to see what that SMP is going to be like when we play there.

Intel are certainly people that we talk to, but that (a Moorestown discussion) hasn't happened.

A Google executive may have inadvertently tipped the wireless industry's hand on the launch time frame for Android phones.

Ever since introducing Android, a mobile-phone operating system, last November, Google has said that Android-loaded phones would be available in the second half of this year. However, on Monday, Richard Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel, put a finer grain on the launch expectations during a conference call about Google's plans for the "white spaces" spectrum, saying the phones could be out as soon as summer or fall of this year.

This Android prototype, show at Mobile World Congress in February, could be a shipping product by fall.

(Credit: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images)

After the call, Google representatives reiterated that the launch expectations for Android phones were unchanged at "second half of 2008," emphasizing that the exact launch schedule is up to Google's partners. However, Google is likely privy to that schedule, since they'd probably want to show up for the party or something, and just about all of summer--and all of fall--takes place during the second half of the year.

The debut of an Android phone in the summer or early fall could give Google and its partners a chance to test the market during the back-to-school or holiday shopping bonanzas in the second half of the calendar year. IDG News Service reported last week that HTC was developing an Android phone called "Dream," that would be out "near the end of this year."

The report also said that Samsung was racing with HTC to get an Android phone out the door, meaning perhaps other handset makers have accelerated their plans.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.

ARM plans to demonstrate prototype phones based on ARM processors and Google's Android operating system next week, possibly paving the way for the chip designer to join Google's Open Handset Alliance.

It won't be the first Android prototype to get a public airing, but this one will come on one of the biggest stages of the year for the mobile-phone industry. An ARM representative distributed invitations Wednesday to come see and play with the Android prototypes next week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

ARM's technology is found at the heart of almost every mobile phone on the planet. The company designs the processor cores that companies like Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Marvell manufacture into chips that run cell phones and smartphones. But ARM was a curious omission from the initial list of companies that agreed to join Google's Open Handset Alliance when it was announced in November along with the Android software.

Android is based on a Linux kernel that already supports ARM-based processors. Software development for the ARM world, however, can be tricky, which is why ARM has close relationships with all the other mobile-software vendors in the world. Different handset makers utilize ARM's cores in different ways, which makes it a challenge to create software that works consistently across phones from multiple vendors.

When it comes to Google, however, ARM has been taking a wait-and-see approach so far. In some ways, that makes sense as Android is not exactly a finished product. But the promise of Android is something that has to interest ARM: if Google can galvanize the Linux community around its product and deliver a compelling user experience for handset makers and carriers, that just might boost sales of mobile phones using ARM's chips.

And coming off a worse-than-expected fourth quarter, ARM's probably looking for some positive momentum. The ARM representative declined to comment on whether the scheduled demonstrations meant the company would be joining the Open Handset Alliance, but ARM is clearly stepping up its public support for Android before phones using the software arrive later this year.