Mobile phone maker Nokia announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire the 52 percent of mobile software specialist Symbian that it does not already own, in a cash deal valued at about 264 million euros, or $410 million.
Long a phone maker, Nokia has been dabbling in Web apps and services through its Ovi brand.
(Credit: Nokia)In addition, Nokia and a number of other electronics makers are forming the Symbian Foundation to drive the development of Web applications for use by consumers on cell phones. The foundation plans to provide a unified platform that has a common user interface framework and that will be available for all foundation members under a royalty-free license, Nokia said.
"Our vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet," Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, said in a statement.
That ambition is a resounding shot across the bow of both Apple, which earlier this month unveiled its iPhone 2.0 ecosystem, and Google, which has been working on its own Android platform for mobile applications.
Nokia has already taken steps toward its own ecosystem of Web applications and services through efforts such as its Ovi brand for gaming, social networking, and mapping.
The other backers of the nonprofit Symbian Foundation are AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone.
Nokia already owns 48 percent of Symbian, maker of a widely used operating system for mobile phones. It has now extended a cash offer for the Symbian shares not already in its hands at a price of $5.67 (3.647 euros) per share.
Most other stakeholders in Symbian--Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, and Siemens--have already accepted the offer, and Samsung Electronics is expected to accept it as well, Nokia said.
A look at Google's Android mobile operating system.
(Credit: Google)Last we heard, we'd be seeing phones powered by Google's Android open-source software in the second half of 2008. A report Monday from The Wall Street Journal has narrowed that down somewhat: Those handsets will start appearing in the fourth quarter of this year, a later time frame than expected.
And according to the Journal, some handset manufacturers are "struggling" to get Android on track even for a fourth-quarter launch. Sprint Nextel and China Mobile, the world's largest cell carrier, reportedly won't be able to put out Android-powered phones until next year. Other carriers, like T-Mobile, claim their Android phones are still on track.
Some developers of mobile applications, on the other hand, have been sidetracked by the announcement of the iPhone 3G, the second-generation version of Apple's ubiquitous handsets. With a lower price point, a developer kit already released, and a concrete launch date of July 11, not to mention faster Web access and a built-in GPS chip, the appeal of the new iPhone may have pushed Android to the back burner for some companies.
Update 3 p.m. PT: T-Mobile confirmed its Android phone is still on track, too.
Google denied a report Monday that phones using its Android software have been delayed to 2009.
The Street reported the delay, citing an unnamed source. But Google denied the report.
A view of Google's Android mobile-phone software, demonstrated at Google I/O.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)"We're still on track to announce Android-powered phones this year. Some of our partners are publicly stating that they plan to ship Android phones in the fourth quarter," Google said in a statement.
That's little surprise, given that Android leader Andy Rubin last week said phones using the soon-to-be-mostly-open-source software will be "available in the second half of this year" just last week at the Google I/O conference.
T-Mobile plans to ship an Android phone later in 2008, Chief Executive Hamid Akhavan said in February.
T-Mobile confirmed on Monday that its Android-based phone is still on track to arrive in the fourth quarter.
One source of possible Android confusion could be that although Google and various partners are collectively writing the Android software, Google isn't the only one supporting it.
Android software overseen by Google will appear in the first Android phones, but Android software overseen by partner Wind River Systems will appear in later models expected in the first quarter of 2009, said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Linux seller and Android partner Wind River.
"They (Google) did the first phone. They carefully handheld it all the way through," Bruggeman said. "We've got the rest."
Wind River supports Linux in embedded computing devices but will support the full Android software "stack," which extends to higher-level software as well.
"When Android is open-sourced, we will support the entire stack," Bruggeman said. "We've ramped up our infrastructure. We are resourced to be able to support Android and not just Linux--the messaging and telephony and e-mail and browsing."
Notice the Market icon...possibly a shortcut to the Application Store?
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)According to Android project leader, Andy Rubin, Google might offer an application store--similar to one for the iPhone--for its Android mobile operating system sometime in the near future.
The Register reports that Rubin is interested in a safe-and-secure venue where customers can purchase and download applications so that developers can get paid for their software. Of course, seeing as Android prides itself on being an open operating system, we're sure you'll still be able to get open-source applications for free from other venues, but having one centralized application store would definitely make Android devices more appealing. We certainly look forward to new applications that will be able to make full use of the touch-screen abilities of the Android OS.
SAN FRANCISCO--Google demonstrated some new tricks of its Android mobile phone software, including an elaborate use of Google Maps Street View and a touch-screen interface with abilities known for their presence on Apple's iPhone.
Steve Horowitz, Android's engineering director, used flicking gestures to sweep from the phone's home screen to another during a speech here Wednesday at the Google I/O conference. More unusual, though was a demonstration of how the phone's internal compass and accelerometer can enliven Street View.
After calling up a view of San Francisco using a Web browser, Horowitz turned around, and the Street View screen panned left or right accordingly, reflecting his orientation.
Also new were demonstrations of a central notification service that can display new e-mail, missed phone calls, and calendar appointments; the ability to unlock the phone using a specific connect-the-dots swipe across the screen; an option to put browser or contact list shortcuts on the Android desktop; and a version of Pac-Man from Namco.
Android consists of a Linux kernel with Java virtual machine technology on top for running software. Google supplies many applications, but it's trying to encourage developers to write their own. Google hopes Android will become an open system on which users can install whatever software they want, though it's not yet clear if phone service carriers will agree with that vision.
Although Android supported the touch screen, there was no support yet for multitouch, which permits two-finger controls such as pinching to shrink a photo. However, Android could accommodate that technology if handset makers use multitouch-capable screens, said Andy Rubin, the Android project leader, in a press meeting after the speech.
"When a hardware developer puts that hardware into the handset, I hope that hardware developer provides the driver," Rubin said.
A view of Google's Android mobile-phone software.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Android can use a touch screen, but doesn't need one, Rubin added. "Steve could have given that entire demo driven by a trackball," Rubin said.
Rubin wouldn't be pinned down about when Android phones will ship, only reiterating the commitment to meet a deadline of the second half of 2008. "What you saw onstage looks pretty good, but we want to make sure it's perfect," Rubin said.
In the demo, Android ran on a UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) phone from an unnamed manufacturer, Rubin said. It used a Qualcomm MDM 7201A processor, a Synaptics capacitive touch screen, and a 3.6 megabit-per-second HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) broadband connection.
Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.
As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.
Vic Gundotra, head of developer evangelism and open-source projects at Google
(Credit: Google)There's been a long-running tension among computing companies about where the brains of the computing operation reside. In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through "dumb terminals" that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these "clients" prospered. Now it's the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.
"We are going to make the cloud more accessible. And we're going to make the browser more capable," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software.
Clouds and clients and connections, oh my
Google isn't showing its Google I/O cards beforehand, but here's my translation of Gundotra's opening keynote themes--"Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud"--into some specific projects under way at Google. For client, think Google Gears for running Web applications even when offline. For cloud, think Google App Engine, a site to house Web applications. And for connectivity, think Android, the mobile phone software package.
The Android software itself is under development at Google, with help from a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance. To make that project successful--in particular its promise as an open foundation with a vibrant programming community--there needs to be software for Android, too.
Google has been trying to jump-start the Android developer program. It launched a developer contest that drew 1,788 submissions. I'm guessing Google will announce the winner from the top 50 finalists (and click here for a PDF of the top 50 Android apps in slideware form).
A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime
(Credit: Google)More newsworthy, though, is the likelihood of a second software development kit (SDK) for Android. "We are working on those things in the next day or so," Gundotra said of the SDK last week. "Android is a big portion of how we make pervasive connectivity useful."
Google vs. Microsoft
We in the media are doubtless too susceptible to narratives that pit one company against another, but in Google's case, there really is a big rivalry with Microsoft. The search giant is trying to make into reality the fear Microsoft had in the 1990s about Netscape, that the Web browser would supplant the operating system as the way people used their computers.
Gundotra has seen it from both sides. Before joining Google in 2007, he was general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, the culmination of a 15-year stint at the company.
But does Google want to dominate the Web platform the way Microsoft has with the operating system platform? Emphatically not, said Gundotra, who took pains to note that the I/O in Google I/O stands for "innovation in the open."
"Today, the most interesting and dominant platform is not the closed, proprietary platforms of the past, but the open Web...It's the platform adopted by all of us because it isn't controlled by any of us," Gundotra said. "Google's motivation is to move the Internet forward as fast as we can."
That's not to say Google isn't interested in bringing home the bacon. But its Web platform work has only an indirect connection to Google's revenue and profits.
Gundotra repeated what's become a familiar refrain to me as I've asked various Google executives about how their initiatives make money: "We have an economic reason to move (the Web) forward. As it gets richer, better apps, it gets more users. More users using more apps leads to more Google searches, and that leads to more revenue for us," he said.
Android is another target aimed at Microsoft. It will become freely available open-source software--or at least 8.6 million of its 11 million lines of code will be--with the specific intent of providing an alternative to Microsoft's mobile version of Windows. Wind River Systems wants to profit from it directly by helping phone companies build it into their products, but Google thus far has voiced no such ambition.
Lighting a fire under Web 2.0
App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.
But developers are likely to be disappointed in hearing about one area in which they're hungry for news: support for other programming languages besides Python in App Engine. Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl support are the top four requests in the App Engine issue tracker, and JavaScript, C#, and ColdFusion Markup Language are in the top 25.
"You can assume from that ranking what we're working on, but not what we'll announce next week," Gundotra said. And he wouldn't offer a specific time frame. "We're actively working on it. It's difficult for us to know until development gets further along."
The company is pleased with the progress so far. It's granted App Engine access to 60,000 developers so far, said Tom Stocky, director of product management for developer products.
Gundotra promises that App Engine isn't a lock-in strategy to lure application developers irreversibly to Google's part of the cloud.
"It is hosting the same open LAMP stack people are used to," he said, referring to the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server software, MySQL database software, and Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages to run Web applications themselves. "If you decide you don't want to use it, you could easily revert back to using your own data center."
Well, maybe not easily. App Engine ties into the Google-only BigTable service for housing data. But the company is working on an export ability for data, and there's an open-source implementation of BigTable, Stocky said.
Giving Gears
The company claims to be equally giving with Google Gears, an open-source project that Google released in beta version to enable richer Internet applications. Specifically, it lets browsers store data better in a local database, work offline, synchronize once they're online again, and run JavaScript more efficiently.
It's hard to find Google Gears used beyond Google Docs, Zoho's competing online office applications, and Google Reader. Gundotra is happy to declare the project a success in another way, though: its influence on version 5 of HTML. Indeed, a draft of the HTML 5 specification includes interfaces for handling database storage and offline work.
"You're right on the cusp of seeing a slew of apps come out that use the HTML 5 and Gears features that redefine what a Web app can do," Gundotra said. "We're working to drive that innovation, and also to drive that back into standards...We think we contributed to the evolution of the Web."
I think ReadWriteWeb is onto something: Josh Catone is suggesting that the mobile Web may be the key to beating Google for the next generation of the Web. Just as Google is upending Microsoft's desktop dominance by making the desktop operating system irrelevant, so, too, could Google's desktop-based advertising be made irrelevant by moving the Web experience to mobile devices:
...[T]he mobile web is likely going to be a significant part of our future, which is good news for advertisers because there's one other thing we've been learning about the mobile web: people using the web on mobile devices are much more likely to interact with advertising.
Google, of course, isn't lying down on mobile, but it has stuttered to start with Android, with Android not looking nearly as cool as most of what Google does. Google SMS and its other mobile offerings are very cool, but so far don't incorporate the secret Google advertising sauce in a big way.
As Volantis and others make the mobile Web easier to use, and as Apple makes the mobile Web less crimped, Google will need to keep pace to embrace the world's largest advertising opportunity: mobile phones. Fortunately, its design aesthetics (minimalist) fit well with screen real estate. But is Google's Achilles' heel mobile?
A T-Mobile executive said Wednesday that the carrier will offer a Google Android cell phone by the end of 2008.
At a wireless conference in Redwood City, Calif., Joe Sims, vice president and general manager of T-Mobile USA's Broadband and new Business Division, said that he has seen prototypes of an Android handset, and that the first in a series of devices will be available in the final quarter of this year.
Sims confirmed an earlier announcement by T-Mobile International CEO Hamid Akhavan at February's GSMA World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. During a news conference, Akhavan promised a fourth-quarter launch, but he did not specify which of the carrier's markets would get it first.
T-Mobile is the first U.S. carrier to set a launch date for an Android device. Though it is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance, as of December a T-Mobile representative would not confirm that the carrier would even offer an Android phone. Sprint and Verizon Wireless are also members of the alliance, but the two carriers have remained silent on when, or even if, they'll launch devices.
Sims did not drop any details on the promised device, though HTC is rumored to be developing a device called the Dream. Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and LG are members of the Open Handset Alliance as well.
Though U.S. carriers have long resisted open platforms like Android, T-Mobile's adoption of the platform is another sign of how carriers have begun to loosen the reins. According to CNNMoney.com, Sims said that though the carrier was at first skeptical, T-Mobile now views Android as a way to encourage innovation and customer choice.
Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.
As with the company's text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.
Google offers a variety of small display ad sizes.
(Credit: Google)Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers' data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.
Apple's iPhone has shown what's possible. Increasingly widespread Wi-Fi makes it possible to bypass mobile-phone network operators. And initiatives such as Intel's Mobile Internet Device and Google's Android could lead to a new generation of devices.
During last week's conference call to discuss quarterly financial results, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was bullish about the opportunity to bring advertising to the mobile Web.
"The mobile ads work very well," Brin said. "There's nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search."
Google's mobile image ads are similar to those appearing on ordinary Web sites, Google said, but are smaller and are limited to one per page. Advertisers will pay only when users click on an ad, as with the company's text ads that appear next to search ads. Google requires only one ad per page, and the ads must link to mobile-specific Web pages.
This pay-per-click model is popular among advertisers who want to match expenses to active expressions of interest in their ads, though "click fraud" can mean some of that activity is bogus.
Google works to identify fraudulent or accidental clicks and doesn't charge for what it deems to be invalid clicks.
While Google's mobile phone platform, Android, and its Open Handset Alliance have been on the brink of significantly changing the mobile landscape since mid-November 2007, little has come out of the young software developer kit with its still-developing community and code.
On Thursday, Opera Labs announced a technical preview release of the Norwegian company's popular Opera Mini mobile browser for the Android platform. Not only are developers encouraged to scoop up the just-released app, Opera is itching for programmers' feedback to help smooth over any rough edges for an upcoming beta release.
Opera's Chris Mills provides a technical back story in his introductory article, in addition to links to the latest build of Google's Android SDK and a direct download link to the Android-Mini preview. Mills is quick to note that Opera Mini for Android is a compound neophyte in the Android universe--the method of running Opera Mini's code base within Android is still experimental, and as Android itself is far from completion, layers of back-end change are inevitable.
