Google announces Open Handset Alliance - Techcrunch | Hacker News Reader

Google announces Open Handset Alliance - Techcrunch

techcrunch.com

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Does anyone see a downside for this?

I mean, iphone/apple will continue on its merry way. Windows Mobile will continue to be frustrated (but MS won't ever let it die no matter how much money it costs). OpenMoko looks DOA now, all other proprietary ones will either fade, or just go back to being in the real low end 2 dollar plastic throwaways.

I don't really see a downside, this stuff was ripe for disruption. Kudos to google for putting serious resources into making this happen.

Looks good to me, the only "problem" is that not everyone will have this as fast as developers might like, so we'll have to keep working on old phone compatibility for the foreseeable future.

Well, things have sucked so bad so far, knowing they will suck less at some point is certainly a relief.

I swear the handset makers and telcos couldn't get laid in a whorehouse. It took apple to wade in and do it themselves to shake it up. Now google have gone "sod it, this is how you should do it - no go and make useful internet devices you children".

I am excited by the idea of what they're doing, and I think they're likely to do something very cool, but I'll wait to pronounce judgment until there are a lot of devices being released from different manufacturers, over the course of several years, and several upgrades in the underlying platform. Only then will we have a good idea of how things have been managed.

"...With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect." From (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html)

Isn't that what Dodgeball did? I find that quote interesting since Google already owns that company and didn't do anything with it.

Isn't that what Loopt sort of does?

The idea may have been to buy Dodgeball to prevent competition, and/or to get in on any collaborations or partnerships DB had.

Or maybe Google realized Dodgeball needs a better platform to become truly usable.

It's unfortunate that it died before the iPhone/SDK came out.

I'm pumped about this -- anyone developing mobile apps?

I've coded some J2ME applications. It's horrible.

Android, I welcome thee with open arms.

From the press release it looks like you're still going to be programming in Java, just hopefully not J2ME.

I don't mind Java so much. It's the incompatibilities between phones that's the killer. IMHO it's far worse than the browsers used to be.

Have you tried J2ME polish? It makes things a tiny bit easier.

Yeah I have, I remember the release candidates for version 2 were having some problems, so I just went to check and it's still on RC4 since March this year.

I actually remember reading that Gmail's mobile client is written with J2ME Polish, maybe Enough Software is working with Google?

I guess that's the end of OpenMoko.

I've been waiting for the first OpenMoko phone to come out for months. It was scheduled for October and I still don't see any updates.

All the news is at http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/linux/openmoko/index.htm...

I see 20000 new startups by next summer.

time to bootstrap that startup that makes startups.. oh, wait...

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