

Google announces Open Handset Alliance - Techcrunch - Readmore
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/05/breaking-google-announces-android-and-open-handset-alliance/

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michaelneale
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.

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davidw
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.

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michaelneale
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".

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davidw
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.

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Readmore
"...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.

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

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

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

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

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

Android, I welcome thee with open arms.

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

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pistoriusp
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.

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

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pistoriusp
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?

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brl
I guess that's the end of OpenMoko.

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cstejerean
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.

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seiji
All the news is at
[http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/linux/openmoko/index.htm...](http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/linux/openmoko/index.html)

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rokhayakebe
I see 20000 new startups by next summer.

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

