Open Handset Alliance, Google and Palm

So we received the news a week or so ago that the GPhone is in fact a platform for open development of mobile devices and applications. Today we received the development tools and I must admit these are impressive. What Nokia has failed so successfully at doing for so many years Google and the delivered. Now to their credit Microsoft's IDE is impressive also and has been around for quite sometime but this new open platform is exciting.

Firstly to the ease of installation and configuration - brilliant, nothing else needs to be said. Moving on to the documentation and samples, it took me less than 10 minutes to get a basic rich application up and running - brilliant and finally to the emulator and flexibility in configuration - well done.

This platform is exciting, with that said I am suspect about so many components including just bringing another mobile environment to the table but as a platform goes what we have seen of Google and the broader Open Handset Alliances' (OHA) efforts to date indicate that Microsoft and definitely Nokia have a fight on their hands (atleast from an IDE point of view).

Oh Nokia, how you have provided such brilliant devices over the years but how you have truly failed at delivering a simple, easy to configure and used IDE. You should be nervous and very ashamed!

LCD with embedded optical scanner

This is piece is a little off the path of intelligent content however in many ways compliments what I blog about here. It seems that Sharp has announced that it is about to release in September this year a LCD which has a built in optical scanner.

What this means is that on top of complete removal the the exiting touch screen component from today's mobile devices, we will also be able to use the scanner to scan images, fingerprints, business cards and the like. I also suspect that the impressive multi touch functionality of the IPhone (actual created by an external researcher) will be possible with this new screen.

The piece mentioned above goes into a little more detail and is worth a read if so technically minded.

Patent submission

Finally after about eight months of part time work we have submitted our patent. I will go into more detail at a later stage but the one will end up becoming two and covers our work in multi-sensory enabled content and variable charging for media.

Vlad's and I are very happy to have hit this milestone!

It's not just about the Map

A variance of Lance Armstrong's book title 'It's not about the bike' has been ringing in my ears for several weeks now since Nokia launched their new advertising campaign for the N-Series. The campaign (atleast in Australia) is using a new catch phrase which I believe is something like 'Maps, Pictures, Video and Music' or something to that effect.

Now as you will be aware I am a big fan of Nokia due to their quiet but continual innovation around sensory addons for their devices (see previous blogs). This has not changed since Nokia's aggressive push into the navigation market with the 6110, E90, N95 and other devices. The concern I have though is that 'It's not about the map' or better still 'It's not JUST about the map'.

I can understand that we need to slowly and easily introduce these concepts to the masses but for those of us who are actively creating, developing and supporting these new technologies we need to look further outside the traditional uses.

GPS is not only about navigation, it is not only about location based advertising, for me GPS (and other sensory devices) are about enriching content of all kinds. Yes we will be able to navigation between A & B and push advertisements to those who want it (opt in) but we need to start talking about the additional opportunities, the travel content, fitness commentary and even general publishing content which can harness and be enhanced by this new and exciting addition which we will all be utilising within 18 months.

Traveler based GPS enabled rings

The BBC is running an interesting article on a British Royal College of Art student Gail Knight who has developed a GPS enabled traveling companion which vibrates a ring based device to notify the traveler of potential danger or points of interest. It is a great concept by which I draw great parallels with what we are doing at Indaran. Travel and the services which will evolve over the coming 18 to 24 months excites me greatly. Being able to harness technologies such as GPS to provide the user a richer experience be it travel or other is extremely interesting.

Similarly an old colleague of mine Alex Craxton who is now over at Ymogen have started working with the BBC on slightly different but still very interesting project linking BBC information with actual physical locations. They utilise GPS coordinates and BBC URL's to provide markup to physical world locations.

JSR 256 Motion Sensor API update

JSR 256 had a major maintenance update release in the last couple of days. JSR 256 is a API for controlling sensors in mobile devices. It is interesting to see how this development library is utilised in the coming years.

Technical folk can find the Java docs here

Nokia's pledge to GPS in all phones & future phone must have's

There was an interesting article over at ZDnet last week in which David Watkins, Multimedia Sales Director Nokia APAC was quoted as saying 'GPS will work its way from niche product to mainstream functionality and will one day be considered as ubiquitous as the cameraphone is today'.

This is great news for the location based content market and for anyone looking at harnessing the new age of integrated sensors.

So a quick question I would like to pose - what is the sucessor to GPS in the line of mobile device 'must haves'? Personally I think it will be a mix of varied user interfaces including ePaper, OLED wrappable screens and sensory devices.

On the sensor side I would have to suggest digital compases (we will talk about these soon) heart rate monitors, motion sensors (see Nokia's 5500 which came out last year - no it wasn't you Apple who were the first to integrate one even though you like to say so), temperature and light sensors (the later Apple does have in the IPhone) are close followers in my books.