j

Android is growing fast, Google said at its developers conference, and soon will be able to interact with home appliances and other hardware.

 

(click image for larger view)

Google Kicks Off IO Developer Conference

Before a crowd of enthusiastic developers at its annual developer conference, Google on Tuesday lauded the momentum of its Android mobile operating system, introduced cloud music and video services, and offered a glimpse of Android’s dominion over appliances in the home.Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra arrived on stage to offer a brief review of previous Google I/O events. He summarized the company’s 2010 developer conference with an image–the green Android robot devouring an apple, which is to say Apple, Google’s principal competitor in the smartphone market.

More Internet Insights

White Papers

• Data Center Efficiency in the Virtual Era: Three Key Steps Step 2: Simplify
• Smart Power Management for Data Centers

Videos

Parrot shows off a slew of WiFi & Blue-Tooth controlled technology, from its Minikit Slim to its Philippe Starck-designed speakers (Zikmu) and the AR Drone, a remote controlled helicopter driven by the iPhone’s accelerometer and built in sensors.

Hugo Barra, director of Android product management, then offered an overview of Android metrics. He revealed that Google has recorded more than 100 million Android activations to date, thanks to the work of 36 industry partners, 215 mobile carriers, and 450,000 developers worldwide. That broad base of support has brought the number of Android activations per day to 400,000, four times what Google reported in May last year. And Barra said that Google’s Android Market now has more than 200,000 applications and that 4.5 billion Android applications have been downloaded and installed.

“Android Market is seeing stronger, faster growth than ever,” said Barra.

Identity theft and online fraud are accelerating at an alarming rate.

Deliver greater authentication security for your mobile devices.

Google has updated Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) to 3.1 and is now rolling that update out to Verizon customers that have Motorola Xoom tablets. Android 3.1 will also be coming to Google TV devices later this summer.

Android 3.1 includes a new Open Accessory API (for interfacing with hardware accessories), a USB host API (for connecting USB controllers and devices), resizable home screen widgets, a media transfer protocol(for connecting cameras), and a real-time transport protocol (RTP) API for audio.

Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android that provides a unified version of the operating system for phones, tablets, and other devices, is scheduled to be released in the fourth quarter of the year. Ice Cream Sandwich includes new head-tracking technology that will allow, for example, tablet webcams to focus on different people when they speak.

To accelerate the speed at which carrier partners roll out Android upgrades, Google said it is working with Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola, and AT&T to standardize new Android release distribution.

Google also launched two cloud services: Movies, a video service that allows Android users to rent movies through the Android Market, play them back on any supported Android device or YouTube, and even cache copies for offline playback; and Music Beta by Google, a music service that allows users–initially in the U.S. only–to copy their digital music collections to the cloud, stream songs to supported Android devices, and cache recently played or specified songs locally for playback without a network connection.

Google is launching its music service without broad support from the music industry, a move necessitated by the March launch of Amazon’s competing cloud music service and the resistance of music companies.

“Unfortunately, a couple of the major labels were only interested in doing so on terms that were unreasonable and unsustainable,” explained Jamie Rosenberg, director of digital media on Android at a post-keynote press event.

Apple is expected to launch its own hosted music service shortly, though with the blessing of music companies.

Perhaps the most intriguing initiatives to emerge from Google I/O are Android Open Accessory, a specification that allows developers to build hardware accessories that can communicate with Android, an Open Accessory hardware reference design (ADK) based on the open source Arduino system, and Android @ Home, a project that provides Android APIs for interfacing with appliances.

Google’s open approach to peripheral hardware development stands in stark contrast to Apple’s iOS accessory program, MFi, which requires licensing and approval.

“The power of Android is that it’s not a single product,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s head of Android, during the post-keynote press conference, “The power of Android is that it can be used in a lot of ways.”

By Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Feb 3, 2011 12:10 pm

Google’s improvements to the Android Market application store, including the addition of a browser-based store and in-app payments, are being hailed as a big step in the right direction by analysts and developers.

So far, Market has been the most criticized part of the Android ecosystem, according to Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight.

“Developers felt they haven’t been able to monetize it in the way they have on Apple’s App Store,” said Wood.

The browser-based version of Android Market will make it easier to discover new applications, according to Google. Previously the store was only available via a mobile phone client.

Users can also send applications directly to their Android device and share applications with friends through Twitter, Google said.

It is the latest in a line of improvements Google has been making over the last couple of months, including a new Android Market client and longer description texts for applications.

“[Google] finally realized that there was a severe need to improve the Market, and that is good news,” said Android developer Konrad Hübner said via e-mail.

His favorite new feature is the ability to select an application, which then can be pushed automatically to a phone. Installing applications that way is “much more comfortable than the iTunes hassle,” Hübner said.

He isn’t alone in thinking that the over-the-air installation of applications is a step forward. It is much smoother than downloading apps into iTunes on a desktop and then synching them with an iPhone, according to Fredrik Andersson, founder and business developer at Swedish consultancy Kondensator.

An important part of the marketing of applications is distribution via social networks and the ability install directly after making a first impression, Andersson said via e-mail.

He is looking forward to using in-app payments, which allows developers to make money from selling virtual goods or upgrades within their applications.

The big challenge is to help users to find what they need among the myriad of apps available, according to Andersson. But that goes for Apple and the App Store, as well, he said.

On Wednesday, Google also demonstrated Android 3.0 or Honeycomb, the upcoming version of the OS that has been tailor-made for tablets, expected to help products like Motorola’s Xoom and LG’s G-Slate compete with Apple’s iPad.

The increased competition will encourage the development of all platforms, and consumers will be able to benefit from that. The arrival of Android 3.0-based tablets will also allow Kondensator to develop new services that, for example, take advantage of the larger displays that tablets offer, Andersson said.

A recent survey of apps developers conducted by Appcelerator — whose Titanium platform can be used to develop cross-platform, native applications — and IDC showed a growing interest in Android-based tablets. Interest jumped 12 points in three months to 74 percent of respondents saying they are “very interested” in developing for these devices, according to the survey.

The Market improvements come at a key time for Android. On Monday, market research company Canalys said Android had passed Symbian to become the most popular smartphone OS.

“Android has been a phenomenal success, probably beyond the wildest dreams that Google had for it,” said Wood.

The success of Android is the result of a wide variety of products, from low-end to high-end smartphones with very different hardware specifications. The next step should be the ability to target particular applications for certain devices, and allow them to take full advantage of dual-core processors and hardware acceleration. That is absolutely critical now, according to Wood.

CES 2011 was unsurprisingly full of various tablets, but one of them stood out in particular: the Motorola Xoom. The device won the Best in Show Award at CES 2011.

For Q1 2011, Motorola has reportedly placed orders for about 700,000 to 800,000 units of the device with four color options. The orders will go up as high as one million units in the quarter, according to sources from upstream component makers cited by DigiTimes. The sources also claimed that currently, Motorola and Samsung are Google’s priority partners, while LG Electronics and HTC are secondary.

The Motorola Xoom will ship with Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb) with impressive hardware: Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 32GB of onboard storage (expandable via SD, a 2-megapixel camera on the front, a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash on the back, a micro USB 2.0 port, HDMI out, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. The 10.1-inch tablet has a 1280×800 display resolution. Battery life is said to peak at about 10 hours of video playback.

The device will launch in Q1 2011 with 3G functionality, later upgradeable to LTE 4G, and will launch with a LTE 4G model in Q2. Pricing has yet to be announced.

A 3D version of Google Maps will accompany a Motorola tablet running Honeycomb, the next version of Google’s Android, according to Google’s Andy Rubin.
Rubin showed off the unreleased prototype tablet at the opening session of D: Dive Into Mobile in San Francisco today, the same day that the company announced plans to ship Gingerbread, Android version 2.3. Honeycomb and the Motorola tablet will arrive at some point next year, Rubin said, showing off the Google Maps application and eliciting more than one “oooh” from the crowd of mobile professionals.

He declined to provide any further details about the tablet.
Rubin was grilled on many Android-related topics by hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of D: All Things Digital. He was granted a few minutes to show off the Nexus S, the new phone announced by Google this morning that will run Gingerbread on a Google-specified and Samsung-built smartphone.

When pressed on Google’s Nexus strategy in general, which has evolved in starts and fits throughout 2010, Rubin admitted “we bit off a little more than we could chew” when it came to trying to promote the Nexus One as a start-of-the-art Google-designed phone and the centerpiece of a smartphone-buying strategy that was intended to match intriguing phones with the carrier of one’s choice, which is a popular approach in the U.K., he said.
However, U.S. carriers were less supportive of the idea. Google dropped the idea of the Web-only store for the Nexus S, scaling back its ambitions and working with Best Buy to distribute the phone, which is available either unlocked or with a two-year contract for T-Mobile’s network.
The carriers have a fair amount of control over how Android is presented to consumers, but that was always Google’s intention, Rubin said. Google has been criticized for allowing carriers to clutter up the Android interface with pet apps that Mossberg charitably referred to as “craplets,” but Rubin said the carriers are starting to understand those practices alienate consumers, and he implied that Android carriers are rethinking that strategy.
Still, “those guys would be commoditized if I forced them to all look the same,” Rubin said. One of the reasons Android has done as well as it has is because carriers and handset makers want an alternative to Apple’s iPhone or Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, but they don’t want to turn into the HP, Dell, and Acer of the PC world, beholden to Microsoft and Intel for innovation and left with no other way to distinguish themselves from the competition other than price.
Despite the rancor that often characterizes the once-close relationship between Google and Apple, Rubin took time to praise Apple for what he said Apple has done right, namely services like the App Store, and even going so far as to acknowledge that its developer program is relatively “open,” a word that Google’s Vic Gundotra and CEO Eric Schmidt never use in referring to Apple in its approach toward third-party software development. A true Googler, Rubin went on to point out that Google is more “open” in its approach to how it allows outsiders to review the source code of Android in addition to unrestricted development. Still, it was a bit surprising to hear a senior Google executive use the word “open” with respect to Apple.
In further discussion about the competition, Rubin said Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 was “a good 1.0 product,” but he said if he was asked for advice, he would implore them to find a better way to allow the differentiation he referred to earlier among its hardware partners. The problem for companies like Microsoft, Nokia, and even RIM is that much of their code is simply old, dating back from a time before the smartphone revolution was fully realized by Apple’s iPhone, he said.
Rubin was very coy about discussions that Google may or may not have had with Nokia about the possibility of the world’s largest smartphone vendor adopting Android under its new leadership, after an outgoing Nokia executive compared the strategy of using Android to that of young boys urinating in their pants to stay warm in cold weather. When pressed, Rubin declined to comment on any specific negotiations in either Finland or Mountain View, refusing to confirm or deny that talks had been held.
Later, Rubin admitted that Android could do a better job when it comes to usability, lending weight to the notion that Android is an engineer’s operating system as opposed to one designed for tech novices. He promised that future releases such as Honeycomb would do a better job of exposing vital functions to users without requiring them to navigate through a sea of menus. ”You’ll see the fruits of that investment in the tablets first, and then the phones,” Rubin said. “We’re aware of the problem and we’re going to do better.”

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20024807-265.html#ixzz17XflBD7b