Google's Android OS

But, unlike the iPhone, it isn’t a physical product; rather an OS and set of basic apps that can be adopted by manufactures to allow them to bring a smartphone to market quickly.

This goes under the name Android – quite an odd choice until you realise this was the name of a mobile technology company Google bought a couple of years ago.

Android is built on open source software. The main operating system is Linux, with much of the code open for developers to work with and modify. From a legal standpoint, this is licensed under the Apache v2 license.

Licensing is a big issue for open source projects; many follow the GNU General Public License (GPL), which has been accused of being viral by traditional closed source companies. GPL is designed to protect the people who work on open source projects by ensuring if a company takes this free software and improves it to launch a product, that company has to feed its improvements back into the open source project, so everyone benefits – except it makes it difficult for a company to build differentiation into its products.

The Apache license allows changes to be made without feeding back, though there are advantages in doing so – such as the product not diverging too far from the general development, which causes maintenance issues.

To support Android, yet another industry group has arisen – the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). It’s a bit tricky to keep track of all of these groups (such as LiMo, OMA, MLI and LiPS), which blur into a homogenous mass of companies who don’t want to be left out of the “next big thing” but aren’t really sure which horse to back.

But it is notable that Ericsson and Nokia haven’t joined the OHA, though HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have.

Motorola has dabbled with Linux, so isn’t really a surprise. HTC wasn’t so obvious though; whilst it has a lot of experience in smartphones, HTC has traditionally been a big Microsoft supporter. And it won’t just be an observer; HTC claims it will have the first Android handset on the market.

The details of Android should be available by the time you read this (the developer’s kit wasn’t available at press time). But from the limited information available, some unusual decisions are being made. One of these is that “all applications are equal”. On most smartphones, the core software is treated as trusted, downloadable applications are untrusted. This helps prevent virus-type activity by giving a third party application a safe “sandbox” to run in, where it cannot affect the rest of the phone, though at the expense of limiting the flexibility of these apps.

Regardless, the big question is whether Android will manage to push its way into a market with several deeply entrenched big players who have little to gain from an open system.

The main thrust behind the handset is being open, which runs completely against the business models of most manufacturers and networks; they want to have a tight hold on their customers and not become a simple commodity.

Nokia gets in touch

It seems that Nokia may soon be having a serious stab at the touchscreen format.

With devices like the iPhone being so hyped, touchscreens are moving from fairly unusual features to one the average consumer sees as desirable.

But they do have problems – the main one being there is no tactile feedback when pressing the screen. So while in theory on-screen keypads remove the need for expensive and mechanically complex buttons, they simply aren’t satisfactory for any large scale data entry.

Nokia isn’t well known for touchscreens. They’ve spurned them for the majority of their handheld devices – even the Communicator range, where it would have arguably made a big difference to usability. But it has, however, had the backroom boys looking at them and has been showing off a new tactile display on a modified 770 tablet.

The Haptikos screen (named after haptics, the study of touching behaviour) looks no different to an ordinary touchscreen, but has additional flexibility (it can bend by a small fraction of a millimetre when pushed) and piezo sensor pads to detect touch. This gives a more natural feel then a traditional display, and when coupled with audio feedback makes typing far better.

It still doesn’t get around the problem of working on a flat surface with no way of telling by touch where your fingers are – we often don’t look at a keypad, but learn the position of keys and feel for them relative to other keys and the casing – but it is a step towards a more usable touchscreen.

Data’s getting faster

Most mobile network manufacturers are working hard on LTE/SAE (long-term evolution/system architecture evolution) as the next broadband technology for mobiles, under the auspices of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) that handled the development of 3G.

We’ve seen data rates jump from 9.6k on GSM to 7.2Mbps on HSDPA, but even this will seem slow compared to the results being obtained in the first concept tests of LTE technology, which are currently underway.

The initial release is expected to be able to provide a 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink, with far less latency (the small delays in transmitting) than existing techniques provide. The efficiency of the whole system is also improved; these faster data rates take significantly less radio bandwidth byte-for-byte than the standard 3G/HSDPA, which means the increased data rates won’t be at the expense of capacity on the network side.

Full commercialisation is still a while off though; the first products aren’t expected until 2010.