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June 23, 2008

The much publicized wireless phones powered by Google's Android open source software will not be arriving in 2008 as promised.

Worse, it seems that application compatibility could be a serious problem as Linux Mobile developers get increasingly frustrated with the search giant, and some now are starting to lose faith in the project.

This represents a sharp contrast to the optimistic hyperbole that emerged after the meeting between Google and some thirty open source Linux Mobile developers last November when Android was officially announced to the Linux community.

For its part, the Open Handset Alliance said at the time that the first devices using the Android platform would be "in the shops" by June 20, 2008.

Now the promise of Android powered mobile handsets being delivered within a month or two simply won't be met. Some industry observers even suggest that we will be lucky to see any handsets at all until mid-2009 at the very earliest.

Others think that T-Mobile USA may well be the only network to hit a handset release by the very end of 2008. And Taiwan's HTC is another of the few manufacturers expected to hit a handset delivery target before this year is over.

Things have since gone very quiet since November 12th when the Android SDK was released. That was also the last time the Open Handset Alliance published a press release, according to its website.

Additionally, Sprint Nextel has apparently abandoned its plans to launch until the middle of next year, and problems with the development of a Chinese language version of the operating system have meant that China Mobile is also expected to follow that same time frame.

"A sizeable number of developers - the very people that Google hopes will add the bells and whistles to its mobile phone software - are complaining that the tool kit is riddled with coding errors, some of them shockingly basic" it says, adding that those developers have also said that "Google has been largely unresponsive to their feedback and some observers suggested the very credibility of Google's mobile phone initiative is on the line."

This is very sad, considering there is very good reason for the excitement amongst developers and some tech savvy consumers alike.

However, there are still some that continue to think that Android could be the beginning of something big nevertheless.

Not least of which because it represents a mobile phone platform that should be totally open, totally customizable. The Open Handset Alliance promises "with devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests.

They can still swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos."

Built from the ground up to be 100 percent open souce, Android is based upon the Linux kernel. With a custom VM (virtual machine) designed to optimize memory and hardware resources, the concept has WOW written all over it...

Time will tell, but Google still has a big percentage of the Mobile Linux community very irritated just the same.

Source: Linux Mobile News.org.

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