Google’s Andy Rubin could be called the ‘Father of Android’ besides being known as the VP of engineering for the Mountain View based company. PC Magazine recently had the opportunity to sit down with Rubin and as usual, the man had some very interesting things to say.

As for the soon to be launched Windows Phone 7, Rubin says, “I think the screen shots I’ve seen are interesting, but look, the world doesn’t need another platform. Android is free and open; I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons.”

The executive also is very partial toward Flash, relieved that phones equipped with the Adobe software no longer show a question mark inside a box. Rubin said, “So, no more Web sites with little boxes with question marks in them – that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty binary. So I would say I want Flash, period, because I want to see the full Web and not just a portion of it. And once you get the full Web there’s just some optimization that over months and years will just get better and better. I’m confident. It’s just code.”

Other topics touch upon by the Google VP include improvements to the Android browser, better gaming support for the next version of the OS and the fragmentation of Android. For more of Rubin’s answers, check out the source link.
source: PCMag

Last we heard, Garmin-Asus gave themselves a target of 6 months to really turn around things for their phone business – or else, they’ll completely exit of the phone business altogether. However, it looks as though they’ll be cranking out a few devices beforehand to see whether or not they’ll have the capacity to compete in this ever growing market.

It appears that Garmin-Asus will launch either one or two Android powered smartphones before the end of the year – but it’s going to make its presence in the Taiwan market. Apparently the Garmin-Asus A10 is selling well over there, so that’s probably why they’re attacking that market in the near term.

Specifically, the A10 managed to rack up sales of 3,500 units in September and it’s positioned to hit the 3,000 mark in October. Plus, they’ll also promote the handset heavily in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Eastern Europe. Since the A10 seems to be a popular catch in those markets, the company intends to release a new version of it that’ll integrate an EasyCard by Taipei Smart Card Corporation which will allow owners to use their device to pay for public transportation.

Finally, they’ll also be in the works with some Windows Phone 7 device down the road, but they don’t plan on launching it until some time in the first quarter of 2011 – which is still well within that 6 month time frame of turning things around.
source: DiGiTimes

Mobile industry patent infringement lawsuits

Motorola is keeping its options open in regards of Windows Phone 7, said CEO Sanjay Jha, if Microsoft has managed to craft an enticing mobile OS. This statement comes in response to questions about Microsoft’s lawsuit against Moto, for patent violations in its Android phone line.

Motorola’s co-CEO stated: “I would much rather have done without that lawsuit, but it doesn’t always work out that way.” Android has been a turnaround story for Motorola with the DROID line on Verizon, and a sufficient answer to Apple’s iPhone for both Moto, and the carrier. Mr Jha also said that they have been waiting for Microsoft to make a compelling update of Windows Mobile last year, and when it didn’t happen, they turned to Android, which actually enabled the company to survive, and even turn profitable.

Motorola is cranking up its Android line with AT&T and Verizon, in a very nonchalant attitude to Microsoft’s lawsuit. The Guardian has come up with a nice infographic who is currently suing who in the mobile business, with disputes both ongoing, and resolved. Have a look at the mess below. Hopefully all those lawsuits are not only aiming to slow down Android’s proliferation.
source: WSJ & Guardian

Much to the chagrin of Omnia HD i8910 owners, Samsung announced it is discontinuing support for the Symbian mobile OS by the end of the year. All related developer’s labs, forums and discussion, will be terminated after December 31st 2010.

The company urges all discussion related issues to be submitted before December 10th, so it can have time to address them. Developers won’t be able to upload and certify Symbian applications to Samsung Apps after 8am on December 31st. Well, that was to be expected – Samsung is having enough trouble trying to roll out updates for its flagship Android handsets, to iron out Windows Phone 7 support, and to populate its Apps store with bada-compatible software.
source: Samsung

You didn’t think Michael Dell will stay away from the next computing craze, did you? After the intriguing 5″ Dell Streak, which had some identity problems if it is a tablet, or a big smartphone, Dell confirms it has much more in the works.

Dell’s China CEO Amit Midha has outed some info on the upcoming 7″ Android tablet, which, he hinted, is mere weeks from being announced. A 10-incher is coming next in a 6-12 months timeframe, and some more sizes will appear in Dell’s tablet ecosystem in the meantime. A 3″ device will be announced closely after the 7″ tablet, and a 4″ is also expected.

Except Android, Dell is also toying around with Chrome OS, but one of the upcoming “inchers” will be a Windows device. We’d wager to say he is talking about that elusive Windows Phone 7 device long rumored from them. Bring it on, Dell, the more, the merrier.

source: WSJ

The CEO of LG Electronics, Nam Yong, has stepped down, after a nerve-racking dive in profits from its mobile handsets division. The operating profits from cell phones slumped with the astonishing 90%, compared to last year, clearly indicating that LG is doing something wrong.

Mr Yong will be replaced by the brother of the LG Group chairman. LG’s share of the cell phone industry’s profits has shrunk more than half since the iPhone introduction, and the proliferation of Android smartphones.

The company is jumping on the Android bandwagon with full force, hoping to reverse these trends, and it’s aiming to carve a niche for itself by outing five Windows Phone 7 devices by year-end. Will it succeed? We’ll know more when the year is up.

source: LG

Android is like a fury of fists that never lets up, and keeps on coming at a rapid rate. This newest study shows that Google’s popular Android OS may end the year as the number two mobile platform in terms of market share. Still forecasted to be in distant first of course is global powerhouse Nokia and their Symbian OS.

The study has projections for the remainder of 2010, as well as the years 2011-2014. Other mobile platforms such as Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry platform are projected to decline slightly by 2014. The forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS isn’t expected to last, as market share is projected to drop under 4% by 2014.

Do you see Windows Phone 7 lasting with tough competition like Android and iOS? Can Android catch up to Symbian by the year 2014 in market share? Will RIM hang in there? These are all just projections of course, and could very well change. Take a look at the chart and give us your opinion.
source: Into Mobile

IDC has run its numbers prediction game again, and this time it speculates on the market share of the various mobile operating systems in the next few years. By 2014, it predicts, the “wild card” Android will have reached nearly 25% of all smartphones worldwide – not hard to believe considering the low-tier push that Google is plotting.

IDC also states that the market for Windows Phone devices (presumably both Windows Mobile legacy, if it is still lurking around, and WP7) will expand from 6.8% to 9.8% – again plausible, since Windows Phone 7 hasn’t even hit the market yet. Here we will go out on a limb and say that WP7 will probably surpass the 10% mark, considering the resources Microsoft is pouring into its development, marketing and distribution.

BlackBerry OS is expected to remain almost unchanged from its 17.9% market share, and the biggest loser is supposed to be Symbian, falling from 40.1%, to 32.9%. The other dip, according to IDC, will be in Apple’s iOS market share, which could shrink from 14.7% to 10.9%. The “other” platforms will modestly increase their market share to a combined value of 4.5%.

We wouldn’t even dare to speculate what the mobile OS market will look like next year, let alone in 2014, but that’s what the IDC analyst get paychecks for. Considering the explosive expansion of the smartphone industry expected in the near future, where will the puzzle pieces fall is anyone’s guess.

Apple’s exclusivity with AT&T will be over in that timeframe, so we will be seeing the iPhone on more carriers, which will certainly boost the iOS numbers. Symbian might be declining in its current reincarnation, but Symbain^4 and MeeGo are nearing to replace it in Nokia handsets, and who knows what consumers will find attractive. Samsung is planning to put bada on a third of its smartphones, and it is the number two cell phone manufacturer, so they might stir the market as well. We are also not so sure of BlackBerry remaining unscathed with all the troubles looming over its proprietary email system.

For all we know the smartphone OS market will become increasingly fragmented, but in the end it will be Apple and Google raking in the cash – Apple from the huge margins on its tightly integrated products, and Google from the search revenue generated by Android’s proliferation.

source: eWeek

Well, well, well, look who might beat the big boys in having dual-core smartphones on the market as early as Q4! That’s precisely what LG announced today – its high-powered Optimus line will have smartphones based on NVIDIA Tegra 2 introduced in the October-December timeframe.

We know NVIDIA is counting on the world’s number three cell phone manufacturer to get a foothold in the mobile business world with its Cortex-A9 dual-core Tegra 2 chipset. Done with the 45nm process, the SoC features two cores humming along at 1GHz, 1080p video recording and decoding, as well as a low power NVIDIA GeForce GPU.

In the 3D graphics department it promises up to five times the performance of the single-core chipsets currently on the market. We don’t know if that includes Samsung’s Hummingbird or Apple’s A4, the current best-in-class mobile GPUs, or just Snapdragon, but Samsung made a similar claim about its dual-core Orion chipset today, so we might as well be seeing console-level gaming capabilities in these smartphones.

From what we learned when researching for our introductory article on the mobile chipsets topic, NVIDIA claims ultra low-power requirements by including eight processors dedicated to different tasks, something that the other upcoming SoCs are doing as well. Buried in the Tegra’s white papers, though, we found stats for 140 hours of audio on a standard 2000mAh battery, while the big boys are achieving 120 hours out of their Cortex-A9 chipsets, but from a 1000mAh battery. That is one major difference we are seeing from the already announced dual-core mobile chipsets from Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Samsung. All of them claim 30% improvement in battery life compared to the single-core predecessors.

LG didn’t specify what operating systems will these Tegra 2 smartphones carry. It still has a way to go on the promise to deliver 20 Android phones and five Windows Phone 7 handsets this year, so both of the mobile operating systems might have a dual-core future in the works.

Well, now we really can’t wait for next Tuesday’s LG Optimus press event, moreover it could also include the rumored Tegra 2-based Optimus Pad Android tablet.
source: LG via AnandTech

After Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, it was Samsung’s turn to announce its own dual-core chipset for mobile devices. The system-on-a-chip (SoC) is codenamed Orion, it is based on the dual-core Cortex-A9 architecture from ARM, and will have the cores running at 1GHz. Samsung claims it will be 5 times faster in graphics rendering than its current Hummingbird, as found in the Galaxy S and its US carrier versions. Well, let’s hope that having full Adobe Flash on our smartphones will come standard now, no performance excuses can be possible this time.

Last time we checked, the PowerVR SGX540 GPU in the Hummingbird chipset was theoretically capable of 90 million triangles per second. That puts the Orion GPU at 450 million, only a bit less than the Xbox 360’s 500 million that the gaming console is currently offering, for example.

Apart from that amazing boost in graphics prowess, the Orion will offer what all the other 45nm dual-core SoCs like the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon, and TI’s OMAP4 will. Full HD video recording and decoding at 30fps, support for cameras up to 18MP, and support for up to three displays simultaneously – two on the device itself, and one external HDTV, for example, via HDMI-out. The Cortex-A9 chipsets also should deliver 30% reduction in power consumption, so all the goodies above will come in an even thriftier package that will further enhance battery life on mobile devices.

The other interesting thing about the Orion SoC is that it will have embedded interface support for various storage technologies – NAND flash, moviNAND, SSD or HDD providing both SATA, and eMMC interfaces. Thus the chipset can be used in netbooks and tablets with enhanced storage options as well. It has the audio and GPS chips included, but not the baseband connectivity, where Snapdragon has clear advantage – it is still A8 based, however .

Samsung’s Orion chipset has already finished sampling and will be shipped to “select customers” in Q4 of this year, with Samsung ramping up production in the first half of 2011, which means we should have an Orion-based device next year – Galaxy S 2 anyone?

We wonder what those “select customers” are, besides Samsung itself of course, which uses the Hummingbird in the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab. We currently have only one major player left to announce a dual-core chipset for its next generation of mobile devices – Apple. Considering that the Hummingbird and A4 are developed by the same company, and Samsung’s traditional ties with Apple for the previous generations of iPhones, could we be seeing a dual-core iPhone next summer? It’s a speculation, but we doubt that Steve Jobs will allow the company to be left in the dust in that respect, moreover it now owns Intrinsity, the company behind the sizzling Hummingbird and A4 chipsets.
source: Samsung