Google has acquired Motorola Mobility essentially for its 24,500 patents.

Google has been bogged down by patent hoarding companies which have put pressure on Android as a platform. They decided instead of focusing on innovating, they would focus on building a patent portfolio.

Google had no choice to pay for patents,else they would end up losing the wonderful Android platform that they built because of patent wars.

What Google in going to do next is anyones guess.

Strip Motorola Mobility of its patents and software talents and sell of the hardware seems like a logical one.

If google decides to continue selling hardware, they would compete with other companies in the Android eco-system such as Samsung and HTC.

However what they would be able to do is tightly integrate hardware and software like Apple does.

The least I expect is to have the latest Android available for Motorola phones.So if you have a Motorola phone, have fun!

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As I did not had a mood to blog during event I decided to write something about after it ended.

First what this Linaro Connect is about… Is it conference or rather an event which has to gather people in one place so they can reach each other easily? From what I saw during last week it is both.

There were several summits which I did not attended so does not have anything to write about them. Inter team meetings during which people were sharing their knowledge about their work and how to use it to improve work of other teams — here the most active were Android and Validation teams (in my opinion). Schedule was full of Android sessions and LAVA was quite often heard word.

For me event started on Sunday as I had taxi at 6:30 in the morning. Then bus, plane and then waiting 2h in terminal 1 of London Heathrow airport waiting for few other guys to appear as we had to share a cab to hotel where I arrived at ~17:00 local time. Yes, my travels sucks.

Went outside with Zygmunt Krynicki to find some place to eat. Found few takeaway only places and small restaurant with India food which was delicious.

Monday started with traditional English breakfast (you know: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, baked beans and mushrooms kind of one) which was quite good and we had it daily. When it comes to food at hotel it was good and someone had great idea serving different cuisine each day.

Starting plenary with informations from each team about what do they plan for this week. Then work, meetings, coding, hacking etc. Attended several meetings like binary toolchain discussion with toolchain working group, Matthias Klose from Ubuntu and several people from ARM Ltd which maintain ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5). Also went for hard float summit with not only Linaro or Ubuntu but also Fedora and Marvell people.

But work is not the only thing we did. There were activities for evenings too.

On Monday we went outside for karting. First we were equipped with proper suit, shoes, helmet and then went for safety instructions.

Racing was fun. Each team were split into two sub teams (as there were two tracks) with 4 people in each. That gave 15 minutes per person, but as one of us decided to not drive second one we had 20 minutes on it.

Was it fun? O yes, it was. Especially outside track where speed was higher and engine more powerful but as steering was tough my right wrist reminded me that RSI problem which I had few years ago (this time pain vanished during night but got back at closing party). Our team took 6th place in total.

Tuesday and Wednesday evenings were “reserved” for team meals. First day we went to Browns and Punter was next one. Food in both was tasty and came in big amounts.

But food was not the only way to spend evening. On Wednesday we went punting on a river in Cambridge. Our punter was presenting us with informations about colleges and bridges we were passing by — things like who created them, when, why etc. Some people took photos but so far I did not traced whom to contact to get a copy.

Thursday we had a dinner in King’s College. Dinning hall looked nice with all those portraits and food was good. Had a nice talk with ST-Ericsson people about their cheap developer board Snowball which I complained about in other post. We got to the point that the CPU on board was created for mobile devices use (that’s why no usb host functionality) and that all those industrial connectors are present because it is more board for prototyping new devices.

Friday was last day. We did some hacking, packed equipment of our room and prepared for closing plenary. At the end we had small party with some activities and food. I left it early — was tired and wanted to discuss with Zygmunt a bit (normally we chat often during company events but this time we got separate rooms).

Return trip was a copy… taxi, plane, bus, taxi. Went home around 22:00 and gave inflated sword (from closing party) to my daughter — she liked it ;)

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Linaro Connect Q3.11 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Congratulations Apple users, you are soon going to have 11 new features which Android users already enjoy

Many Apple fanboys find Android a copy of the Apple.. now its Apple who is copying from Android. Apple iOS5 has copied 11 features from the Android platform which will show up in iPad2 and iPhone 5.

Here is the list:

• Notification Bar
• Cloud Synchronization
• Wireless Syncing
• Tabbed browsing
• Voice Control
• Split Keyboard:
• Real time messaging
• Over-the-Air Updates
• Twitter updates
• Multitasking
• Widgets

Read the complete article.

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Last week there was Ubuntu platform sprint in Dublin, Ireland. I was there as one of invited Linaro guys (we got own room). What for we went there?

Work. Simple word but so much content in it. Sprints like this one allow to cooperate with other developers and this time I spent some time with Ubuntu ARM, Foundations and Kernel teams. But most of time I spent with Linaro guys as we had release of 11.06 to do.

My part was building cross toolchains for Ubuntu — including few already released ones. So I pushed several updates to ‘oneiric’, ‘natty’, ‘maverick’ and ‘lucid’ versions:

• binutils 2.21.52.20110606-1ubuntu1
• gcc 4.4.6-3ubuntu1
• gcc 4.5.3-1ubuntu2
• gcc 4.6.0-14ubuntu1
• eglibc 2.13-6ubuntu2
• linux 3.0-1.2

If you are running 11.10 ‘oneiric’ then all you need is just apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabi and will get cross compiler. For “armhf” compatible one apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf needs to be used. For those which run older releases there is Linaro toolchain backport PPA where packages are available for “amd64″ and “i386″ architectures.

Other part of my work was related with Star rating system which we plan to use to show status of boards supported by Linaro. I did some tests with PandaBoard connected to two monitors at same time and reported several bugs. Situation is nice but many things still need work.

At one moment I was creating “lucid” chroot on my “oneiric” system to be able to compile toolchain. And then I got a problem which ended in bug 802985 which needs fixing in all supported releases… Also debootstrap needs to be expanded to handle multiple suites at one time — otherwise there will be no way to populate chroots with older releases on any machine running 3.x kernels.

But work is not the only thing which we spent time on. Evenings were usually in pubs or similar places.

On Monday I went to hotel bar, grabbed a beer and started discussing with some random people. At one moment (when we were talking about OpenZaurus) one of them asked who I am and then went and bought me beer — he was Zaurus user whom I helped in past ;) So never know who you can meet…

As I have few friends in Dublin area I contacted them and on Wednesday evening I went with one of them to Club Chonradh na Gaeilge Irish pub where speaking English is nearly forbidden (but we were using Polish so no problems :). There was one bard singing Irish songs. Nice place, nice event.

Thursday was team dinner — went to Rustic Stone. Nice place, awesome food:

Friday was a day when many of us started packing and some even left earlier to catch flights. As Wookey asked me week before sprint to take my N900 with me we made a deal and I got some Euros and he got phone with all accessories. So guys — now really no more Maemo support from me (not that I did anything in this area since move to Nexus S).

On Friday also other part of visit started for me — my wife Ania arrived and we went to our family to spend nice weekend in Ireland.

We drove to Howth, spent some time looking at area from highest(?) mountain:

Then beach in Portmarnock where my wife started collecting sea shells… Quickly we got lot of them but I managed to put them in luggage somehow ;)

Evening was funny as we had to meet with one of my old friends. The “problem” was that we never met in real life yet and I forgot how does he looks. When I told that to wife and rest of group they were really surprised that such thing can happen ;D But we found each other and went to the Church Bar which is made from old St. Mary’s Church of Ireland which is one of the earliest examples of a galleried church in Dublin. Built at the beginning of the 18th century and renovated in 21st century. Nice place to visit in Dublin.

On Sunday we went into Wiclow county. Upper Lake at Glendalough then Glenmacnass Waterfall and few stops during trip to watch landscapes:

Monday was different — we went to Dublin for normal sight-seeing. You know: buildings, churches, castle…

Then packed bags and went to airport. The good part of Aer Lingus is that there were no problems with checking-in two bags on my ticket (but queue to just drop bags was insanely long). 2h flight, then another 2h in a bus and we finally arrived home. This part of conferences trip I like most — arrival at destination (as in Europe trips can take even 9h for me).

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Dublin: Ubuntu sprint and more was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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It’s been on it’s way for a while now, so we are pleased to announce that our new free Android files app is ready for download from the Android Market.

So what does this super new files app do? Well, Ubuntu One’s files app for Android gives you the freedom to take your files, photos and more with you and access them on the fly. It’s been picked as Pocket-lint’s ‘App of the Day’ today so see the full review here.

You can secure and manage your photos, files and folders directly from your Android device anywhere in the world. You can browse, select and download all your files and folders as well as upload and send files directly from your phone.

What’s really cool is that Ubuntu One files automatically backs up photographs taken from your Android phone’s camera directly to your Ubuntu One personal cloud. Giving you peace of mind knowing that all the great photos on your mobile are backed up and available for you to share. Speaking of sharing, you can do that directly from the app – just tap and hold on the file or photo you want to share and instantly post it straight to Facebook, Twitter, or your blog.

Other news, last week we submitted our new Music streaming app for iPhone to the app store. We’ll tell you more as soon as it’s available for download so keep your eye on our blog.

Do you envy when your Blackberry friends talk about BBM, short for Blackberry Messenger. Time to show them Whatsapp.

What is Whatsapp?

Its a cross platform instant messenger, think SMS/BBM.

It works on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia. Currently BBM is restricted to Blackberries only.

It offer messages, videos, photos, audios and more.

No cost of sending messages because it uses your data connection. You can use WiFi or 3G. A world of caution: if you have a limited data plan or on roaming, you may be paying for sending messages.

Sounds too good to be true? Now the fine print Its a paid app, on no! For iPhone its $.099 and for Android its free for first year after that its $2.

Its still worth it. Enjoy Whatsapp.

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Earlier Microsoft sued Android phone makers, now Oracle is suing Google for Android. Patents were to protect innovators instead its being used to stop innovation.

The big old daddies of the IT industry are going after the new companies.

The old ones have nothing new to innovate. Thy are too comfortable in their zone to make the big bold moves. These companies are eventually going to get extinct and are only resting on their past laurels. They are utilising their patent portfolios to make money and stop other companies from innovating.

HTC is paying $5 for every Android phone to Google Microsoft , yes Microsoft! Microsoft makes more money than Google on every Android phone for patents! The business models is similar to the Mafias asking for protection money. The patents hoarders are the new age Mafia.

If you don’t believe me they are going to be extinct? Do your maths. If you bought Microsoft stock 10 years back for $60, today it would be worth US$28. You would have lost more than 50 percent of your value in 10 years. This is for a company that controls the software on 90 percent of the computers.

Now Google is buying patents, not because they need them. But to have a defensive patent portfolio. You see in the tech industry the big 800 pound gorillas never get sued by other gorillas because they have a patent portfolio.

From Google’s Blog:

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It’s for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S. economy as a whole.

Google wants to purchase patents from Nortel Network, a company now gone bankrupt (you cant live on patents for too long you see). Microsoft has a license from Nortel Network and fears Google may cancel their license.

Reuters:

Microsoft, which claims a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to all of Nortel’s patents” following a 2006 deal, said in a filing with a Delaware bankruptcy court that existing agreements should be transferred to any new owner of the intellectual property, which spans many fields.

Google has bid $900 million to buy more than 6,000 patents and patents applications belonging to Nortel, a once mighty Canadian network equipment maker that filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009.

Glyn Moody says:

I mean, let’s be consistent here: if you want to abuse the patent system, expect to be on the receiving end of similar abuse. On the other hand, rather more laudably, why not stop abusing, in which case you can take the moral high ground when others start abusing the system to attack you?

Its high time we replace the patent system with open source and let the innovation happen again.

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This week I am in Budapest, Hungary attending Ubuntu Developer Summit for 11.10 ‘oneiric’ release discussions. But this is not only Ubuntu — there is huge amount of Linaro people discussing what to do next cycle.

Sunday

Travel, travel, travel… Usual way — bus from home to Berlin airport (SXF this time) where I met with Henning ‘woglinde’ Heinold to donate my old Linksys WRT54 which I got donated few years ago to be able to use my Zauruses wireless. Router had to be in use on OpenEmbedded stand at LinuxTag, Berlin — go there and visit them at booth 7.2b 112.

Again flight was with Easyjet. It is cheap airline but with speedy boarding it is good enough to go with. Bad side is that it lands at old terminal 1 in Budapest so I had to go to hotel by my own.

Evening was Canonical only meeting where there was a presentation of some things which will go into 11.10 Ubuntu release (nearly same to next day keynote). After food, discussions and finally sleep ;D

Monday

Sessions started — I attended few:

• Ubuntu LEB documentation
• cross toolchain user stories — my own session where most of time Micheal Hope was telling us about requests which Toolchain WG got
• user stories for nano image
• DMB regular meeting — I became Ubuntu developer during it!

During evening was ‘Meet & Greet’ social event sponsored by Openstack and Freescale. Nice way to catch with people. Especially when you meet old friends which you never met in person ;D I met Marek Szyprowski which whom I was writing to Polish Amiga paper magazine named ‘eXec’ (but website with similar name does not have nothing in common now). We talked for quite long time about misc things. Also met some other folks, refreshed faces memory etc.

Tuesday

Sessions:

• cross toolchain user stories (again) — we discussed notes from previous day, decided on some details and created work items so I can start working on it
• Ubuntu LEB documentation (also again)
• Linaro Ubuntu LEB process for 11.11
• GDB as cross debugger

As you see LEB was topic of a day. And it was not everything — next day was another session.

Evening was taken by The Linaro Technical Showcase sponsored by IBM. What was there? Many interesting things:

• Arnd Bergmann was talking why class4 SD card can be much better then class10 one
• Freescale Landing Team was presenting i.mx53 Quick Start boards
• Ash Charles from Gumstix was presenting their new miniboards with DM37xx cpus and few carrier boards
• Pawe? Moll from ARM was presenting Cortex A15 running from two biggest FPGA chips. It had just 11MHz clock but it was enough to show Doom game running on connected monitor.
• Oxlab guys shown their work on Android and how you can hibernate BeagleBoard
• ST-Ericsson guys presented Snowball boards — we had a talk on some hardware details
• Konstantinos Margaritis shown what kind of difference can be between armel and armhf ports on same hardware
• Angus Ainslie presented Samsung developer board and we had interesting discussion about it

I do not remember all presentations — those ones interested me most. ARM one was amazing — huge FPGAs which were able to emulate A15, A5, A9 just by booting with different MicroSD card… And it is not related only to CPU emulation cause there were two expansion slots on mainboard so FPGAs can became graphics card with Mali core flashed into. Second board was ‘simple’ A9 with Mali and some OpenGL(ES) demo was running there.

And again — new faces to join with names. Talked with Ash Charles about discussions in past when I helped Gumstix developers with OpenEmbedded, Angus Ainslie from ST-Ericsson was working for Openmoko at time when we had cooperation and so on…

Wednesday

Woke up early… What to do after 6:10? Go swimming! So I went to Royal SPA and spent some time in swimming pool and sauna so day started nicely.

Sessions:

• automated cross-buildd system/service
• Ubuntu LEB Star Rating documentation — my session again on how we want to rate level of support of member boards
• ARM Linus interface 3 — attended just to check how kernel developers are discussing how to improve arch/arm/ situation

Met Mark Brown with whom I was working in OpenEmbedded project and after lunch I went to do some sight seeing with Pawe? Moll. Budapest is nice city and I have to came back here one day.

Team dinner somewhere in the city was quite good. We had a fun going back to hotel when ~half of us used phones to navigate though city ;D

Thursday

Sessions:

• arm and other archs certification program — Canonical has certification program of machines which came with Ubuntu pre-installed. I have to check at their tools.
• ALIP mini-distro and build system user/developer stories — interesting discussion
• cross-toolchains for the ARM hard-float ABI — will have to provide them for Ubuntu and other but it is doable
• next steps with multiarch in Ubuntu — where do we go and how

Evening was sight seeing with local guides. We saw parlament building, chain bridge, castle area and ended in interesting pub.

Friday

Ending day and nearly no sessions today:

• port to the ARM hard-float ABI — Ubuntu armhf someone?
• Linaro Review of LDS week
• easier access to -dbgsym packages

Some of people already packed and left, rest will go to have fun at UDS party.

Summary

It was my third UDS and I feel that it was best one. I had two blueprints to handle and both had great discussions which ended in many notes and work items. There was lot of people both from Ubuntu community and Linaro teams. I met many developers, some old friends, went to so many sessions that it took me most of time (I do not remember is list in post is complete).

It was nice to see amount of ARM netbooks at people hands — mostly Genesi Smartbooks but also several Toshiba AC100 ones. I think that it shows that times are changing and who knows… maybe at next event I will not use my ASUS UL30A laptop.

And this is another UDS with some added hardware. This time it is Pandaboard A1 which can replace my EA1 at my work for Linaro. Probably will keep both running one to another but one (EA1) with Ubuntu and second (A1) will be used for misc tests.

Now it is a time to drop laptop in hotel room and go for party!!!

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
UDS-O was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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I took a trip out to see the folks at the Indiana LoCo team to talk about 11.04. That means ROAD TRIP! (Note how we avoid Ohio):

One thing I totally suck at is remembering to sync my phone with new music before I go on a trip. For the last 6 months or so though I don’t really have to, since we have Ubuntu One Music Streaming. 

The basic idea is that since I keep all my music in the cloud anyway I can just stream it back to myself, so when I buy a new album it’s just there, so I don’t have to remember to sync my phone or whatever.

But on a 3.5 hour trip with varying network conditions? Surely this won’t work. I’ll have to switch to more conventional ways to rock out for sure. Let’s find out.

The first step to any road trip is preparation:

I have Bluetooth audio support in my car, so the first thing I did was pair my phone, this was pretty straightforward. Then I fired up the application, queued up Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies and hit the road. At this point in my trip I was on 3G.

One of the nice things that the application automatically does is cache songs for you. That way the next time you want to listen to it you don’t have to hit the network. I told the music app to store 10GB of cached songs. So basically instead of my usual “Sync 10gb of songs to my phone” smartlist I just use these settings. When a song is cached the application shows a little yellow asterisk:

So as I’m listening to the songs the U1 app is caching the next songs for me. While the Alice was cranking I went ahead and queued up more albums. Since the app integrates with last.fm you can see what songs I listened to on the way there and on the way back. And since they’re my songs it’s at a nice high bitrate.

The queuing works well, the only interruption was when I was north of Fort Wayne, where I spent a while on a “G” network, which is apparently even worse than edge. I had finally caught up to the queue. This is also where I discovered the “unlimited” setting for caching songs. On longer trips where you know you’ll be far from 3g you probably want to turn this on instead of the default 3 songs.

Other tips:

• You’ll need power. You have the bluetooth and data radios on, and if you’re using the map, GPS.
• The phone gets quite warm. It was uncomfortable sitting on my lap, for a longer trip I am mulling a bracket for the dash.
• All of a sudden I want to replace my car radio with a tablet that runs this.
• The app has an offline mode, if you’re totally without network it just functions as a music player playing the songs you have cached.

The Ubuntu One team are feeling the joys of Spring, because after several months working hard we’ve got some great news about updates to our Android Music app, which don’t forget works anywhere in the world!

The first thing you’ll notice in the new UI is album art so you will now see any saved album covers. Managing your playlists is now even easier as you can create, edit and delete playlists straight from your device. Those of you with lots of music will notice the overall speed improvement, meaning you can enjoy your huge music collection without any long waits. Plus, we have also added support for non-DRM iTunes songs so that you can stream songs you’ve purchased from iTunes just as easily as your MP3s, bringing all your music together.

In addition many of you requested this next feature so we’re sure you’ll be pleased that we now support songs in Ogg Vorbis format so you can stream your collection of Ogg music natively, without the need to convert it to another format. If you’re a developer you may be interested in knowing that playlists are stored in your CouchDB database allowing you to write applications that read/write to them.

So that’s faster access to more of your music wherever you are in the world. The latest version 1.2 is now available in the Android market, happy listening and watch this space for upcoming updates to our iPhone app.

Enjoy!

- Martin and the web & mobile team

When I bought Nexus S in January I was using stock Android for few weeks. But somewhere around FOSDEM I moved to nightly builds of Cyanogenmod which is alternative “distribution” of Android done in more open way.

Why moved? New features, out of box support for Polish language, no problems with getting root access for applications, big community behind project were main reasons. And more… I have now custom kernel (Netarchy 1.3.0.2), DPI changed to 210 (from original 240) with use of Font Changer and normal font replaced by Ubuntu one (also done in Font Changer).

I was updating my phone from one nightly build to another. From one RC to other and today moved to final version. Upgrading usually went fine, but each time I had to reinstall custom kernel or change back to 210 DPI but that’s how it works. I will probably check other alternative builds one day but today I am satisfied with Cyanogenmod7.

But as this is final version then maybe I will find some time and (after discussions with our Android magicians) will do build of it with Linaro cross compiler — who knows, maybe will give few more percent of speed extra?

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Cyanogenmod7 released was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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HTC has launched the HTC Incredible S, which is an update over HTC Desire HD. Here are the improvements of HTC Incredible S over HTC Desire HD.

• Its lighter, 135g vs 165g
• Incredible S has 4″ display, while the HTC desire is 4.3″. Incredible S however has better quality Super LCD with the resolution remaining the same 480 x 800 pixels. Aparently HTC had LCD supplies Delays from Samsung and hence has switched to Super LCD from Sony.
• Incredible S ships with Android 2.2 just like the Desire HD, however is upgradeable to 2.4. No word yet on whether Desire HD will be upgradeable to 2.4 althought 2.3 is expected.
• Incredible S has secondary front facing camera for video conferencing.
• Has image stabilisation
• Touch sensitive control buttons

Both the phones have:

• 1 GHz Processor
• 8 Megapixel Camera
• HSDPA 14.4 Mbps

My two cents: If you already have the HTC Desire HD, then stay with it. If you were planning on buying the Desire HD, then this is for you. Battery life is nothing to write home about.

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I have been using an Android phone for more than month now. I used the original iPhone which I upgraded upto iPhone 3.0. I have used newer iPhones 3GS, 4 occasionally. Here is what I find better in the Android platform:

1. No Need for iTunes: Apple insists for syncing music, video and other things, you need iTunes. Which requires a PC/Notebook with Windows or Mac. This is a big limitation for me for two reasons. One, you need a computer, today cellphones are out-selling computers so why have the need for a computer. The second is I don’t use Windows or Mac, I use Linux. So every time I needed to add an MP3 into my iPhone, I had to re-boot into Windows.. newer version of Ubuntu, allow you to sync with iPhone without iTunes, which is nice but it still requires a PC.
   With Android, I can stick-in a memory card full of music and it will allow you to play it. You can also transfer from another phone/PC via Bluetooth.
2. No Apple Tax on data usage: In India Vodafone charges higher for data usage if you have an iPhone, essentially a part of the data revenue gets shared with Apple.  Do I get any benefit of paying the Apple Tax? No, so why should I ? Android phones data plans are the standard plans and they are cheaper.
3. Choice of Vendors: With Android, you have a choice of vendors to choose from. Android has the large number of vendors supporting it, while iOS is only available from Apple. Competition is always good for the customer.
4. Cheaper and pricing options: You can purchase an Android phone from Rs. 6800 ($150) up to Rs. 32,000 ($710), while the iPhone costs $800 in India.
5. Faster availability: iPhone 4 is still not available in India, while 3GS is priced very expensive. Android phones are hitting the markets faster pace.
6. No Vendor lockin: When you buy an iPhone you are locked into apple and also with the service provider due to contracts etc.. With Android you can choose to buy your own handset and take the plan of your choice without any contracts.
7. More Free Apps: Lots of free apps right from Wi-Fi hostspot to games are available. While many of these apps are charged on the iPhone.
8. Play you own ring tone! Apple doesn’t allow you to select any music from your collection as your ring tone, while Android has no such restrictions.
9. Expandable Memory: When you buy an Apple product, you better be sure how much memory you are going to need. You would either end up buying more than what you need or if you buy with less, you would always feel wish I had bought the model with higher memory. With Android, you have a choice of phones which has expandable memory slot. So if you every run out of memory in the phone, you can always add expandable memory.  This also works out cheaper.
10. OS upgrade make your phone faster. With iPhone, every time I would upgrade the OS, my phone would slow down.. it was tell me time to get the new  iPhone. With Android, upgrading to the newer version of the OS actually makes your phone faster. The upgrade on Android also doesn’t require iTunes or a PC, so can be done directly

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Motorola Atix the most powerful Android phone is now available for purchase.

US$599 without any contract and $129 with 2 year contact with AT&T.

Order Motorola Atrix on Amazon.

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Samsung has announced the I9100 Galaxy S II, here is whats new..

• 8 MP Camera
• 4.3″ Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen
• 16 or 32GB memory
• HSDPA 21 Mbps for high speed data downloads
• USB on the go, so you can connect other USB devices
• Full HD, with 1080p video recording
• Gyroscope sensor for gaming and other applications which require 3D orientation
• Dual Core 1GHZ processor
• Near Field Communications (NFC) support, which doesn’t have any application today but could be used in future for payments, etc.

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Samsung has discontinued Samsung I9000 Galaxy S and has replaced it with Samsung I9003 Galaxy SL, here is the difference:

• Sumer AMOLED display is replaced by Super Clear LCD. Resolution remains the same.
• Slight heavier 131 grams vs. 119 grams.
• Preloaded with Android 2.2, while Galaxy S has 2.1 but is upgradable to 2.2
• Has 16G storage, while the Galaxy S has 8 or 16.
• 1GHz Hummingbird (Samsung) processor is replaced by TI, speed remains the same.
• Battery has been bumped up from 1500mAh to 1650mAh, that answers the increase in weight.

Final Thoughts:

I don’t see much change in specification,  If you are using Galaxy S, you need not upgrade. If you are planning to buy a new one, you could get a good deal on Samsung Galaxy S. You can always add additional memory if you need and change the battery to 1650mAh.. since battery life was one big complain for Samsung Galaxy S users.

Samsung Galaxy S is available on Amazon for $539.

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Intel CEO Paul Otellini agrees with me

Otellini said Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop received “incredible offers — money” from Google and Microsoft to switch.

“I wouldn’t have made the decision he made, I would probably have gone to Android if I were him,”

Otellini said Nokia would find it hard to differentiate using the Windows platform: “It would have been less hard on Android, on MeeGo he could have done it.”

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After the Motorola Atrix which runs both Android and a Linux based OS, ARM showcased a TI OMAP4 based phone that runs Ubuntu and Android.

Todays phones have become powerful enough to as a phone as well as provide basic PC functionality. This should get more PCs accessible to People, as more people today have mobile phones than PCs.

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During Linaro/Ubuntu platform rally in Dallas I went to Best Buy and bought Nexus S as a phone which has to replace Nokia N900 which I used for over year. It was first time when I paid full price for such device — previously I took phones from operators or had some kind of discount (like DDP one for N900 year ago).

Switching from Nokia N900 to Nexus S was not easy task. First I lost calendar entries when tried to sync contacts to Google account using Mail for Exchange functionality of Maemo. Good that I had a backup… Copying of data from internal storage from one device to another was easy — microUSB cables are good to have thing. And then I took SIM card from N900, put it into Nexus and so far did not took it out yet.

Then came Market — after installing AppBrain application I had all applications, which I selected before or had on N900/Nitroid, installed properly. Then installed some more and removed some, added others etc. Common routine when you change operating system — finding which application suits best.

For Twitter I checked few and now I have official one and Plume installed. First one only to have contacts synced and do all tweeting in second one. For Facebook I use their default app — so far did not found replacement. Best situation was with e-mail client — installed K-9 Mail and added all my IMAP accounts into it. Now my phone tells me when do I have to check for new messages before my desktop one will notice ;D

Basically when it comes to applications Android shines (especially compared to Maemo). So far I found many programs for things which I did not had on N900: TV programme, public transportation guide, ATM finder and so on. And games! Dungeon Defenders, Gun bros and several others… Angry Birds has more levelpacks then Maemo version (but I never was a fan of that game anyway). Lot of things to choose from. Not to mention that installing of software is not so painful as it was on N900. You can use online Market, AppBrain and probably there are some other ways. Ok, I will probably miss APT but so far I am fine with what Android does. The most impressing thing is that during package installation device is not slowing down — it just adds one more entry to notification bar.

Notifications… I like how it is done. One place for icons on status bar which expands to whole screen list of what is going on. Nice stuff. Especially after installing some extra apps which will add there switches, weather informations etc.

Desktop looks different and has lot more customizations possible then hildon-desktop gave. And user can use other launcher then default one (I use ADW Launcher). Then just put widgets, icons, contacts, live wallpapers etc and you will be done. Business calendar which I use now can not be compared to Maemo parody of calendar (this is with most of apps anyway).

Do I miss some applications from Maemo? Yes, I do. Nokia did good job on Contacts and integration of IM/VoIP/Skype accounts. Under Android I did not yet found out how to get it in best possible way. So I have to run separate IM client (IM+ for now), Skype is also external (but contacts are synced into addressbook) and did not yet setup SIP accounts (but this is integrated). Good thing is that after first week of use I was able to use SkypeOut for calling my family in Poland.

But let’s get to hardware. Nexus S is light and small compared to N900. I like it’s look and feel. Screen works nicely for me everywhere. Before buying I was not sure how will I adapt to capacitive touchscreen after 8 years of using resistive ones but there was nothing to adapt to — it just works. Bigger problem is other direction — I need to press my TomTom harder now ;D Other issues? Lack of any kind of LED is a bit annoying. But NoLED helps a bit with it. Also WiFi reception looks worse then N900 had. But this one I need to check one day.

Overall I am satisfied about this change. I have phone which has latest version of popular operating system, have access to application market where there is a problem which app to install instead of “there is no application for this”. For some time I will have system updates provided by Google, then will switch to alternative firmware and will have current software.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Month with Nexus S was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Motorola has finally launched the Defy in India. This is 3 months after it was launched in US by T-Mobile. Motorola is improving, some of their other phones, took 4-5 months to be launched in India. Lets hope they launch the Atrix sooner in India.

Here is whats cool:

• Waterproof, scratchproof, dust proof. Should I say child proof ?
• 3.7″ touchscreen  display
• 5 Megapixel Camera with Video recording
• MicroSD Card slot for additional Memory
• 3G with HSDPA 7.2Mbps
• WiFi
• MicroUSB for charging (This is soon becoming a standard)
• 3.5mm standard headphones jack
• AGPS and Digital Compass
• Accelerometer, Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor
• Android 2.1 with Flash player, this will get upgraded to 2.2
• FM Radio

What would be nicer:

• Device should have shipped with 2.3 or atleast 2.2, no word yet on when it will receive 2.3 update
• Gyroscope for the gaming enthusiast
• Xenon flash for indoor night photography for the party animals
• HSDPA+ with 14.4Mbps
• AMOLED display.

Nevertheless its a nice phone for its price. Its available for Rs 18,900 at Croma.

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