There’s a reason smartphones are locked down
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, smartphone, linux, Google, Apple on
If Google’s Android OS is open source, why is the company going after an Android developer? Because not everything that you think of as Android is actually open source.
CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ is an alternative, unauthorised, third-party version of Android for Android phones. As Android is an open source operating system, why has Google hit the developer behind it with a cease and desist letter? Because the Google Maps, Android Market, Google Talk, Gmail and YouTube applications on Google’s own Android builds are Android apps rather than part of the OS - and they’re not open source. That means Google has every right to tell the developer behind Cyanogen that he can’t distribute them as part of his build http://androidandme.com/2009/09/hacks/cyanogenmod-in-trouble. Google told Intel the same thing back in the spring when it was trying out Android on netbooks. Search, and the apps powered by search, are where Google makes its money and they’re not open source and you can’t use them without permission. Parts of the Android SDK are proprietary as well.
Microsoft has never seriously gone after the developers on sites like XDA Developers who create ‘cooked’ ROMs for Windows Mobile devices. That might be because Microsoft makes its Windows Mobile money by selling licences to the phone manufacturers. There’s also the fact that many of the XDA developers work for phone manufacturers and mobile operators and have a fairly good understanding of what you don’t want a phone to be able to do - as least as far as the phone network is concerned.
The mobile networks have a rather ambivalent attitude to open source on phones. On one hand, anything that makes it easier to make powerful phones cheaply is good, because it costs them less to subsidise. Plus open source should make it cheap for developers to create apps for the platform. This is a big change in attitude because an open, easy to configure, easy to develop for platform is also very scary for the operators because they’re paranoid about a rogue - or just badly-written - app or phone taking down the phone network. That’s why the OpenMoko phone - a truly open phone - never got very far; the operators were just too worried about having it on their network.
Vodafone’s support of the JIL platform in the 360 launch shows that the networks have realised - with a lot of help from the iPhone app store - that having lots of apps on a phone is a good thing. The reason Windows Mobile looks so far behind in the app space isn’t that it’s hard to develop good apps for - although the mix of screen resolutions and Compact and Micro Framework versions certainly doesn’t help. It isn’t just that it’s too complicated to find, install and uninstall apps (I can’t find a good version of Spider solitaire from a site that I trust and I can’t find a way to get Windows Live off now that I’ve realised that having Hotmail on my phone isn’t worth it if it’s going to slow down the mail interface this much). It’s also that the over-cautious operators held back the first wave of app developers by insisting on lengthy certification and approval systems.
The operators are a lot more confident now (although there were still some nerves at the Vodafone 360 launch yesterday - “Is opening up our network services like this a good thing?” asked one spokesperson rhetorically; “we hope so!”). It’s also interesting that despite being a member of the Open Handset Alliance, instead of following Motorola down the Android route Vodafone has put MotoBlur-competitor Vodafone People onto the LiMo platform instead. Linux Mobile (and Maemo and Moblin) aren’t just different flavours of Linux from Android (which Google says is built on the Linux kernel, but is not actually Linux); they’re Linux-based mobile operating systems that Google doesn’t control.
Handset manufacturers and operators like Linux phones for lots of reasons. They like open source for lots of reasons. But for an industry that contributes as much to UK GDP as the oil and gas industry, few of those reasons are connected with the philosophy of openness that draws developers like Cyanogen.
–Mary
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
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Motorola Android phone announcing mid September
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, smartphone, Windows Mobile, Hardware on
Finally, another Android manufacturer steps up (though they don’t want you to know yet).
Motorola is sending out invitations for an event on September 15th that are deliberately mysterious; “Unfortunately, we are not able to give you any more details at present”, says the email; “however, over the coming weeks we will be able to reveal more”. Given that the invitation has the Android robot log on, it’s a fair bet that this will mark the UK announcement of the Motorola ‘Morrison’ and ‘Scholes’ Android phones. The rumours say both will have keyboards and large screens; Morrison looks like an old HTC design with rounded corners (or, say, a much thicker iPhone with a slide-out keyboard) , Scholes looks more like a Sony Experia, with bevelled edges. Rather more important than the case are what the phones will offer over HTC’s Android range, what Android means for Motorola - and what Motorola means for Android.
Back in the day, with the StarTAC, Motorola invented the mobile phone, then watched Nokia take the market away. The RAZR was the definitive feature phone, back in 2004. As Motorola needs more than one successful handset a decade to stay in business, they’ve tried every phone operating system - including going back to Symbian after abandoning it. None of them have turned into signature devices that sell like the iPhone and the BlackBerry and those billions of Nokia handsets (not to mention all the million-selling Windows Mobile devices HTC has come up with). The Android phones come out of a project that was rumoured to pit Android, Windows Mobile and a couple of other smartphone operating systems head to head; Android - or the hype around Android - won that battle. Just as HTC has said half of its handsets next year will be Android devices (a plan that’s unlikely to get the company any more photo opportunities with senior Microsoft staff), Motorola thinks Android will put it back on top. Er, only if the phones are any good.
Good, for an Android phone, has to include running all the Android apps that are on the market for the HTC devices. The Australian company that planned to make the second Android phone ever dropped the idea when it realised the smaller screen it planned would mean problems with apps that expected the same screen size as the G1. Windows Mobile developers and handset makers have dealt with this for years, with multiple screen sizes and resolutions and it’s rare to find software with a button hanging off the bottom of the screen; iPhone developers will have to cope with it if the rumoured Apple tablet really does run iPhone apps on a bigger screen. Windows developers can get a nasty shock when they look at their apps on a netbook and discover key buttons are hidden by the Windows taskbar because they just don’t fit on screen. Part of being a platform is making it easy for developers to put their code on every device and form factor that runs the OS. If the Motorola devices don’t have the same screen resolution as HTC Android phones, we’ll see how well Android enables multiple screen sizes. If they do, that only postpones the question; with so many handset manufacturers dabbling with Android, competing with HTC is going to mean trying different device sizes and styles rather than just making cosmetic changes.
Of course, Motorola isn’t only competing with HTC’s Android phones; leaving aside all the other smartphones on the market, there are still those Windows Mobile devices HTC dabbles in, like the Touch Pro2. I’ve been waiting for this since February and using it for the last few weeks - and it was well worth the wait. It’s got a big screen and a beautiful keyboard and intuitive, easy to use touch gestures (and yes, that is the first time I’ve ever been complimentary about TouchFLO). It’s fast - I think faster than the 1GHz Toshiba TG01 for a lot of what you actually do on a phone. And it’s clever; you get the phone equivalent of Reply All to email - you can pick and choose multiple people and make your own conference call. You get the PIN for a dial-in conference call up on screen ready to type in. And when you turn the phone over, it turns into a speakerphone with really good speakers - and a mute button for when the cat throws up in the middle of your call and you don’t want anyone to know you’re working from home. If the Motorola handsets have anything half as useful or innovative, they’ll be well worth a look.
And actually, we don’t need to wait until the 15th to find out what Motorola has on offer; the US event is five days earlier, so the main news will be the price and the operator for the UK.
-Mary
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Groundbreaking Intel Nokia deal produces – another netbook
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, smartphone, Android, Hardware, Laptop, Microsoft, Mobile, Internet, Apple on
But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.
Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).
The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.
Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.
That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”
Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.
Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).
If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary
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Office 2010 protects you – from your own documents
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Beta, Android, Applications, Office, Security, Networking, Microsoft on
Remember macro viruses? Trojans and bots have taken over from them in the virus top ten, but there could easily still be binary Office documents lurking in your business’s fileservers with unwanted code in them. The XML file formats introduced with Office 2007 mean you know when a document has a macro by the file extension (an XLSX file can’t have code in, an XLSM can) but even though XML files are smaller as well as more secure, not everyone wants to spend the time to convert a backlog of many years. So to protect you from anything worrying, Office 2010 introduces a Protected View that locks documents when you open them, and runs in an isolated, low-integrity process with a restricted token (rather like combining the protected mode that IE 8 runs in with the secure desktop you see with UAC elevation prompts - Protected View uses the same User Interface Privilege Isolation).
As the Office engineering blog post puts it, “For a malware to actually be able to run in Protected View it will first need to find a way around DEP, ASLR, GS and our new 2010 Office File validation checks. After all that, the malware would need to find a way to break out of the sandbox.”
The Office team is confident enough in Protected View that opening and previewing attachments from Outlook will get less annoying; you won’t have to say yes, you trust every different type of document to open and preview individually the first time you come across it. It seems like a welcome security measure that will make life easier too. Sadly, as implemented it’s currently a productivity blocker that will be turned off or loathed by every user that comes across it.
On my system at least, every single document I open in Office 2010, binary or XML, from the office network is opened in Protected Mode and tagged as coming from ‘an unsafe location’. That’s supposed to be for documents downloaded from the Internet (”When a file is downloaded from the Internet the Windows Attachment Execution Service places a marker in the file’s alternate data stream to indicate it came from the Internet zone,” says the Office Engineering blog) and I’m kind of offended that Microsoft is telling me that our network isn’t secure - it is Windows Server 2008 we’re running. I’m also losing time on every document, having to click through before I can start editing.
I tried turning Protected View off; you can’t. You can go into the Trust center, ignoring the sign that tells you not to go in there and not to change anything, and tell Office to trust network documents (again, ignoring the warning that a network is a scary place and you shouldn’t be trusting it) but that didn’t fix it. I had to manually add the file shares on the server, mount point by mount point. You can’t just give office the name of your file server and trust the whole thing; Office refuses to mark the root of the server as safe.
This isn’t supposed to happen, says Microsoft. In some cases, the proxy settings are to blame (check out The LIZ and Proxies: the surprising connection for an explanation by Eric Lawrence of the IE team of why proxies are involved in the intranet at all. We don’t use a proxy. Maybe the Local intranet setting in Internet Options isn’t set to ‘Automatically detect’? It is, as it happen.
Ah, says the Office team; it’s a bug, and they’re working on it. That’s good news; if I only have to put up with this until the beta of Office 2010 this autumn, that’s fair enough - you expect problems when you use a ‘technical preview’ (or alpha code as we used to call it).
But the fact that Office 2010 is relying on Internet Explorer options that may or may not apply if you don’t have Internet Explorer on your system is a little worrying (Firefox doesn’t use security zones, for example). And Simon, who is joined to the domain doesn’t see Protected View on network documents. So the underpinnings of Protected view seem to be a tangle of Internet Explorer, Active Directory and Microsoft network settings; that’s fine for an all-Microsoft business - like Microsoft. It’s less useful for the rest of the world where heterogeneous networks are the norm and security is important - but will always get demoted if it gets in the way of getting your job done. Let’s hope the bug fix does more than just tweak things; Protected View uses a spiffy new architecture inside Windows and it needs to take a clear and manageable approach to defining what a ’safe’ or ‘unsafe’ location actually is, or it’s going to be unpopular and insecure (cue everyone copying documents onto their laptop to edit them without the nagging and leaving them in the pub car park).
-Mary
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When the fat lady sings for the mobile web, is it the end of the Opera Mini?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, Cloud, Web browser, Mobile on
We’ve been helping a friend get to grips with mobile browsing on his aging BlackBerry. It’s one that’s old enough that it doesn’t get the new browser that arrived with the Bold, so he’d been using Opera Mini to at least get something that approached a decent browsing experience. Even so he was hitting what I think of as the mobile browsing wall: the mobile web is not the web we get on our desktops.
Our friend uses a lot of online forums, and Opera Mini was starting to show its limitations. Most of the social aspects of the sites were lost as he was redirected to mobile versions of the sites - with drastically cut down user interfaces. The in-cloud reformatting the Opera Mini was doing wasn’t helping, either…
Opera recently sent us a whole pile of statistics about how people are using their Mini browser. The numbers make interesting reading, with impressive numbers of people using the service to view huge numbers of web pages. But if I was running Opera I would be getting very worried about my mobile business indeed…
“Nokia phones continue to be the handsets of preference for Opera Mini users, with Sony Ericsson claiming second place. BlackBerry and Samsung phones are the preference in the United States.”
Nokia is in the process of rolling out a WebKit-based browser, which should bring iPhone class browsing to much of its Symbian platform. Sony Ericsson is enroute to Android, and while its Java-based feature phone platform works well for Opera, new Java-based platforms like Bolt are rolling out that give users access to a much more powerful in-cloud browser, with support for Flash and for Silverlight. BlackBerry will get a significant browser upgrade in the autumn with the release of BlackBerry OS 5.0, and our Windows Mobile in-cloud browser of choice SkyFire is currently testing its own BlackBerry version. Samsung’s own browser is also in the middle of upgrading.
The foundations of the Opera Mini business model are crumbling. What was a story of broken browsers and unsatisfying online experiences is changing into one where high end devices like the iPhone are changing the way users think about mobile browsing - and mobile device manufacturers are having to follow. Opera needs to make a jump that takes its desktop rendering engine into the cloud, rather than the current service.
It’ll be interesting to see if Opera Mini can evolve to deal with the demands of its users.
Oh, and our friend?
He’s now using the beta of Bolt and finding the mobile web a much more desktop-like place.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Augmented Reality gets, well, real
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Android, Navigation, Applications, IBM, Mobile on
Today is the first day of Wimbledon, and it’s also the release of IBM’s first consumer augmented reality application, Seer (for Android mobile devices).
Here’s Seer in action:
Augmented reality is one of the upcoming killer applications for mobile devices, where the built-in sensors mix with geocoded information to tell you just what you’re seeing - and at the same time give you more information about it. Seer’s an annotated window into the Wimbledon, using the device’s camera, built-in GPS, compass, and G-sensor. The combination of the four lets the software know where the phone is, and where it is pointing - and at what angle - at which point it overlays relevant information on the camera view of the world, in your own personal heads-up display.
What IBM is doing is an interesting example, as it links straight into IBM’s Wimbledon data feeds (and its Twitter stream!). It’s easy to see how this type of tool can be adapted to business applications. Plug Seer into a logistics feed, and you’ll be able to “see” just what’s in each package on a shop floor, or in each truck on a loading dock. Perhaps it’ll help your sales staff identify the products your customers are using, or give estate agents a new tool for annotating houses.
Seer’s not the only AR application out there. I’ve been playing with a shiny new HTC Magic for a few weeks now, the G-2 Android phone in the guise of a Google ION developer device, and as part of my explorations I’ve been looking for interesting applications in the Android Market. That’s where I found one of the nicest pieces of mobile software I’ve seen - Google Sky Map.
It’s not surprising that Google has done such a good job with this software, after all, Android is their phone platform, and they should know it (and the reference hardware inside out). The folk in Mountain View also have a huge database of data they can take advantage of - in the shape of Google Earth and all its varied information layers. Where Sky Map differs from most computer based star maps is that it’s live.It then calculates the current view, and displays it. Google is augmenting reality, making it part of its world of search.
On a deeper level it’s actually a specialised version of what Mary calls a “What’s-That”, a device that when pointed at something, well, just does that. It annotates the world with an overlay of information to give us the information we want and need. Phones don’t have the power needed to deliver that level of image recognition, but they do know where you are. Constrain the problem to maps of the heavens, and you’ve got a winner on your hands.
The sky at night can be confusing - with light pollution and high cloud making identification hard. Just being able to point a phone in the right direction to get the names of the objects you can see is an excellent solution to the problem. After all, it’s the most personal of devices and one that’s going to be with us when we most need it.
Then there’s Wikitude, which is a step even further in the direction of the What’s-That, using the device camera and the device sensors to overlay points of interest from geo-coded data in Wikipedia and Qype on the phone screen.
Here it is, letting me know what’s in the world outside a hotel room somewhere in Oregon. There’s still not enough data in the world of public geo-coded information - but what there is is enough to make you want more.
You know, I really like living in the future.
(I’ll go into all the hassles involved in screen-capping Android another time!)
–Simon
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