A new player will be entering the mobile market space to help other phone manufacturers compete with Apple and BlackBerry. Google's mobile platform, called Android, is building upon some of the strength's of Apple's iPhone. Some features such as the 'slide to unlock' capabilities have been copied and enhanced allowing users to unlock their screen using a preset pattern as opposed to a left-to-right swipe. More significantly, it appears Google is establishing its' own Application Store modeled after Apple's imminent release of their own iPhone App store. The concept is that people can go to a secure, trusted place to download and install software for their phone. Some software will be free while others will cost users to download. The Apple model provides 70% of proceeds to go directly to the developer while 30% covers the hosting, purchasing, marketing and download bandwidth costs that Apple will incur. Google is expected to adopt a similar cost structure. Google's Android operating … [Read more...]
Google’s Android Mobile Platform
Microsoft: A Multi-Touching Moment!
Microsoft today demoed the new multi-touch portion of their next gen operating system Windows 7 yesterday at the All Things Digital conference. For those not familiar with multi-touch, it was brought into the main stream by Apple's iPhone in June of last year and lets users concurrently use multiple touches on their device's screen to perform commands or actions. An example is using a pinching motion with your fingers to zoom in when viewing a picture. The video below is a great demonstration of Windows 7 multi-touch capabilities. The interesting comment from Microsoft is that Multi-Touch will be built throughout the operating system. This change can be a dramatic one for programmers who will need to learn new APIs and coding tools to take advantage of the technology. As the technology is expected to be integrated into the next versions of Linux and Mac OS, we certainly hope that there is commonality when it is integrated into browser technology. The next version of the … [Read more...]
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