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By Chris Buerger
Following a recent trip to China, I acquired an Android tablet running Release 1.6 (Donut). Total retail price: $90. Unlike an iPad, it is both 'Designed and Made in China.' Running on an ARM platform and containing an 802.11 interface, SD card slot and a touch screen, it is actually a reasonably speedy experience. However, that is where the positive news ends.
By Paul Henderson
RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices.
By Paul Henderson
In my last posting I mentioned I'd be running a webinar with James Grenning on Agile testing. James is a recognized expert and frequent speaker on the topic of software development and one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
We talked about the case for agility where today's embedded software projects are inevitably faced with changing requirements and market conditions that cause unplanned, mid-course corrections. The result is what went in is often not what was expected to come out. Testing folks are the tail trying to wag the dog as they try to test in quality at the end of the project.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the next installment in my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.
By Chris Buerger
A couple of weeks ago, I read through a somewhat heated email thread about the ‘Big Reveal’ mentality that Intel and Nokia were claimed to apply to the pending MeeGo 1.0 release. By coincidence, the timing overlapped with the excitement Google was stirring up for its 2.2 (Froyo) release of Android. Both events made me wonder about the value of a ‘big reveal’ approach in mobile open source stacks, and whether there might not be developments that occur within rapidly maturing software stacks that are native and systemic to the open source model, and that at the same time change the potential impact of ‘Big Reveal’ releases of either Android or MeeGo.
By Mark Hermeling
I received a bunch of emails today pointing to this blog from Jason Perlow. Jason has an interesting thought with regards to the Apple and HTC lawsuit that is brewing. Let me first say that I understand that companies have to protect their IP and that there are clearly important and enforceable patents out there, say Coca Cola's formula for well, Coca Cola. Apple certainly has a lot of valuable IP as well and they are spending a lot of dollars in making the user experience better. Some of these patents are vague at best, so I have mixed feelings on this and since I am not a lawyer I am going to leave it at that.
Jason's blog evolves around hypervisors and his fantasy world in which they can change the way we build mobile phones. This is not a fantasy world, in the fact that what Jason wants is technically very possible. However, it would also require alliances between some of the fiercest competitors in one of the biggest markets in the world. Unlikely to happen, however, allow me to dream with him.
By Emeka Nwafor
Wow!!! OK, so how is it that a few innocent tweets about the iPad gets
me embroiled in a little Twitter /
blogosphere skirmish with a colleague?
Who would have thunk it? It's not just Schaefer, almost everyone seems
to have formulated an opinion or a prediction about the future of mobile
computing.
Following last week's announcement of the Apple iPad there has been an impressive flood of blogs, microblogs, and YouTube from pundits and pranksters, alike. I don't recall a technology preview that had as much publicly generated hype and excitement as the iPad announcement.
By Mark Hermeling
I believe that 2010 will be the year of embedded virtualization, all the
signs point in the right direction. It always takes a while for new
technology to grab the imagination of embedded device developers.
Embedded developers are traditionally a conservative bunch, however, the benefits of virtualization can not be ignored, even by them.
By Jason Whitmire
It is no secret: While Google continues to push for wide adoption of smartphones driven by its open source Android
platform, most industry pundits know that manufacturers typically need
upwards of a full year of development and productization effort (and
often Google’s help)
to develop an Android phone. Not surprisingly, it takes much longer for
an OEM to reach a level where they can irrigate the operator ecosystem
with differentiated phones based on Android (this of course applies to
most new mobile device software stacks).
At the same time, we are all aware that there are multiple parallel efforts to enhance Android that have led many observers to believe that fragmentation is inevitable. Ultimately, it is said, this will become the bane to developers who will struggle to reach an economy of scale on a moving target where multiple variants of the Android OS co-exist.
By Doug Schaefer
Boy I'm having fun with Android. Maybe because it's the first time I'm getting the chance (albeit in my spare time) to do some real embedded development. And even in the playing I'm doing, I am experiencing the challenges that regular embedded developers face. Yes, believe or not, even with the latest and greatest hardware, you are limited by the amount of memory and storage your device has, and by the speed and capabilities of the processor. Not to mention power (feel like running your graphics loop at full speed, see how long your battery lasts doing that). You really have to think about these things and write your code carefully to be successful. (And I won't get started on Java again).
One thing you still see in the rumoursphere with Android is the spreading of it's wings into the "smartbook" world. I love that term, Smartbook. Mobile Internet Device is too vague and I think there is a clear delineation between the tree contenders: smartphone, startbook, netbook. Smartphones are the small handheld things we know and love today. Netbooks are the small notebooks which likely have a hard drive in them. But Smartbooks are an exciting middle ground between the two. They have usable screens, 5-9 inches, but everything else is like a smartphone, particularly in mobility and power consumption. A good smartbook should last the day without charging making it handy for carrying around conferences like EclipseCon, for example :).
By Jason Whitmire
The announcement one year ago that Symbian will be open sourced under a license free platform in 1HCY10 was heard around the world. If we are to believe game theory, the motivations behind this move are not a non-zero sum game but rather one of rational choice by its major stakeholders. But what does Open Source Symbian really mean for all of the players involved? Recent press commentary on the announcement might suggest that the leading ascendant contenders for the unifying Open Source platform – Android, Moblin, and LiMo – will somehow be cannibalized by a resurgent Symbian platform that is "free."
Indeed, in the mobile industry, invariably, there is always that big announcement that gains mindshare from industry pundits who can see the future (I recall WCDMA handset launches enjoyed similar attention in 2000). However I believe the opposite is true in the case of Symbian, that its demise as it nears an end to a natural product lifecycle will only be accelerated when it is made available under an open source license next year.
Here are 7 reasons why I believe this to be the case:
By Emeka Nwafor
Mobile mania is upon us.
In recent days, we've been introduced to the awesome looking Palm Pre. The Pre is Palm's attempt to share some of the spotlight with Apple's innovative and popular iPhone. Apple has had a big role to play in feeding the Mobile mania frenzy and it too was in the news this week. I have to acknowledge that I count myself amongst the multitudes that watched and waited in anticipation of The Big Announcement at this week's Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference where the Apple iPhone 3.0 was introduced. Since its first release, I have always admired the iPhone and its cousin the iPod Touch. I see the iPhone 3.0 at its pricepoint as being similar to a standing-up double in baseball; a great hit that puts them in scoring position, but it didn't bring the runner home. I was hoping for something different - more on this later in this post...
By Mark Hermeling
Sometimes I get a chance to browse the web a bit, trying to find interesting tidbits. I ran into the following post from Hollis Blanchard. Hollis is an active participant in the world of virtualization, particularly on the Power architecture.
Hollis makes a point that I have been trying to get out as well: virtualization is clearly technology to look into when you are building multicore systems, but also when you are building unicore systems.
By Jason Whitmire
While we still don't know the impact of Ovi, iPhone, or Android on the dynamics of tomorrow's device landscape, we know that "End Users" have evolved into sophisticated buyers of new devices, especially as subsidies gradually decline. Although I don't think anyone quite knows where the value is going in the new mobile ecosystem (is it migrating to software, devices, services, networks, content…?), everyone is trying to understand how to best monetize the new mobile economy as relationships between all the players - operators, manufacturers, software developers and Internet /media companies - shift. There are no spellbinding stories yet.
In my last blog, I tried to formulate the term "mobile device investor" to drive as large a wedge as possible into the idea that mobile consumers are simply End Users - people who are unable to multitask when chewing bubblegum and only in search of a good application or service to contribute to self actualization. In today's world, mobile device investors are typically not End Users praying for the next killer application (these, as far as I have seen, do not really exist in the mobile market). Rather, consumers today are increasingly acting like investors and have heightened expectations for mobile devices - they expect these to continuously improve and evolve (Apple and Nokia are two of the few companies that deserve an underscore on this point). In this sense, devices increase the value of customer ownership in a big way (especially when combined with brand & access).
By Doug Schaefer
I was just reading up on the news that Imagination Technologies has launched a new generation of their architecture that drives POWERVR. What's POWERVR, you ask? It's a good question, but chances are, if you have a mobile device that has 3D accelerated graphics, it's driven by this hugely popular silicon IP.
The big news is that even they're going multi-core to achieve scalable graphics. They claim they rival the performance of discrete graphics chipsets, which I assume means the nVidias and ATI's of the world. That's a pretty interesting combination when you look at the latest chips that have multi-core ARM processors combined with DSPs (digital signal processors) for audio/video processing, which can then be combined with these powerful 3D cores.
By Jason Whitmire
I love the mobile industry because everyone, even my cat, has somehow turned into an industry sage, predicting that just about anything can and will happen in mobile as the dark clouds collect on the economic horizon. Are there any bright spots (to use an overused analogy this week) left in mobile after we hear of precipitous drops in chipset sales and phone volumes, slackening subscriber demand, and workforce "adjustments?" Well, while talking to a group of executives from a large global operator recently about "killer" things (the talk was about signature applications) I had an epiphany: isn't the recent creation of an entirely new device category that every single ISV, consortia, chipset vendor, consumer electronics company, OEM or ODM, and service provider are starting to coalesce around something to take note of? Clearly making a market and getting an entire technology industry to move on a dime is no easy trick, not even for companies like Google and Intel. Yet over the past two years, these companies have started to change the face of the mobile industry (I am not a sycophant in either camp so please reader, take heart). Indeed, Intel's creation of the MID category has turned on a perpetual motion machine that especially mobile network operators can no longer ignore given the enormous role that new devices play in adding new subscribers. Given that the MID software coming out is truly next generation (I have seen it), my view (pundits aside) is that MIDs will be the bright spot of 2010, as terminals with 4" screen diagonals fully cannibalize the ancient meaning of high-end smartphones and cause everyone from Apple to Orange to Nokia create slots for this device type.
Continue Reading »
By Doug Schaefer
So I was sitting watching my 40" HDTV the other day, and started thinking about why web browsing on a TV pretty much sucks, even with all the pixels you get at 1080i or what have you. And trust me, I tried it with our PS3 and other than watching YouTube videos, it's not a good experience.
But while I was sitting there on my couch (or sofa, depending on your English dialect) a pretty normal distance from the TV, I held my hands up to frame the size of the picture at arms length. Then lowering it to may lap, it struck me. The size of the picture isn't any bigger than a handheld gaming box, maybe slightly bigger than an iPod Touch (as I try to find one for my son's birthday on Thursday :( ).
By Jason Whitmire
Scene Setter
26 years after GSM was created to design a pan-European mobile technology, Mobile World Congress number 13 is set to take place in Barcelona in February. This time around, as they did when GSM World Congress was first held in Madrid in 1995, mobile network operators will dominate the scene.
Next month, however, the topic of discussion will not be new network deployments, or the latest traunch of jazzy new devices, or the next best application. Rather, Open Source will be topic Number 1 on the operator agenda in 2009. As changing operator strategies include the need for a strategic terminal platform that they can influence, the tectonic plates that once defined how a device was created and deployed are shifting and fueling significant change in the value chain.
A Brave, New Ecosystem
Whether it be the proliferation of phone development activity around Google’s Android stack, the phenomenal operator gravitation toward the LiMo Foundation, or Symbian’s intriguing announcement to open source its end-of-life cycle stack, the mobile industry is breaking out of the traditional controlled development environment to favor collaboration that accelerates innovation. The use of open source software in mobile is exploding from the operating system all the way up to the user experience, and Linux-based open source stacks are moving well beyond alpha stage with backing by industry heavy weights.
Indeed, the ubiquity of open source is causing not only a fundamental shift in proprietary OEM software deployment, but also accelerating the opening of the operator walled garden. As VisionMobile’s Andreas Constantinou – arguably the industry’s most astute pundit of open source in mobile – has pointed out, strategic “shared” core software platforms are “in” (versus supporting and maintaining up to ten proprietary stacks in an operator portfolio).
Innovating on a Perceived Commodity
Given that almost every major operator has now launched some sort of Linux device, operator versions of open source stacks are entering the optimization phase, aiming to reduce costs of bringing new Linux devices to market, more rapidly evolve on-device and network-based services, and speed application testing and certification. These highly optimized stacks will allow the operators and their OEM and ISV partners to shift the focus of innovation from the baseline software to the applications, services, and user experiences that will ultimately provide the basis for differentiation and subscriber and revenue growth.
At the same time, the complexity of open source coupled with proprietary software assets has forced operators to quickly get smart – few companies in mobile offer the indemnification, quality metrics, warranties, and SLAs that were intrinsic to the fully proprietary software paradigm. Yet this is exactly what the operators and their partners seek to allow them to overcome the last business hurdle to open source adoption.
Take-aways, Before You Reach Costa Brava
Have fun !
Jason Whitmire has more than 15 years of executive marketing and management experience in semiconductor and system software. He currently serves as General Manager of Wind River’s Mobile Solutions business. Previously he was a managing director of FSMLabs, where he headed the worldwide wireless and EMEA businesses, and he was head of business development for wireless software at Infineon Technologies for four years. Additionally, Jason has held senior product management, marketing and business development positions at two European mobile network operators. Jason got his start in the wireless arena in 1993 while representing the US government in international spectrum and privatization negotiations.
By Doug Schaefer
I was just reading the slides presented from the kick-off meeting of the Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group. I believe this is the first working group at Eclipse and I think it's a great concept. Bring groups of companies together that are interested in the same or similar technologies and do some planning. Hopefully that will result in new investments in various Eclipse projects.
Anyway, one of the examples of work environments shown was for a J2ME developer. The first thing that jumped into my head, and of course I'm writing this entry without thinking more so I may come off a bit misinformed here but hey I'm just the dumb C++ guy, but who cares about J2ME any more? With the rich mobile development environments provided with Android, the iPhone, the new Palm Pre, and even Qt for mobile devices, why would you do J2ME development any more. Isn't there much more opportunity for greater riches writing apps for these new and wildly popular environments?
By Doug Schaefer
I've been following the Palm Pre story a bit the last few days. While the technical details are still pretty sparse, it appears that one of my predictions for 2009 is already starting to happen.
My understanding, and I hope it isn't coming from sources who are also using the same technique to guess at the architecture of this thing, is that the UI for the Palm is rendered totally using WebKit. It appears that the applications for this device are written in JavaScript and use HTML and maybe WebKit's SVG support to render the graphics. Hell, maybe it's even using Dojo to make things look really sharp.
By Doug Schaefer
My Khronos.org News feed filled up all of a sudden today. Looks like they've been busy and had a couple of announcements to make.
They released a new version of the 2D OpenVG spec.
They added some APIs for text glyphing to make it easier to draw good looking text. I'm not sure anyone really uses OpenVG, especially when you are most likely to be drawing 2D in a web browser with Adobe Flash or SVG (and even then, most likely Flash). From the news release, this is probably most interesting to the mobile crowd.
By Doug Schaefer
Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.
The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.
By Doug Schaefer
Apparently the word leaked on an unofficial Google blog site and they followed up with an "oops" official blog post. Either way, the word is out and the web browser "industry" is in for a shake up. Google is releasing their own web browser called Google Chrome. Apparently it includes pieces from Webkit (I'm guessing the browser part) and Firefox (I'm guessing the chrome part) and will be developed as an open source project.
The first beta will be released tomorrow (Tuesday). I've heard rumors but always dismissed them. Why would they do that when we have a handful of pretty good browsers already. I guess the rumors were true and given the beta comes out now, it's been in the works for a while.
By Doug Schaefer
Quite a while ago now I posted about the open source gaming device from Korea know as the GP2X. At the end of the day, it ended up with a storied history and while I love the concept of a handheld mobile device for which you can write your own applications, their execution as a company out side of Korea wasn't that great and only a distributor in the UK was able to make any kind of splash with it.
At any rate, I found on Slashdot that they have announced a new generation of the product called the Wiz. The links lead you to the UK site and a big JPEG of the brochure in English. The specs look pretty good, ARM9 processor at 533MHz, 3D accelerated graphics, Linux of course, and support for audio and video making it a pretty cool multimedia gaming machine, for which you can write your own applications. And hopefully they'll be a bit more successful at delivering it than the last one.
By Doug Schaefer
Well, if you follow the embedded industry even from a distance, the news that the Android SDK has gone beta is old news by now. I've been so busy p2-izing our upcoming Wind River products that I haven't had time to write here. Time to get my priorities straight :).
Any whoo, there's a lot of competition all of a sudden for mind share in the mobile Linux game. Android has been pretty quiet lately but they've clearly been busy beavers and a real Android-based device seems imminent, so it's time to take them seriously.
By Doug Gaff
It's been a few months since the initial buzz of the Android SDK release, and the technology itself continues to look great. Ed Burnette recently posted a blog indicating Android will be 100% open source.
In it he notes that Google says they fully intend to open up all of
their code using appropriate open source licenses (including EPL!), but
they're not yet ready because some of the API's aren't done. They're
afraid of having to support bad API's forever. Yes, that sounds
familiar, and of course the Eclipse response is: maybe if they opened
up their API's, others could then help them evolve those API's to a
point where the overall community was happy. We have provisional API's
in Eclipse for exactly this reason. At a minimum, I wish Google would publish a timetable (gasp!) for getting this code opened up. Ed says Google will open (most) everything by the end of 2008. Please see the comments for details.
I want to revisit the two requests I made in my original post.
By Paul Parkinson
A few months ago I commented on some of the technical developments in passenger in-flight systems ('In-flight Internet access...and mobile phones too?'). In recent weeks, there have been some rapid developments, not on the technical front, but in terms of regulation and operation, with announcements from the UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom and the European Commission.
On the 26th March, Ofcom published the results of its consultation on the use of Mobile Communications on Aircraft (MCA). The executive summary summarizes the findings and Ofcom's decisions, but the full statement (PDF) provides much more detail, revealing a mixture of social, operational, safety and security issues.
By Paul Tingey
There seems to have many news stories about the imminent rise of 3G technology in the UK over the last few years. Looking back these stories would seem to have heralded repeated false dawns with 3G being relegated to little more than another mobile voice calling technology. However we now seem to have positive proof that 3G based mobile broadband is becoming a viable alternative to (or addition to) more traditional broadband technologies for UK users.
In a blog entry titled Mobile net takes off, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC includes what he describes as "an extraordinary graph" showing how the amount of data crossing the 3 mobile operator's 3G network has increased 14 fold in just six months.
By Jason Whitmire
Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. In the Linux world, creating an esoteric, theoretical application standard not based on market-driven code requires too much speculative investment without any clear mitigation of ROI risk for anyone to take up anymore. Indeed, the days of a bunch of representative techies flying to exotic locales to dream up the theoretical perfect system are over. It’s just too expensive to completely retool an entire stack without a known intrinsic return.
Because of the concentration in the mobile market (83% of handsets manufactured by five companies), when market leaders have invested in a stack, it is a standard whether certified by an arcane standards body or not. The Open Handset Alliance has created a de facto market standard not because a group of market leaders have adopted the standard, but because of Google’s overall singular market weight. The effect is the same (Trolltech and OpenMoko did the same thing that OHA did, and took it one step further by actually building a phone, but no one came running to embrace their reference designs because they lacked the market weight that Google has).
Continue Reading »By Paul Parkinson
I read a business article in the Economist ('Mobile Phones on planes - Your call') during the Christmas holidays about the current developments in passenger in-flight systems, specifically the provision of Internet data access and the potential to support mobile (cell) phone voice calls during flight.
The article reports on trials of a Wi-Fi data service by JetBlue and Quantas, and a forthcoming mobile phone voice call trial by Air France (which follows on from the mobile phone SMS text messaging described in this Air France press release); it then goes on to discuss the social impact and acceptability of Internet data access and mobile voice calls during flight, which makes interesting reading.
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