Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

I am in shock by this news, but that is the only rational explanation: I am sure Yahoo knows that BlackBerry Curve is the number one smartphone in US, Symbian is still the number one mobile OS globally, and Android share could explode late this year.

Yahoo! has decided to cease development of the Yahoo! Mobile smartphone app effective Wednesday, May 20th. So you will not be provided access to the beta program for this product.

For the time being, we will be focusing our efforts on the newly-launched Yahoo! Mobile experience for browsers (available at new.m.yahoo.com) and for the iPhone (available via the Apple App Store).

It is the time to open source the Blueprint platform?

Last February AOL announced that AOL Open Mobile Platform would be available at summer time. Since then I did not notice any big news about it. There is no announcement on AOL OMP website or blog yet, but I received an email about OMP 1.0 release:

You have previously registered on the AOL Developer Network site http://dev.aol.com to receive more information about the AOL Open Mobile Platform when it becomes available. This message is to let you know that the AOL Open Mobile Platform 1.0 code is now available for download on SourceForge.net at the URL https://sourceforge.net/projects/openmobileplt/.

Please use the SourceForge Developer Forums for the project to send questions to the OMP team.

As AOL promised, OMP supports BREW, Java ME, Blackberry, Windows Mobile (C++ only?), Symbian and even Maemo. Android and iPhone are not in the list, since this project is based on some work from AirMedia in 2005. The source code is released under Apache License 2.0, together with documentation and sample applications (MapQuest, OpenAIM, Photo Viewer, LBS Coupon, RSS Reader.) The server package is Java based.

The following quotes from the original announcement probably is the best summary about what it is:

The AOL Open Mobile Platform is based on proven technology acquired by AOL that has been deployed across more than 150 different handsets on carrier networks in the U.S. The platform will consist of three components: an XML-based, next-generation markup language; an ultra-lightweight mobile device client; and an application server. A dynamic presentation layer will allow for rapid deployment of new features and easy optimization for a wide variety of mobile devices, allowing developers to build and update applications once, and then distribute them across all supported devices and platforms.

In addition, it will be possible to integrate applications built using the AOL Open Mobile Platform with third-party APIs, as well as with AOL’s open APIs for AIM, AOL Mail, AOL Video, MapQuest, Userplane, Truveo, Winamp, and others. The AOL Open Mobile Platform will also give developers the ability to monetize their mobile applications by utilizing advertising resources, such as clickable banner ads, provided by AOL’s Platform-A.

This video is hilarious: “When Bluetooth, Car Phone and BlackBerry team up, iPhone gets what he deserves.”

Thank you Dave for sending me the link!

I did not notice Qualcomm’s new BREW Mobile Platform developer site until today. It is quite a surprise to me that everyone jumps to big version number (Java from 1.5 to 5.0 for instance), Qualcomm decided to move the number backwards from BREW 4.x to BREW MP 1.0. It seems to start all over again.

One very positive move is that Qualcomm now provides Eclipse based plugin in addition to Visual Studio based tools. GNU Compiler tool (MinGW) is officially supported. Before you had to have some hassle to use the GNU tool chain. In the early days I tried GNUDE, then WinARM. It was quite a pain, especially I am not an expert in C/C++ cross compiler settings.

This news seemed to be buried in other hot news in mobile industry such as Android related. Maybe it is because the close platform nature of Qualcomm BREW, there are only very few blogs cover BREW programming topics.

I got my T-Mobile G1 last week. I took this picture and then found this collection happens to cover a good range of different mobile OSes: Google Android, Windows Mobile Standard Edition, Symbian S60, an old Pocket PC Phone (now Windows Mobile Professional Edition) and Maemo. The last one is not a phone. It is a Garmin Nuvi 350. Gaimin actually is working on a mobile phone - Nuvifone. It seems to be delayed till some time next year.

There are a lot reviews about T-Mobile G1 and I do not want to repeat again here. The GMail push email works very well. Most of the time I receive emails from my phone first, then it appears on the desktop GMail web site. There are decent amount of applications available from Android Market to play with. The only complaint I have at this moment is the battery life. It is significantly shorter than the Nokia E61. I have to charge it everyday for sure.