David Caabeiro's Forum Nokia Blog

Google's Android mobile OS announced

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:57:05 +0100

At this pace, mobile application development is probably bound to become one of the most fragmented software activities.

Today Google announced Android, "the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.", following the (quiet) acquisition of the company ( http://www.android.com ) two years ago.

Besides Google's name (as if that weren't enough), 34 other companies (forming the Open Handset Alliance) are involved in the platform: T-Mobile, HTC, Motorola and Qualcomm, just to name a few.

Besides the initial buzz, this will probably bring some interesting news in the next few weeks.

More info:

http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html

WDF / 3GSM (P.I.P.S.)

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:16:18 +0100

Among the several talks in the Symbian WDF, I was quite interested in the one on PIPS. The presentation (by Erik Jacobson from Symbian) turned out to be pretty interesting and enlightening. Having worked in some porting projects in the past, and suffering many of the shortcomings of the estlib (now soon to be deprecated), there seems to be at last some good news for future porting developing.

Here're some highlights:

- select() is supported: this single addition makes the whole project worth to me :)
- exec() / fork() are not supported, as they would require many changes in the kernel (use posix_spawn() instead)
- Many IPC mechanisms supported: pipes, fifos, etc.
- Signals and thus asynchronous I/O is not supported
- dlsym() cannot be used with symbolic names, use ordinals instead (there could be some facility provided in the future though, to ease development)
- Carbide.c++ v1.2 is intended to support PIPS development (v9.3+ will introduce new target types: STDEXE & STDDLL). Anyway you can always rely on the good old command line.

PIPS was originally intended for v9.3, but given that most functionality works in v9.1, there will be a sis available to that OS version.
To prove its effectiveness, an independent company ported the TightVNC client for both S60 and UIQ.

To start to get a feeling out of it, I'd recommend you keep an eye on the P.I.P.S. Home @ DevNet , starting with the freely downloadable booklet.

3GSM 2007

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:12:43 +0100

3GSM starts tomorrow. Besides the usual stuff, new devices announcements (E90 maybe?) and launchings there will be many interesting news and events for developers: S60 3rd ed. feature pack 2 will be demoed, there will be a technical explanation on PIPS from the Symbian guys at the WDF, among other things.

Symbian itself will have an engagement zone and lifestyle lounge, definitely having a stronger presence than in the last year's show. Stay tuned through their 3gsm page:

Symbian 3GSM home
Symbian at 3GSM blog
Nokia 3GSM

If going to Barcelona, make sure you get an AmiGO (a free LBS application from Symbian)