There was a brief, tense pause in the bidding this morning, but some anonymous giant telecom company (Google, perhaps?) has just pushed the price of the 700MHz C-block over the FCC’s reserve price of $4.6B — and the rest of us straight into the promised land of open access. Yep, January 31, 2008, Round 17 will be the day to remember — to think it was all a dream, we used to read Free Spectrum magazine.

[via Engadget Mobile]

If you’re in Canada, the UK, France, or Germany, then say hello, bonjour, or Guten Tag to faster and more intuitive search on your mobile phones. Starting today, our new mobile search experience is available in these four countries, giving you access to the information you need with minimal effort and distraction.

One of the ways we do this is by bringing you the most relevant result for your query, regardless of whether it’s a local result, a web result, or what have you. If you enter a search for [sunflower] (”tournesol” in French or “Sonnenblumen” in German) for example, we know you could be interested in pictures of sunflowers in addition to web results. Another new feature is the ability to remember your recent search locations, so we can provide useful local results when you search the next time — no need to retype the location! It takes just a few clicks to get listings for nearby restaurants, weather reports, and other information tailored to where you are.

To access our new mobile search service, point your mobile browser to the following: www.google.ca (Canada), www.google.co.uk (UK), www.google.fr (France), or www.google.de (Germany).

[via Official Google Mobile Blog]

Mobile Linux company Azingo, formerly Celunite, today announced Azingo Mobile, a comprehensive suite of open mobile software and services designed to help companies deliver web 2.0 applications, music, video, vivid graphics and more to a wide range of mobile phones. Leveraging the economies of open source innovations and based on LiMo and its ecosystem Azingo Mobile provides a less costly and more flexible platform for designing and deploying mobile devices. The platform will be demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, (Azingo booth 2.1D57 and LiMo booth 8B135), Feb 11-14, 2008.

Available for immediate licensing, the Azingo Mobile platform enables handset manufacturers and operators to leverage a rich suite of “out of the box” mobile applications that “plug-in” to a comprehensive and pre-integrated open mobile middleware framework and kernel. Supported by a powerful SDK and development tools, Azingo Mobile lets OEM, operators and ISVs build and customize innovative services and user experiences. Azingo Mobile’s one-stop-shop approach reduces development costs, shortens the time to bring new handset designs to market, and enables lower cost phones offering the latest multimedia and UI innovations.

Guido Arnone, director of terminals technology at Vodafone said: “We welcome Azingo’s mobile Linux platform to the LiMo Foundation. Azingo Mobile’s ability to provide lower-cost, Internet-enabled mobile phones helps support LiMo’s goal to create a true mass-market platform and surrounding ecosystem that will deliver compelling handsets and rich user experiences.”

“Azingo Mobile has received significant interest from the industry’s leading handset manufacturers and operators,” said Mahesh Veerina, CEO of Azingo. “Our product is offered on 13 different hardware platforms from seven of the industry’s leading silicon providers. Azingo technology is a core component of the LiMo Foundation common integration environment and our support of LiMo specifications ensures that devices powered by Azingo Mobile will contribute to the growth and unification of mobile Linux.”

(more…)

*UPDATE*

Dell has denied all claims of making a Google phone.  More here

Speculation is mounting that Google is plotting the launch of a mobile phone in partnership with computer giant Dell. Senior industry sources claim the two companies will reveal their plans at next month’s 3GSM telecoms conference in Barcelona, al-though Google insiders deny an announcement is due in the near future.

But the rumors will once again throw the spotlight on Google’s mobile strategy, which has been the subject of much conjecture over the last year. There had been widespread talk of Google launching its own handset, known as the “Gphone”, to go up against Apple’s iPhone, which launched in November last year. But the world’s largest search engine surprised the industry by announcing an operating system for mobile phones called Android. The software makes it easier for developers to create mobile applications that run on many different handsets.

Android, which will be available this year, will bring all of Google’s online services to mobile users. At present, mobile phones use a variety of operating systems to access the internet, including systems from Microsoft and London-based Symbian.

Marketing Week revealed last year that Dell was also planning a move into mobile phones after poaching Motorola executive Ron Garriques to run its new global consumer group (MW March 1, 2007).

Dell already produces personal digital assistants (PDAs) and strategy analytics director Neil Mawston says: “It makes sense for Dell to have a high-profile entry back into the market because its last effort with PDAs pretty much flopped.”

[via MarketingWeek]

We’d like to let you know that we are extending the submission deadline for the first Android Developers Challenge to 14 April 2008. Based on the great feedback you’ve given us, we’ve made significant updates to the SDK that we’ll be releasing in several weeks. In order to give you extra time to take advantage of these forthcoming UI and API enhancements, we’ve decided to extend the submission deadline. In addition, a fair number of developers have also asked for more time to build and polish their applications.

Of course, you can stay the course and submit your applications using any version of the SDK that you’d like. We’re looking forward to seeing some great apps, especially after we’ve had a chance to incorporate some of your feedback into the Android platform.

Here is the updated time line:

April 14, 2008: Deadline to submit applications for judging
May 5, 2008: Announcement of the 50 first round winners, who will be eligible for the final round
June 30, 2008: Deadline for the 50 winners of the first round to submit for the final round
July 21, 2008: Announcement of the grand prize winner and runner-up

For additional details on the Android Developer Challenge, please visit the ADC page.

Good luck and good coding!

[via Android Developers Blog]

This semester 25 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will gather in a classroom with one particular purpose: playing with cell phones.

The students are taking a class geared around Android — the first fully open mobile operating system developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG). The class will cover the ins and outs of the Android platform and build applications to run on the operating system.

The class, which at least 50 students tried to enroll in, is being offered to students in the computer science major at MIT and is designed to give them an early edge in what could soon become a dominant platform among cell phone operating systems. As smart phones and cell phones with Web functions have grown in popularity, there is growing interest among computer science pupils to learn how to create and launch applications and software for mobile operating systems, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform coordinator for MIT.

“It’s definitely something that captures students’ interest,” he said. “Given the fact that they actually have the devices, they want to do something with it.”

[via Boston Business Journal]

News just in from one of Total Telecom’s roving reporters in Berlin:

“T-Mobile is set to introduce this year a handset based on Android software, which is likely to be unsubsidised.”

The phone will be one of a handful of Android-based handset models that will make it to market in 2008.  T-Mobile was named as one of Google’s operator partners when the Internet giant unveiled its open standards-based mobile handset project late last year.

[via The Editor's Cut]

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but this sounds a bit familiar…

Featured last Tuesday on BusinessWeek, GridGrain is an open source Grid Computing solution for Java available for Android platform. GridGrain is not an application but a technology that could be used to create innovative applications with shared computing between different Android devices. But the question is, can we really turn Android devices into supercomputers ? Sounds like science fiction.

[via GridGrain]

While Google’s Android SDK for mobile applications could become a formidable competitor to Sun’s own Java platform, Sun vice president James Gosling said Wednesday it is not possible for Sun to take a position on Android.

Speaking at the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days conference at Sun headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., Gosling cited insufficient information from Google.

“It’s impossible to have a position [on Android], right, because there is no data,” he said when interviewed at the event. “Over the last couple of years, Google’s been showing their phone at telecom conferences all over the world and with different business models, all of which really scared the carriers and handset makers. And then with Android, they put out a bag of code with no business model.

“Unless the day comes when they say what they’re going to do with it, it’s just a bag of code sitting out there,” Gosling said.

(more…)

High Tech Computer (HTC) expects its revenues to grow more than 20% on year in 2008, and the company also plans to launch 2-3 Android-based mobile phones in the coming year, according to the Chinese-language Commercial Times which quoted remarks made by HTC CEO Peter Chou last week at a meeting with analysts from foreign investment firms in Taiwan.

During the meeting, Chou also said that HTC plans to launch a non-Qualcomm 3G solution in the near future, introduce a new user interface which will be better than its current TouchFlo technology in 2008, and launch WiMAX/TD-WCDMA mobile devices by the end of 2008 or in early 2009, the paper reported.

[via Digitimes]