HTC’s CFO reiterated that their Android phones—previously slated to be released Q4 of this year—will be released Q4 of this year. Android handsets are still planning to be shipped to “ODM clients” in the fourth quarter, meaning that you might not actually see them until late, late 2008 or early 2009. Why? Because those ODM clients, like T-Mobile or various other companies who are using HTC to design the base phone but customize it even more, need time to work their own add-ons in. So yes, on time might not mean on time for you to play with unless HTC releases an Android phone with the HTC branding, without going through secondary companies.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK)-owned Symbian and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)-created Android are destined to be combined to provide a single open source operating system for smartphones, an analyst firm said Thursday.The merger of the two operating systems will begin within three to six months, driven mostly by the fact that Nokia and Google are pursuing similar open source strategies with their respective technology, J. Gold Associates said in a research note.

Nokia and other users of Symbian, which has the largest share of smartphones in the market, do not want to compete in the OS market, the firm said. With Google, the search engine entered the OS market to push the industry toward openness and a level playing field in offering applications and services on the devices.

“We expect that within the next three-six months, Symbian and Android will combine to provide a single open source OS,” J. Gold said. “Many of the same sponsors are involved in both initiatives.”

Nokia recently acquired 100% ownership of Symbian and announced plans to turn it over to a new Symbian Foundation to create an open source OS, which would be offered to foundation members sometime in the first half of 2009.

In pursuing the same open source strategy, Google and supporters have formed the Open Handset Alliance for Android. Members include Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Japan-based DoCoMo, which are also participants in the Symbian Foundation.

J. Gold said both sides have good reasons for joining. Google’s investment in Android is “diluting the potential for it [Google] to build compelling cross-device applications where it can generate substantial revenues,” the firm said. Symbian, on the other hand, could cement its position with the open source community by not appearing as just a Nokia public relations stunt.

For the market as a whole, the consolidation would reduce the number of major platforms, making it easier for developers to write applications, which means more software would hit the market, J. Gold said. In addition, consolidation means lower support costs.

Finally, it may help discourage carriers from creating their own unique user experiences on specifically altered and customized devices “in order to maintain customer control, but which is also suppressing the growth of apps,” the firm said.

“A combination of the Android and Symbian efforts would be good for the industry, good for Google and good for Symbian,” J. Gold said. “It would also help spur a growth in the availability of applications and services. The downside is minimal. Everyone wins.”

Google’s strict code of secrecy may work fine for protecting its internal operations. But the company isn’t ingratiating itself to software developers by keeping major updates to its Android mobile software platform locked away in a Mountain View dungeon. Now, even those developers once very committed to pushing Google’s technology forward are thinking about abandoning Android – the most closed open platform to not yet exist.

Over at Google’s official Android discussion group, independent coder Nicolas Gramlich recently posted an ad hoc online petition calling on Google to at least tell developers why they can’t get a new and improved SDK for the fledgling mobile platform. Google hasn’t publicly updated the Android software developer’s kit in more than five months.

“In order not to lose many highly encouraged developers, I think it’s time to release some news about the development process of the SDK. Maybe let us know why we have to live with these long cycles,” reads his open letter to Google’s Android overseers. “In my personal opinion it is not the right choice to keep developers in the dark. We, the developers, are the absolute base of success to the whole Android platform.”

Gramlich is the man behind AndDev.org, an online Android developer community that boasts 3,075 registered members. He began coding for the as-yet-unreleased platform in November, the very day Google first unveiled the SDK. And he sees himself as one of the platform’s “biggest fans.” But he fears that Google’s ongoing Android secrecy is alienating its biggest supporters.

“Developers are getting annoyed and some have moved and some are thinking of moving to another platform,” he tells The Reg. “I hope Google will think twice about how long it waits for the next public-release.”

Of course, there are other reasons to code for other platforms. Other platforms actually exist.

Google had promised a real live Android phone by the end of the year, and now, even that’s a stretch, with reported delays on the prowl. And, many developers argue, the company’s SDK silence has set the platform back even further.

“I lost patience long ago. will keep coding/waiting untill the end of july. then ill either switch to the iphone (if sells are good) or windows mobile,” reads a mostly intelligible post from one of the many developers voicing their support for the Gramlich petition. “i see absolutely no use in working with a barely finished SDK on an emulator without a piece of hardware in my hand. MOBILE phone development is no fun if you cant test it MOBILE.”

Google unleashed the last major update to the Android SDK on February 13. The last minor tweak arrived on March 3. And in the nine months since Android was first announced, the company hasn’t given developers even the slightest hint about when updates would arrive. “This is the biggest mistake that Google could have made: not to have small public-release-cycles,” Gramlich says.

He’s doubly ticked off because he knows that a new SDK exists. Google is sharing updates with certain VIP developers - the fifty finalists for the company’s Android Developer Challenge, a coding contest offering $10m in prize money. Finalist Zach Hobbs wouldn’t speak to us about the SDK because - like the other finalists - he signed a Google non-disclosure agreement before getting his hands on those updates.

Google has already annoyed countless developers by keeping the Android source code under wraps. Though the company calls Android an open platform, it won’t actually release the source code until the first Android phone arrives sometime in the unspecified future.

And so the soap opera will only continue.

As The Colored Balls Turn

At least Google was open about the source code being closed. The company’s been nothing but coy about the SDK. And it seems perverse that it would hand updates to some developers but not others.

“The biggest mistake they’ve made…is a big lack of communication regarding this business,” reads a recent blog post from Austria-based developer David Welton, known for his Hecl mobile scripting language. “If they explained in a convincing way why they needed to do things that way, they would go a long ways to allaying the frustrations felt by many.”

After conversations with Google’s Android brain trust, Welton says they’re well aware the SDK situation has rubbed developers the wrong way. “[Google's Android developers] understand that they’re hurting their development community through this ambiguous stance,” Welton tells us. “This attitude is probably coming from upper management…There’s this mysterious thing where the developers can’t talk about certain things and they can’t talk about why they can’t talk.”

In other words, Google is just acting like Google. “We continue to receive feedback from developers on our previous SDK releases,” a company spokesman tells us. “We’re working to incorporate many of these suggestions into the next release of the SDK, which we expect to be out in the coming weeks.”

In the meantime, developers like Gramlich aren’t just annoyed. They’re hamstrung. As you might expect, that five-month-old SDK is on the fritz. “There are some open bugs inside the current SDK, like the Mediaplayer, that loves to crash, or the Geocoder, that is just a local database with two entries and therefor simply unusable,” Gramlich says.

Is this the best way to play catch up with the Jesus Phone? The Apple App Store is already open.

While the image above is a design originally conceived for Samsung, it represents the work of San Fransisco-based product design and development firm Ammunition Design Group. Why should you care? Well beyond the fact that their site is packed full of amazing designs done for huge companies including Panasonic, Dell, Nike, HP, Wells Fargo, Microsoft and more; Ammunition may be the team helping make the much-rumored Google Gphone a reality. Last year there was plenty of buzz surrounding the possibility of a Google-baranded handset, however most of it was squashed shortly after the announcement of Android. Even still, at no point did Google really deny the claim that it was working on its own handset. As of today, consider those rumors back in full force as Techcrunch reports state that a Gphone is most likely in the works. The article cites two main reasons for the claim:

1. Hollywood Reporter Dan Cox’s recent piece stating, “The trio of Google execs also used the opportunity to talk about the inroads the company is making with its own branded mobile phone as a replacement for the iPhone,” after an interview with Google’s top execs Brin, Page and Schmidt.
2. “A good source” that swears Ammunition is currently designing a “seriously beautiful” Gphone for Google.

If the rumors are true, this will definitely have a huge impact on the handset market as we know it. A few big handset manufacturers have run the game for quite a while now and Google could be the second “newcomer” to hit the market in just a few years and make a huge dent in the business.

Making good software for mobile phones is hard — even for a technically adept company like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) .

Indeed, it’s so difficult that the fleet-footed champion of search advertising finds itself in the unaccustomed position of playing catch-up to normally slow-moving industry behemoths.

As Google scrambles to release its mobile phone code sometime later this year, a nonprofit consortium of some of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies and handset makers has quietly beaten the search giant.

The LiMo Foundation, created in 2007 by Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), NTT DoCoMo, Motorola (NYSE: MOT)  and four other telecom giants, delivered its first phone in February. It now boasts 18, including the Motorola RAZR2 V8 and MOTO Z6w.

A Tough Timetable to Meet

Feverish speculation about the “Gphone” contributed to industry unease, though much of the concern subsided after Android, Google’s name for its mobile efforts, was announced in the fall of 2007. Android wasn’t a phone, but a bundle of still-to-be finished software that anyone could use to create a phone.

Like LiMo, Android wanted to become an industry standard. However, first it needed marketing partners. Initially, 33 companies signed on to Google’s Open Handset Alliance.

Google promised the first phones carrying the code would be available sometime in the second half of the year — along with the code itself.

However, meeting that timetable has been tough. Despite widespread interest among carriers and handset makers, only one carrier, T-Mobile , has announced plans to distribute an Android phone before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, LiMo has sprung ahead by using existing software contributed by members. “This means you have a far lower level of bugs and defects that you need to deal with,” said Morgan Gillis, the executive director of the LiMo Foundation.

Similar but Different

Like the so-called “Gphone,” LiMo’s devices are designed to solve one of the telecom industry’s biggest problems — the plethora of technology platforms that makes the introduction of new products time consuming and costly.

While the two Linux-based efforts have the same goal, their approaches are decidedly different. Seeking to solve the problems of the industry that created it, LiMo focuses on providing best-of-breed middleware, the software that makes the phone work. It leaves the user interface and other stylistic considerations up to handset makers.

Not so with Android, which has iPhonesque design ambitions.

When LiMo describes its code as “open” and “free,” it means its members can review LiMo’s source code and use its software without paying licensing fees.

In contrast, Google has promised to release the code for its platform under a license in which anyone will be able to review the code and use it — once it’s ready.

Until then only members of the Open Handset Alliance can see the code and membership is by invitation only. While LiMo has a formal mechanism by which members can propose changes to its platform, Google only takes suggestions.

“They own the bat, the ball, the playing field, pay the refs and dictate the terms,” said David Helfrich, managing director of Garnett & Helfrich Capital and an investor in Azingo, a software maker working with LiMo.

Good for Consumers

However, Ken Klein, chief executive of Wind River, a provider of Linux services working with both the Open Handset Alliance and LiMo, said the ambitious nature of Android means the development process must be carefully controlled.

“Google is trying to do something amazing here,” he said.

Christy Wyatt, vice president of software platforms and ecosystem for Motorola, which is a member of LiMo and the Open Handset Alliance, said she expected the industry to converge around a handful of operating systems, but she says it’s still to early to predict what the dominant platforms will be.

In the meantime, consumers — and industry players — are likely to benefit as LiMo, Android and other operating systems slug it out.

The blogs are saying that T-Mobile USA will launch an Google Android-powered handset in the autumn in support of its nationwide 3G network rollout on October 1st.

It all started last weekend when TmoNews speculated on the T-Mobile 3G dates and suggested the Android handset would be the HTC Dream.

Despite telling its own readers that the news should be treated with ‘a whole damn bucket of salt’ it set off a chain reaction of blogging and re-reporting (hey, we didn’t want to miss out) that four days later leaves us in no clearer position.

It’s all exciting stuff. But remember just two weeks ago all the talk was of Google reneging on its promise to have Android handsets in the market by the end of 2008.

In light of that, The Register speculates on ways that Google and T-Mobile could speed up Android phone development to meet that October 1st day of destiny.

T-Mobile could be one of the first mobile operators to launch a handset running Google’s upcoming Android smartphone operating system, according to various blogs in the US.

One report claims T-Mobile USA will release an Android smartphone when it rolls out its 3G wireless network across the US towards the end of 2008.

Google Android installed on Nokia’s N810

Android marks Google’s entry into the mobile phone operating system market, with the search giant hoping to go head-to-head with the likes of Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm. It will have a complete set of components, including a Linux-based operating system, middleware stack, customisable user interface and applications.

Google announced Android last year, and prototype devices based on the platform were on show at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. However, last month it was reported that the first handsets running Android won’t be available until the fourth quarter of this year.

Reports from the US seem to back up that prediction, with News.com suggesting T-Mobile will launch an Android phone – possibly the HTC Dream - in October.

With a skyrocketing stock price, fanboy hysteria and — most importantly — really useful products, Google Inc. is the prima donna of tech for the new millennium.

The company is so active that it’s hard to keep track of everything it does. And, just when you get a good handle on its litany of Web applications, promising lab innovations and unheralded research projects, it seems to turn on a dime — a difficult move for a $167 billion company with 19,000 employees — and invent something new. Who would have thought a search site company would get involved in laying a fiber-optic undersea cable between the U.S. and Japan?

Of course, not everything has worked out for the company, as these flubs, flops and failures illustrate. JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg, for one, isn’t put off by the wide range of directions the company has taken and occasional miscues.

“The whole Google empire started as a research project, and it’s a core in their DNA to try and discover new things and figure out how to monetize them,” he says. “When you have a market cap like they do and the cash cow in the guise of paid search, they can keep experimenting. You need the financial wherewithal to support these projects, and plenty of smart people to carry them out. Google does not seem short on either.”

“Truth and Rumors”

Here’s an update on some of Google’s most interesting projects, including some new details about Android, energy initiatives, language translation and a new facial recognition search technology. Also, the Web is rife with wild rumors about clandestine Google projects, so we asked the secretive company to comment on some of the more prominent ones to try to find out what’s really going on.

“Android”

Although the “gPhone” never materialized, the company has been planning something better: an operating system for phones called Android. It’s partly a direct competitor to Windows Mobile and partly an experiment in open-source development. Recently, the company held a contest for third-party developers to create innovative apps for Android. 1,700 programmers took up the challenge.

Examples from the contest include wayfinding apps that tap into the handheld’s Global Positioning System chip. One application lets users find a taxi based on where they are. Another app lets users find their friends’ locations and what they’re doing and lets them create plans with them, with all the information tracked in real time. Some of these apps sounds a bit theoretical at this point — the platform and phones will ship in the second half of 2008 — but Google did post a PDF that shows the top 50 winners in the first round of the challenge, along with screenshots.

Erick Tseng, Android product manager, says it’s a massive shift in thinking from the phone dictating what you can do to the device being open to any kind of content, service, provider and media.

“There are clear benefits to the ecosystem, not just [for] the users, but [also for] developers, carriers, providers,” Tseng says. “Whatever phone you use today, think about the difficulty of getting content — Android has unfettered access to content. You never have to think about, because I am on this service or this provider I can’t get certain content.”

Not everything has gone smoothly for Android, however. Charles Covin, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst covering Android, says “I think the Android platform is a long-term play, and its short-term hiccups are no surprise. Google is intent on reaching consumers wherever they can, and it’s clear that, while Internet use on mobile phones is still limited, it is the next venue where Google can expect to interact with its customers.”

Facial recognition search

Image search is a burgeoning market that is woefully untapped. Today, when you type “Paris Hilton” at Google.com, you’ll find images that other users have tagged. Yet tagging is a tedious process. At Flickr.com, for example, many images are left untagged, making it impossible to find them by searching. The more images stored without tags, the harder it is to find them.

At Google, new facial recognition technology will make it easier to find untagged images. Unlike the technology used for biometrics — where you can pass through a security checkpoint when a video camera confirms your identity — this image search is purely for finding the information you want.

“What Google did for text, we want to do for vision,” says Shumeet Baluja, a Google research scientist. “We want to make images just as searchable and accessible as text.”

Imagine this scenario: Five years from now, when all of your digital photos are stored online, you decide you want to search for pictures of your grandmother. With Google facial recognition technology, you might start with a source scan that measures the distance between the eyes, arrangement of nose, ears, eyes and other data. In seconds, you find every image you ever uploaded — and any image stored anywhere online.

rest of article here

Google Maps Mobile is probably Google’s most actively developed mobile application. It seems like there are new versions popping up for one platform or another every couple of weeks these days. In the past few months for example, Google has issued a native S60 version updated several times, various versions that can make use of internal GPS, versions that can integrate with device phonebooks and Nokia Maps, cell-based location, etc. For the most recent feature addition, Google has decided to implement a bit of voice recognition. Sweet! A new version of Google Maps Mobile has been made available for the US BlackBerry Pearl 8110, 8120 and 8130 that allows users to speak their search criteria rather than type it. Voice search uses the same voice recognition engine as GOOG-411, Google’s free information service, so we know the accuracy will be spot on. Using pretty much couldn’t be easier:

1. Press “0? to center the map view around your location
2. Press the left-side key and hold it while you say the name or type of business you’re looking for (for example, “pizza”)
3. When you’re done speaking, release the left-side key, and our voice recognition technology will figure out your request and find the business you’ve been looking for, no typing needed.

These days there’s a pretty good chance that the rest of your BlackBerry-toting friends make fun of you from time to time because you’re still carrying a Pearl. Opportunities might be few and far between, but here’s a good chance to show them a little something they can’t have quite yet. Hit http://www.google.com/gmm from your Pearl to snag the latest build.