May 21, 2010

Fast mobile and fun TV...

...some even quicker observations on keynote of Google IO day 2.

In short, the new and faster version of Google´s OS for mobile devices, Android version 2.2 codenamed Froyo, was launched as expected. There was some picking at Apple with references to their famous "1984" superbowl commercial calling their approach Draconian, push APIs were launched "not to address basic shortcomings in the operating system of the device, such as lack of multitasking", demonstrating tethering in Android with the words "now let´s turn to a device that doesn´t have connectivity, how about that iPad?", etc.

The Android momentum is high, with 100 000 activations per day. The Flash plugin (10.1 public beta) was announced as expected. I am looking forward to see how it performs, as pointed out yesterday Flash on the mobile has yet to deliver (when I supervised a MSc-student in 2005 doing context-based mobile app that it was supposed to be half year away from being great, which I think it has been since...). Hopefully this will be it!

Google TV was also launched, not quite as pre-announced as the Android Froyo, but not unexpected either. Personally I am more interested in "Chrome OS for TV" - to have a lightweight connected OS with browser (for public screens etc.) in TVs than the PVRish and EPG aspects that it was focused on in the announcement, but I guess it can be used for both.

It will be interesting to see if Google will be the ones to get voice control right. It has been tried (several times) before, including getting similar wow-demo-effects to the ones we saw in the keynote working. With all the data to improve their algorithms, they might just be.

Oh and to leave you with a maybe non-exciting note that I forgot yesterday: App Engine are getting SLAs and standard SQL databases, which might in fact be of the more important announcements for CIOs considering running apps in Google´s cloud.

No comments:

Post a Comment