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20/20 Podcast #3A 2007-12-17 21:49:00 Part 1 of 2 for the date of December 8th. This is the first of the new format since we ditched our original Week in Review and debuted the AG5. In this edition, we talked about our site, where we came from, and where we are going. We've been up slightly over a month now and we felt like doing a little progress report. To save the podcast, you can right-click and save here.This is a slightly different format for the podcast as we hope it resolves any issues out there for people looking for the mp3's in a 'non-iTunes' capacity. Please tell us if this works as we are still a little green in the podcast design game.UPDATE: To subscribe to our podcast only feed, please click here.AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ...

Android Spotted in the Wild 2007-12-17 15:42:00 While it's certainly not the prettiest phone we've ever seen, a Gizmodo reader sent in a picture of his phone running Android. According to their guy, "even in early form, it's light and fast, much faster than the desktop emulator at times. And as a long time programmer, he think it's a lot more put together than Window Mobile 5 on the back side of things. Huzzah! Upon close inspection, the phone looks like it has been taken apart and reassembled a time or two. We'd expect such a thing for a prototype phone or something testing an SDK. Good to see it already out there. It's definitely a step in the right direction Can't wait to see it running something other than that main background and menu screen though. Note to developers: Give us a new wallpaper to look at. Pronto!AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ...

Ribbit Hopping Into The Wireless Service Arena 2007-12-17 12:06:00 Move over AT&T and Sprint, there's a new player in town. Well, sort of. Ribbit, a silicon valley upstart has tossed their hat into the wireless provider ring, offering telephony service to compete with the likes of current providers such as Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint. However, unlike the big boys Ribbit will use the web as it's backbone. You can read the complete article here at ITPro.co.uk. . While they will have switches to route phone calls like other carries, they plan to imbed their services into other applications such as Facebook and business apps.AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ...

Android SDK Enhancements 2007-12-17 10:41:00 December 14th saw a few updates to the SDK for Android. According the official blog, there are additions, tweaks, and bug fixes to the original release. If you're one of those "Release Notes" type person, here you go! If you've been hiding in a cave for the last 6 weeks, there is a developers challenge with $10M in booty. Download your SDK and get started. Then, tell us what you are working on so we can add you to our Developers Spotlight Series! AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ...

M/C Ventures Has a Crystal Ball 2007-12-17 10:12:00 M/C Ventures predicts that globally, 2008 will see more people accessing the Internet via their mobile phones than through desktops or laptops. PCs will still be the primary way to access in developed countries. However, in developing regions, most Internet use will come from mobile phones, helping to bridge the digital divide.“Mobile broadband is becoming the medium to bridge the digital divide worldwide. Many people in the world, even developed economies, don't have regular, affordable access to the Internet for a variety of reasons, but mobile phones and the business models around them are profitably penetrating even the low income sectors of the economy. Now more than ever, people of many means can use mobile phones to enable their lives. Quite simply, mobile broadband will democratize communications.” - James Wade, managing general partner, M/C Venture Partners. He also predicts that 2008 will see mobile devices ushering in the second wave of broadband. We consider those b ...

Who is Sirf Technology Holdings? 2007-12-17 07:23:00 If you looked at the names of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, the casual tech fan would probably recognize a little over half of the names. Well about those other companies? What do they bring to the table? Why would they benefit the OHA? AndroidGuys is here to help break down a few of the names of the partners and tell you what you might expect from them. First up is SiRF Technology.According to Wikipedia, SiRF manufactures a range of patented GPS chipsets and software for consumer navigation devices and systems. What does this mean? It means that the stuff they make for phones will help with location awareness in programs like Google Earth and Google Search. It could also come into play down the road in social networking applications. Consumers would very much like to see location used to enhance their lives by further developing the things they already do with their mobile devices. More and more, users are looking for a that easy-to-use location experien ...

AndroidGuys: Developer Spotlight Series 2007-12-16 09:42:00 Up until now, Androidguys was your premier site for the latest news and opinion about Android and the Open Handset Alliance. As of today, we are going to delve a little deeper and start giving you a little bit of insight into what developers working on Android are running into. The kind of software being worked on, how it will benefit the end user, and what expectations to have are all things that interest us. We're here to pull back the curtain and let you take a peek as to what is going on behind the scenes. Down the road, we will do what we can to get the word out about these developers and their software. We'll even host the software if you'd like.Our first spotlight will be on one David M. who reached out to us from a post we had on a Google Group. We sent him a handful of questions and asked him to be as vague or as specific as he felt comfortable. Here are his answers.What type of program are you writing for Android?We are working on a social networking type of applicat ...

AG5 - December 15 Edition 2007-12-15 09:14:00 #1 - Nokia claiming that Google's Android will offer nothing revolutionary.A full month after the cellular industry was all abuzz about open networks and service capabilities, Nokia comes out and says that they would have been able to make the same type of announcement a year ago. On top of that, they are slowly building their own alliance of sort.Further ReadingNokia Looking to Emulate AppleNokia Prepares for Battle#2 - Endgadget spent some time with HTC's CEO, Peter Chou.We learned that HTC has been playing around with Android for about two years already! Chou informed us that Android will most likely impact the consumer market for now and then maybe down the road, enterprise users.Further ReadingHTC Gets More Props#3 - Android was spotted running on a device this week.Although it was not a phone, we got to see pictures of Android in action as it was running on a reference board. A few screen shots showed us the main menu, Google maps, and an incoming call. While it may not see ...

Google Really Wants to Win Spectrum? 2007-12-14 11:59:00 For those keeping score at home, we've talked about Google wanting to bid on the upcoming "C" block of the 700MHz spectrum in January. Days after the announcement, we started to hear that they might not be in it to win it, but rather, just fulfilling obligations. Well, today we're hearing that now they might be interested in doing everything they can to win after all. According to a senior vice president of a nonprofit public interest telecom law firm, Google will aggressively bid to win the spectrum, even if they don't plan to directly operate a network on it. He makes a valid point too. Google is not looking at becoming a direct competitor with the major telcos. Rather, I think they want to use the spectrum to entice people who are network operators to build out the kind of open-access network that Google wants. If Verizon or AT&T buys that spectrum, then Google will have to live with whatever kind of open-access network that the carriers want to build. Great point, bu ... Google

And in Open Handset Alliance News This Week... 2007-12-14 10:11:00 Sprint Revises Regulatory FeesNTT DoCoMo Unveils Child Friendly Handset/DeviceMotorola Up For Sale?Intel Creating WiFi, WiMAX, and DVB-H All-in-One ChipT-Mobile Sidekick Having AIM IssuesYet another 3G phone surfaces for 3g-less T-MobileLG Predicts Steady Profit Margin for Handset BusinessT-Mobile makes Samsung Katalyst officialAndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ...

Introducing the AG5 2007-12-14 08:49:00 So, what is the AG5? Simply put, it is our revamped 'Week in Review'. We'll be highlighting the 5 biggest things talked about on AndroidGuys from the previous week. Whether it's about hardware, software, or carriers, we'll give you the previous week's wrap up. It'll be a perfect place to stop should this be your first visit to our site as well as a good refresher for those of you who might have missed a day or two. You'll see the link back to our original article, some new commentary, and any other relevant links from around the internet.You can expect to see AG5's on Saturdays so look for the first one tomorrow!We talked briefly about doing away with the Week in Review podcast a week or so back. Jamie and Scott were finding it increasingly difficult to schedule time to sit down once a week and essentially rehash articles from the previous week. Both guys work full time and have families outside of work. At the risk of coming across as a 'blog', we'd prefer to set s ...

Google Dropping 'Knol'-edge on Us 2007-12-14 07:44:00 It was bound to happen. Never one to just rest, Google has thrown their hat in the ring of community writing and social encyclopedia websites. Judging by the descriptions we're given, it looks like it could be very useful tool for information, much like Wikipedia is today. We know Wikipedia gets a bad rap every so often when someone changes a major subject or erroneously reports something as fact. That probably won't change much as the design itself is what allows for that. Knol looks to take things a step further. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google aims to give authors more of a spotlight than they currently get. Much like how you can read 'about the author' when looking at a book, this will be the goal for Knol. They have a picture up right now for an article on insomnia and it reads like a hybrid of ... Google

Year of the Cell Phone 2007-12-13 12:26:00 A NY Times piece today talks about how even though cell phones and technology were the big focal points in 2007, next year will be even bigger. The top two items listed for 2007 were 'openness' and 'Google'. You know the AndroidGuys are all about both of these things, so that's why we're linking it. In particular, 2007 was the year of the cellphone’s marriage to the Internet. All kinds of interesting phones and services were made interesting because they married Internet data with the phones in our pocket: iPhone, GrandCentral, Teleflip, Google Mobile, Pinger, SimulScribe, SpinVox, and so on. AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ...

Intel Creating WiMAX, WiFi, DVB-H All-in-One Chip 2007-12-13 11:17:00 Intel, one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, has developed a test chip that ties in three very cool technologies into one. Imagine being able to use WiFi at home and having your phone automatically switch over to WiMAX for you when you leave the house or office. On top of that, you're able to watch digital video broadcasts all the while. Pretty swift stuff! "There is a shift from people wanting their content any time, anywhere to any device, any network, and the problem is there are too many radios,” said Jeff Hoffman, system architect for the wireless communications lab. Head over to Slashdot if you care to read some more in-depth 'mumbo jumbo' about its size and what not.AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ... Intel

UK: Google Can Bid Here Too 2007-12-13 10:14:00 There's an impending analog switch-off in England just as in the US and there will be enough available spectrum opening up to create a nationwide mobile network. In the UK the auction of the so-called "digital dividend", which is set to overseen by Ofcom in 2009, will give companies the opportunity to acquire spectrum and launch any number of products including mobile and internet services after digital TV switchover is completed in 2012.An article at Guardian Unlimited does go on to say that even though they might show an interest in US spectrum, there is no indicator that they would even care to get involved overseas."Google could bid in the UK but for me the US is where Google is strongest, and it has a certain amount of infrastructure - a network backbone - that it doesn't have in the UK as far as I know," said David MacQueen, the senior analyst for mobile media at Screen Digest.AndroidGuys | The most trusted site for Android news and opinion. ... Google