I am an Android fanboy. But I don’t like the different custom Android user interface designs such as Motorola Blur, HTC Sense, Samsung TouchWiz, Sony Ericsson’s nor Acer’s custom user interfaces, I think they are confusing and they are like visual bloatware. Please investigate following:

1. Is there a home replacement in the Google Marketplace that returns the full UI in Android to the default Android UI in all of the different Android phones? If not, then why isn’t Google officially releasing this default Android UI in the Google Marketplace? Does anyone have any contacts at Google to whome they could ask about this?

2. Will that Default Android UI Home Replacement provide a way to have exactly the same UI as on the Nexus One? And without voiding any of the warranties? And without consuming any extra RAM memory or slowing anything down in any way?

It’s very simple, but we need simple and definite answer on this. And we need answers from Google officially. Thanks.

I do understand that the reason for each of these different layers of designs on top of Android is that each of the phone makers feel that they have to differentiate their Android offerings from the competition. That consumers have to think that they are buying a HTC phone and that only HTC phones can do that or look like that. And so on.

But I would rather that the Android ecosystem immitate the Windows world, let all the default desktop user interfaces look the same. Stop confusing the consumers. Let them recognize the true value of the whole Android ecosystem. And phone makers should preferably compete on hardware and features for the prices.

I understand this idea is disruptive to the current Android business plans of each of the companies. But please, could we at least just get a little basic Home Replacement somewhere deep in the Google Marketplace that offers anyone with any Android phone to set it back to the Nexus One styled basic Android UI design?

I’ve been told in certain comments that Launcher Pro and some other Home Replacements were good. But I am looking for a Home Replacement that offers exactly the same UI designs as on the Nexus One. Please let me know in the comments if you know of a near or fully Nexus One UI Home Replacement that is available for any of Samsung Galaxy S, Droid X, HTC Desire, Sony Ericsson X10 or any of the other Android phones, what your experience is with it and on which of the phones.

Having to void warranties on those $500 devices just to get a normal UI is a terrible thing.

Read more at droiddog.com: Hey manufacturers, leave Android alone!

The biggest threat to Microsoft’s $62 Billion in yearly revenues and $24 Billion in yearly profits is the possibility that consumers and the enterprise start adopting sub-$200 Linux based ARM Cortex A9 laptops and desktops as the new standard for personal computing in the months to come. There is a high probability that Chrome OS and Ubuntu will turn out to work very smoothly on ARM Cortex A9 processors, so smoothly that most consumers might be satisfied with the experience of web browsing speed and for running basic applications like text editors but even basic video- and photo-editing once those are available on the cloud and powered by advanced HTML5 native code and caching mechanisms.

Microsoft clearly must be seeing this as the biggest threat to their core business and thus is probably preparing a version of Windows 7 for ARM. It won’t run all the .exe files that run on Intel/AMD/VIA x86 processors. But there may be tools for developers to recompile the most important applications and to make new drivers. The challenge is for Microsoft to present such a lightweight version of Windows for ARM in a way that consumers will still pay for the Microsoft Windows OS experience even as prices of those ARM Powered laptops arrive at under $200. The profit margins will be low for Microsoft and this will require for them to implement totally different and bold business models if they want to try to keep the same numbers in yearly revenues and profits to not have their share holders sell their stocks. It would probably be based on Windows CE 7, but since that one looks much like Windows CE 6, it would be all about how they could upgrade the user interfaces to make it look and perform as much like Windows 7 as they can.

Some other possibilities as to what Microsoft may be doing with this ARM Licence:

– To release a new lower cost ARM Cortex A9 powered XboX to compete with the upcoming Google TV platform. 10 years ago, Microsoft launched MSN TV and for years there has been Windows Home Center Edition but it never really was a success like Google TV has the potential to be. Features need to be implemented in a cheap ARM Powered hardware such as HD quality video-on-demand streaming, casual and advanced 3D gaming, lean back web experiences.

– To release a Tablet centric OS to compete with Android and iOS, it would be related to Windows Phone 7 Series and with some features of the ARM version of Windows 7.

– Microsoft may want to design and control their own version of an ARM processor and keep it for their products. Like Apple keeps A4 for their products.

What do you think Microsoft is going to do with this ARM License?

via: techmeme.com
source: arm.com

ARM’s marketing vice president, Ian Drew is quoted in an article at ZDnet.co.uk as saying:

“Our target is mostly internet machines — it becomes sort of a requirement that they run the internet,” Drew said. “[The delay in optimising] Flash has stalled it”.

Drew suggested that solving the issue of Flash optimisation had involved “lots of heavy lifting” but once the new version of Adobe’s rich media software is in place for smartbooks, that would be “very powerful” for ARM.

(…)

“I actually think we’re a lot stronger because of it,” he said. “We now know what we didn’t know two years ago. It has taught us a lot about how we work with software companies.”

So we know from my Interview with ARM’s Director of Mobile Computing and from my interview with Adobe Flash’s product manager that ARM, Adobe and other partners including Google, Nvidia, Freescale, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and others have invested hundreds and hundreds of engineers in working full time over the past many months to optimize and succeed in supporting the full Flash on the ARM processors of upcoming Smartbooks, Tablets, Phones and Set-top-boxes.

The Smartbooks are a big deal. Getting the full speed web browser experience working I think is the biggest job. Delayed Flash support on ARM Cortex A8 and A9 processors was one part of it, my theory is also that ARM has had to wait for the Chrome browser to come and smooth things up and optimize speed of Javascripts and AJAX-heavy websites as well. It wouldn’t look good enough for consumers if AJAX versions of Gmail, Facebook and Flash-heavy sites like Youtube and Hulu weren’t able to display correctly and feel like the browsing experience was as fast as on Intel.

Now though with Google Chrome for ARM and Flash for ARM being finalized, and also even the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processors starting to become available, performance for a full PC web browsing experience on ARM should be real.

Once full web browsing performance is working, once all major websites load instantly on ARM laptops, from then on, advances in processors I think will be more about lowering cost and lowering power consumption further, then there would even be the need for any performance increases. The performance increases can be used in server parks powering the processor intensive tasks in the cloud, but the web browser access terminal just needs to have a perfect web browsing experience to unlock an experience that all consumers will like.

ARM Laptops to even support heavy Multimedia authoring applications on the cloud:

Clever cloud computing should even allow for very advanced video-editing, image rendering, even 3D graphics acceleration and 3D games can be streamed to a thin client that just needs to run some kind of 3D engine. Even professionals and advanced users will prefer an ARM laptop for video editing, if they have a fast enough upload speed to store the original native video files on the cloud, display AJAXified video-editing user interfaces and thumbnails in the web browser or in an app that interfaces with the cloud, and then you can have a grid of servers on the cloud processing, rendering and encoding the videos much faster than any multi-core local processor could do it. Imagine clicking a button and having 2000 servers on an FFmpeg grid encode your hour-long HD video for you in a minute. All video editing and encoding professionals would love to have that setup.

Found via: Techmeme.com

Up until last year, I didn’t like the business model around Adobe Flash at all. My theory was that Flash was basically used by Microsoft, Apple and Intel to block mass adoption of open source Linux and embedded Linux operating systems as there was no good enough Flash support on open source computers and embedded devices.

On the other hand, and as I am not a developer with access to Adobe’s source code so I can’t really know how hard it is for them to optimize their proprietary source code, perhaps Flash isn’t as bloated as I thought, but that it really represents graphics intensive animations and embedding of videos which actually are really hard to process using multi-purpose processors and which really perform much better once it can be made to use the latest hardware acceleration.

Check out my video filmed with Adobe Flash products manager Richard Galvan at Mobile World Congress 2010 demonstrating Flash support on the ARM Cortex A8 based Nexus One and Motorola Droid as well as a very interesting demonstration of the controversial Creative Suite 5 authoring software suite on which Adobe is demonstrating the infamous “Export to iPhone” option, where developers can input any Flash application based on ActionScript3 and output it in the iPhone applications format. Thus develop once and output all hardware platforms.

The big talk right now on Techmeme is the funny war going on where Apple doesn’t want to support the Flash format on the ARM Cortex A8 based iphone, ipod touch and ipad. Even though technically, Flash certainly could work on those devices. It’s probably just a question of a few megabytes of plug-in code that would have to be installed with the Safari browser on those devices.

My guess? Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer are angry at Adobe’s Open Screen Project. Up until last year, Microsoft and Apple had the exclusive platforms to have hardware accelerated Flash support on X86. Nobody else could get full Flash support, especially as Flash 9 fragmented into ActionScript3 based Flash projects which more and more displayed either not at all on Open Source OSes or displayed really badly, without hardware acceleration. My guess also is that Microsoft’s attempt with releasing Silverlight may also be a provocation against Adobe which pushed them further to optimize Flash for embedded Linux and thus support Flash everywhere else than Microsoft/Apple/Intel.

My point? To some degree, one of the main reasons Linux hasn’t yet caught on for mass market mass consumer adoption on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has so far been the lack of decent Flash support. Sure, there are many many other factors. But Flash support was an important problem that up until recently released Ubuntu 10.4, hardware acceleration of Flash wasn’t even available for Linux!!

Of course I still wish Adobe would bluntly just announce that they will open-source Flash and licence it out for free (they can still release proprietary authoring tools that they can sell for lots of money to developers). And for sure, I am a proponent of HTML5, Ogg Theora 2.0 (based on Google’s On2 VP8 codec), for sure I can’t wait to see Google’s Native Client plugin for Browsers, Google’s 3D plugin for Browsers (like the very impressive new Google Earth for Google Maps in the browser (not for Linux yet)).

For now, especially as I expect Flash support in Android and Chrome OS can be fully hardware accelerated, run smoothly and nicely as Adobe has been investing hundreds of full time engineers in optimizing this process over the last couple of years. As I don’t expect any other aspects of Android and Chrome OS will feel any slower or any more bloated by adding Flash support. I don’t think Apple’s choice of excluding Flash is a good choice for their users.

What will happen? I think consumers will enjoy Flash support on Android, Chrome OS and other embedded Linux it also looks very impressive and nicely hardware accelerated in Ubuntu 10.4. If Apple persists in wanting to exclude the Flash plugin for non-technical reasons, consumers will likely buy Android and Chrome OS devices instead. In any ways, competition is good and in the coming months, it will be very interesting for me to film demonstrations of Android Tablets, Phones and Laptops with hopefully full and smooth Flash support.

The point of Kyocera’s newly announced Android phone is to be the first pre-paid Android smartphone in the USA. It will be sold for $169 at Virgin Mobile, Cricket and MetroPCS. No contracts. The phone might be SIM-locked to that pre-paid carrier, but there is no subscription plans required to have an Android smart phone.

The fact is that Android phones cost around $150 to manufacture at the moment. The Nexus One might cost $50 more than Kyocera’s phone to manufacture (perhaps $175 vs $125), due to the more expensive components. But in general, the cost of parts and manufacturing is around $150.

Same with Android or Chrome OS on ARM processors for Laptops and Tablets. Those can also be manufactured for around $150 or even less if you don’t include the 3G modem in the device and use the lowest quality components.

Of course Google can subsidize the price of the devices with advertising. In fact, I think we can expect Google will sell $99 Android Phones and $99 Chrome OS laptops on google.com/phone and google.com/laptop within long.

For Internet access, there will be pre-paid deals for using 3G and LTE networks without contracts, and there will be WiFi-only devices or 700mhz White Spaces ones in those products, to thus route the VOIP through data and provide near-free wireless broadband usage on these products. So $99 devices without contracts, without subscription plans is doable.

The question is only how soon does Google want to disrupt the whole market?

I originally posted this as a comment here: paidcontent.org
Found via: techmeme.com

The Nintendo 3DS has now been announced by Nintendo in this official press release:

March 23, 2010
To Whom It May Concern:
Re: Launch of New Portable Game Machine
Nintendo Co., Ltd.(Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “Nintendo 3DS”(temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.
“Nintendo 3DS”(temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125 million units as of the end of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.
We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.

I’m a big fan of Nintendo, while I would be very impressed if this 3D screen technology (rumored to be Sharp/Hitachi’s parallax barrier) actually doesn’t look like some blurry crap, which is my opinion of all the 3D screens that I have seen at consumer electronic shows so far these past few years, with and without glasses. Here are my feature wish-list for Nintendo’s next portable game console:

– It should be possible to deactivate the 3D screen effect and the screen must be just as clear as the market’s best LCD screens

– Game downloads, Nintendo needs to be bold and provide $1 Game downloads, for all games, including affordable $15/month game subscription plans that gives access to all the games. Online games means they get updated often and new games could even be streamed when they are based on pre-installed game engines.

– 3G module for extra $50, there should be a module slot in the back of the device where users should be able to add such things as a modem for 3G and its SIM card. The 3G module shoulds be unlocked so anny SIM card on any carrier can be used.

– Android OS, Nintendo surely has enough money and power to do their own OS if they want. I would find it much more interesting if Nintendo was so courageous and simply base their next portable on Android. At the same time announce that games will work on other Android phones that have graphics hardware acceleration. This would instantly add thousands of apps to the platform and make all UI and feature design work compatible with the rest of the industry.

– SD card slot but perhaps even a built-in hard drive compartment. Adding a 1.8″ or 2.5″ hard drive in the back of the device could be really cool to thus have enough storage for hundreds of big games, videos and music.

– HDMI output, this should basically be even more powerful than the Wii in terms of graphics outputting full 720p and 1080p games to HDTVs.

– At least dual 4″ screens, perhaps a larger version with dual 4.8″ screens. The screens should be close enough to each other so when the device is opened or put on a table, it would look like one big screen.

– Keyboard add-on should cover one screen and thus turn the device into a pocketable laptop form factor. The keyboard should be foldable, thus providing a full sized keyboard typing speed.

– Nintendo should do the marketing for using it for VOIP and IM, it should be compatible with SIP, Skype, Google Voice, video-conferencing and more. Over WiFi and 3G and even other networks as the modem module shall be replacable with other networking technologies. Thus Nintendo should market this as a replacement for smartphones.

– Full video codecs playback at up to 1080p and full bitrates also for high profile. Somehow video playback battery runtime should be at least 10 hours. Youtube HD support should be included.

– Pixel Qi screens so the Nintendo portable can be used for reading, with 50 or more hours of battery runtime. Comon Nintendo, when you order 100 million screens, you can make any screen technology you want. Be the first to announce 4.8″ Pixel Qi LCD screens. Including even that 3D layer on top if you want.

– Usable for education. Instead of teachers and schools banning the Nintendo DS from the classrooms (I’ve seen this happen for some of my young cousins), Nintendo should work to include the hardware in class rooms. Thus it needs educational contents, it needs to provide productivity such as the web browsing and text input needs to provide a full speed experience.

– Pricing should be below $200, preferably $150 without the 3G module.

What do you think?

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