In-Vehicle Infotainment touched by Teleca -July 5th

By Dr. Roger Hampel

As the automotive industry is recovering from one of its worst crises ever, also the suppliers of automotive electronics and multi-media software are regaining strength.

For suppliers of in-vehicle infotainment systems, however, the world has changed dramatically over the last 3 years. Typical head unit functions like navigation or media player have become standard applications on Smartphones, thus consumers are no longer willing to pay a huge premium for built-in infotainment systems that are already outdated at the time they hit the market and which cannot be updated with new functionality in the field.

Leveraging smartphone platform ecosystems drives time to market
To bridge this gap, the automotive infotainment industry has started to embrace smartphone platforms. The GENIVI alliance of automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers and service companies is developing an open source Linux based infotainment SW platform. The first platform release was based on Intel’s Moblin stack and it is anticipated that future platform releases will be based on the MeeGo platform, see Andrew Till’s blog entry from February 18th).
Google’s Android platform has also made its way into the automotive infotainment arena, e.g. in Continental’s AutoLinQ system. Furthermore, the recently announced acquisition of QNX, provider of OS and Middleware for automotive telematics, by Smartphone manufacturer RIM can be interpreted as a move to close this gap from the other end and Microsoft’s Auto platform is based on Windows Embedded CE

Cars go smart(phone)
Consumers will be able to experience connected services in the car such as downloading and installing apps from an application store, consuming audio and video stored locally and amended by online data such as album art or streaming online media. Media can be transferred seamlessly between the home network, smartphone and the IVI system. Car diagnostics such as battery level for electric vehicles, fuel gauge, door/window lock status can be accessed via Internet from any PC or the mobile phone. Actuators in the car can be triggered remotely, e.g. unlocking the car, closing the windows, activating stolen vehicle tracking. Emergency calls are automatically initiated by a triggering airbag.

The adoption of smartphone platforms for in-vehicle infotainment goes along with the change from device centric scope to ecosystem scope. Leveraging the ecosystem around open source platforms such as Android and GENIVI allows the providers of IVI systems to offer product development based on a sustainable roadmap for software platform evolution while reducing overall cost of ownership.

We are engaged
Teleca is a member of both the Open Handset Alliance governing the Android platform and the GENIVI alliance driving the development of the GENIVI platform. Moreover, we have been a Microsoft Gold Systems Integration Partner since 2002.

Expect breathtaking IVI systems to hit the market that have been touched by Teleca!

Mobile Apps or Mobile Web or both? -June 28th

By Andrew Frost

There’ve been some discussions recently about the relative benefits of applications that are created as native mobile apps (e.g. for iTunes, Ovi Store, Android Market etc) or applications that are deployed via the mobile web. Andrew Till commented on this discussion recently on our blog following the Open Mobile Summit conference at the end of May.

The obvious benefit to a web-based deployment is that anyone with an internet-connected device can access it. No longer are you bound to application stores or particular brands of device, you can create something that anyone (maybe even desktop users) can access. The downside though is that you’re unlikely to be able to leverage the full power and integration of each individual device, due to a number of factors such as the underlying browser engine (i.e. Webkit or something else), the data models implemented by the device vendor and any unique interaction models implemented on the device that you need to consider in order to deliver a consistent user experience. So while web-deployment will certainly remove a lot of challenges it will not, as yet, be able to address all the challenges and hence your application will be inherently limited.

A new development in this area (on mobile devices at least) is the release of Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) 2 which is going to be available on a number of different platforms, initially on Google Android. AIR 2 brings a number of benefits:

• Includes the Flash Player 10.1 with the new developer features and enhancements, so it is simpler to create an application that runs both as a web-based application and as a native application on a disconnected mobile phone
  


• Applications appear as native – so despite being created using Flash/MXML, they can be deployed from application portals and installed on a device as a native application.
  


• Potential for extended integration. AIR 2 has APIs for accessing a device accelerometer as well as supporting gestures and multi-touch, and the likely integration is going to expand further.

This last area is one in which Teleca has a great deal of experience, extending the capability of the Flash Lite player on mobile and embedded devices to allow OEMs to use Flash content for much more than just games and utilities – enabling tight device integration and using Flash content for the whole device UI, for example. Using Flash and AIR 2 capabilities to provide home screens and UIs on platforms such as Android may help companies to quickly and easily differentiate their products.
Teleca are heavily involved in projects using Adobe’s new Flash Platform run-times including Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Lite 4 and have also created some demos using AIR 2. This is an area we are seeing a growing level of interest in from developers and we can expect more growth over the coming quarters.

bada - Application interface, Part 3 (3) - June 17th

by Markus Gausling

The bada application interface
The interfaces for the native C++ applications are provided by the Framework Layer. Most of the interfaces provide quite standard functionality that you would expect on a modern platform. This includes support for messaging, 2D and 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL) or media playback and media capturing. Additionally UI controls to embed flash content, web content and maps are available. Those are based on the integrated Adobe Flash player and the WebKit browser.
Common device sensors are supported as well.

The interesting thing here is maybe that weather information is also provided as a special kind of sensor. The actual data is retrieved from an online weather service.Additionally bada provides build in face detection support for still images and movies.

One interesting group of interfaces is defined by the Social APIs which provides interfaces for social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Flickr which are seamlessly integrated with the platforms PIM implementation.

The bada platform doesn’t directly communicate with those social networks but through an SNS gateway hosted by Samsung. This ensures that the client-side interface doesn’t depend on the actual interfaces provided by the Social Networks and that new services can be easily integrated. On the other hand this introduces Samsung as an additional intermediate entity.

Publishing application
Samsung bada applications are sold through the "Samsung Apps" store. Applications for bada devices can only be downloaded from the Samsung application store. They need to be approved by Samsung before. Application developers need to register at the Samsung App Seller Office. The App Seller Office verifies and validates the application prior to certification. Once the application was certified it can be sold through the Samsung Store.
Summary
According to Gartner ( http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1306513) Samsung is currently the number two mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Samsung claims to have sold 40,000,000 mobile phones with touch support and that a number of new models in 2010 will be shipped with bada. Based on these numbers it is clear that bada will gain a reasonable market share in the near future even with strong competitors such as Android, iPhone OS, Blackberry OS and not to forget Window Mobile and Symbian.

Summary
From a technical point of view bada seems to be a quite stable and mature platform with powerful and well designed interfaces for application developers. Especially the tight integration with social networks makes application development for such applications quite comfortable.

References
- Samsung Bada - http://www.bada.com/
- Bada Developers pages http://developer.bada.com/ http://innovator.samsungmobile.com/ http://www.badadev.com/
- Samsung S8500Wave - http://wave.samsungmobile.com/

bada - The new kid on the block, Part 2 (3) - June 14th

By Markus Gausling

Developing native C++ bada applications
An application is described by an application profile. The application profile is an XML manifest file that describes the application, the system requirements the application has towards the platform (like display resolution, memory etc.) and the API groups the applications uses.
Developers are divided into two levels of membership (Basic and Partner) and based on this level the access to platform interfaces will be granted. Developers of the category Basic e.g. cannot access interfaces which require system privileges.

Samsung provides an online tool, the Application Manager, to fill in the information about the application. The Application Manager will then generate a manifest file based on the given information. The manifest will also contain a unique ID for the application. Using the Application Manager requires a registration which is free.
Once the manifest file is available the actual application development can start. Native C++ applications can be developed using the SDK which was recently released as a beta version (1.0.0b2).

The SDK is based on Eclipse with the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT).
It contains an emulator, sample applications and tutorials and also a UI builder.
The SDK is only available for Microsoft Windows and can be downloaded at http://developer.bada.com/.

bada – The new kid on the block, part1(3) -June 10th

By Markus Gausling

On the World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this year Samsung has announced the Samsung Wave (also known as Samsung S8500). The device is a new smartphone with a 3.3 inch Super AMOLED WVGA capacitive touch display that has a 5 megapixel camera. It can playback and record HD video with 1280x720 pixels and it supports the latest WLAN-n and Bluetooth 3.0 standards. The device is about to be available in stores any time now.

While this is already quite impressive the more interesting thing –for me as a developer- is that it is based on Samsungs new bada platform which was announced in Q4 of 2009 and where an application development SDK was released these days.

So what is bada then? bada is Korean and stands for ocean. It is a closed platform in the sense that Samsung owns and controls it. bada is not an open source platform and only intended to be shipped with Samsung devices. It has open interfaces for application developers though.

According to Samsung (http://www.bada.com/whatisbada/) bada is already available for nearly 10 years and was shipped in a number of devices during that time. Designating it bada means it was enhanced with new features such as multi-touch, social APIs and a new UI.

The figure shows the four layers of the bada platform and the different types of applications that can run on bada.

The platform supports four kinds of applications:

• Native C++ applications based on the interfaces provided by the Framework layer.
• J2ME applications (MIPD 2.0)
• Widgets based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript and executed by the platforms WebKit.
• Flash app´s executed by an integrated Adobe Flash player or embedded into native applications.

The bada platform was designed to run on smartphone devices as well as on cheaper feature phones. To make this possible bada has a configurable kernel architecture which can be based on Linux as underlying OS or some other RTOS.

Follow this bada educational blog. Next chapter 2(3) is about Developing bada C++ apps.

Ending of flat rate era? -June 2nd

By Andrew Till
Are we seeing the end of flat rate data or a More balanced Approach to Network Congestion?

Recently AT&T announced that it was ending it’s flat rate data plan in North America. No longer will consumer be able to user mobile internet services without concern for their month end bill. As of 7th June AT&T will offer 2 new pricing schemes to replace the flat rate data plan with $15 for 200MB and $30 for 2GBs.

Could this signal a trend away from flat rate data plans with a number of global operators adding more stringent Fair usage policies to their tariff offerings.
However it’s not all bad news as AT&T also recently announced free public WiFi access in New York in what maybe the start of a broader trend.
With new tablet devices like the iPad from Apple and Dell’s Streak device launching around the world this maybe a glimpse of the future with operators offering combined cellular and WiFi packages designed to address the issue of network congestion on the traditional mobile networks. This has been driven by the growth of smartphones but with many new device formats now also launching this issue is no longer one that can be ignored.

It’s going to be interesting to see if other operators follow AT&Ts lead and if this brings in a new age of connectivity management for mobile users. After all free WiFi services provided in conjunction with cellular data services will solve many users issues as trying to surf the internet on a congested HSDPA network is not a lot of fun.

Open Mobile Summit Day 2 -May 27th

By Andrew Till
Day 2 of the Open Mobile Summit continued to stimulate much industry debate. At the heart of much of the discussion was “will the web win over apps?”. For this author this was largely a mute question as the key issue is rather how does the industry help developers create, publish, and be discovered. So while the debate raged on with almost religious intensity at times the key takeaway message was give developers great tools and let them worry about what the right approach is based on the experience they want to deliver.

There was also a lot of debate about “how low can Smartphones go”. It’s clear that Smartphone are poised for rapid growth over the next 5 years not only in established Western European markets but on a global stage. There was much excitement about the prospect of true low cost mass market handsets running Android and Symbian reaching consumers hands in the second half of the year. Orange shared some interesting data such as their expectation that by the end of the year 50%, yes 50%, of new handset they buy will be running a Smartphone OS.

Nokia showed that they are far from giving up their leadership of the mobile market. During a keynote presentation they shared some compelling data about the growth of the OVI platform (now hitting 1.75m downloads of applications and content per day), the uptake of their new mobile maps strategy (11M users of Drive and Walk) and a very interesting insight to the emerging markets where they have 1.5M paying users of Nokia Life Tools. As you would expect Nokia also hit on its new handset offerings such as its first Symbian 3 handset the N8 and also announced that MeeGo release 1 is now available for download.
There was much discussion of the role of tablets moving forwards. Clearly the iPad has got off to a flying start and many, including CCS’s Ben Wood, openly stated that it was outperforming their expectations. Indeed Ben went so far as to say it would own 80% of the tablet market. Aside from agreeing that tablets are set for higher levels of success than expected there was also a lot of focus on the usage model. Clearly publishers like this new format for delivering real time content to a device where it is easy to consume print as well as new multimedia formats. However others believe that Tablets will become a “device for updating Facebook while watching TV”. Regardless of the usage model it’s now clear that Tablets will find their own niche in the market and will also force the industry to think anew about how to enable consumers to take content and experiences across the rapidly growing range of format factors.

There we also some great presentations on the role of User Experience design from companies such as Frog Design and TAT- The Astonishing Tribe. Clearly they are enjoying the new world of open platforms and have the shackles removed from their creativity. IF half of the concepts shown come to market that this is going to be one amazing industry to be part of. Interactive applications that have the intelligence to help you find and share content with friends, boundless usages of Augmented Reality, a significantly reduced number of clicks – at this point I have to give great credit to the presentor from TAT who managed to overcome IT issues saying "Click" every time he wanted to change slides while talking about reducing the number of clicks. It turned out to be a great way to deliver the message – instant recognition of people and places with the ability to immediately interact with friends around the media and as you would expect all wrapped up in mouth watering eye candy and delivered on a wide range of new device form factors.

So all in all a very insightful two days covering many of the key issues in our industry and as I look in to my crystal ball I am looking forward to
· Much faster connectivity much sooner than expected
· No limitations on creativity
· More development options with enhanced, HMTL 5 enabled, browsers
· Ever more gorgeous user experiences
· Ever increasing levels of competition – driving innovation
· A better focus on making applications and content stores work for developers

Now I think I need to go and write a new Christmas list!