Tuesday, May 26, 2009

oFono – Open Source Telephony.

By Andrew Till
Last week Nokia and Intel made an interesting announcement about their collaboration for an open source telephony solution. We at Teleca always like to see new innovative projects being launched and have been considering what this may mean for the future.
Firstly there is nothing in the announcement that suggests this project could not be supported across multiple platforms. So while it may initially look like a Maemo focused solution it’s also possible that we will see S60 device also embracing the approach.

However the real excitement is that this is opening up new parts of the platform to the developer community and should enable new innovative applications. In addition the new oFono platform should also support new methods of applications interacting with the telephony stack thus enabling developers to find creative ways to minimise battery power or exploit multiple radio environments.
And it should not stop there.

If oFono is successful then there is no reason why, as an OSS project, it could not be leveraged by other platforms especially those that are Linux based such as Android or uBuntu and hence it maynot be limited to just traditional handsets. But also MIDs, Notebooks and why not for car infotainment systems?
The mobile world evolves through innovation and initiative and that is what creates opportunities, for us and for You.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Battleship game for Android, born by passion


By Artur Kulik, Roman Prominski and Emilian Szyburski


It was an after-hours learning project that became a real-life application. Our gang, Artur, Roman and Emilian at Teleca Poland, wanted to get familiar with the Android platform. So we started from scratch, using emulators, SDK and resources from the internet to create something that could help us understand and become knowledgeable in Android software development.

We felt it was important to to touch several aspects of the platform with audio, imaging, connectivity, middleware and more, to get a complete overview of Google's mobile system. The exercise started out as a small proof-of-concept project, and quickly became a full-blown entertainment application ! Then we took the chance to put it (well tested though…) on the Android market in order to get comments from the users.

Overwhelming response
We received an overwhelming response from the people that downloaded our ‘Battleships’ application and liked it! There were greetings. There were improvement suggestions. And there were rants from users that lost against the phone in the naval action (..oops) For us it was not only the learning experience on the development side but we also realized the potential in the application market. The feedback we received provided priceless information on user experience, behavior and expectations.

Top 20
The “Battleships” application quickly became a Top 20 application on the market and got more than 50,000 downloads in the first four weeks.


Download Yourself
Download the application from the application market with your G1 or similar phone (look for Teleca Poland publisher) or alternatively check http://www.cyrket.com/package/com.teleca.bs for user ratings and score.

So enjoy the battle game to fight against the war tactics of Teleca :)

Friday, May 8, 2009

Platform competition stiffens

By Hasse Annerfeldt
The playground for mobile OS/SW platforms has really increased in the recent 12 months. Instead of focusing on a few platforms we have seen the number increase. While we have seen Symbian gain an early lead leveraging its very strong position in terms of history, maturity and close relation to Nokia new platforms are now challenging it. What we have seen that Apple with the iPhone introduced a new era showing that offering products and services, that many operators and handset vendor’s have been struggling to achieve, is compelling to consumers. Apple starting from zero has got a large group of mobile phone users, enthusiastic and thrilled, over the user experiences it brings to them. They have also showed that it is possible to make money from music and application downloads which has been on every operator’s agenda for a long time. The success for this new Apple world has not yet been shared by the other handset vendor’s.

Google with its dominating position in the internet space with services and content is now filling a gap when creating the Android platform. An open source based project, has created a platform that will be highly integrated into services on the internet, copying Apple success for a potentially broader audience.

At the end of this year and beginning of next we will be able to see if S60/Symbian and Windows mobile can reclaim the initiative with new business models, increased openness and services that bring them into parity with the Open Handset Alliance model and Apple.

This should lead to a very compelling Christmas and new year sales season as the focus firmly shifts on to experience and service innovation which can only benefit all involved in the mobile industry from handset vendors, through to service companies, such as Teleca, consumers and independent application developers.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Is Symbian looking beyond handsets?

By Andrew Till
As the Symbian Foundation gets up and running and ready for the first releases of handsets based on its first release, there are signs that the Foundation may expand its horizons to focus on new market opportunities.
In this week’s BusinessWeek David Wood is quoted as saying "There's a lot of interest in netbooks," & "I've never been as busy and rushed off my feet in my entire life. We are seeing a lot of early experimentation." Given Symbians broad support for most of the world’s favorite application processors it would make a lot of sense for them to look at new market opportunities such as mobile information devices, GPS navigation solutions and web tablets. This would also make a lot of sense given the recent announcements about Android based netbooks and Microsoft’s long standing strength in embedded consumer electronics market with WinCE.

Exciting times ahead.