Jun

This Week In Technology: Mobile World Congress

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This Week In Technology: Mobile World Congress

I’ve noticed that we spent the last few weeks mostly highlighting mobile applications and mobile development platforms. However, with the Mobile World Congress this week, our mobile development team can’t help doing a specialized feature on the new phone operating systems that were released this week.

Wholesale Applications Community

Never heard of them? They are a new alliance of 24 of the largest phone operators, which banded together this week to create a unified app store to rival the Apple® App Store™. According to the BBC, their goal is to make it easier to build and sell apps “irrespective of device of technology,” meaning available on multiple types of phones.

As a developer we have certainly recognized the frustration of developing apps across platforms. Between custom development for the iPhone™, Droid™, Nokia®, Symbian, Blackberry® and Microsoft® platforms, each platform requires a new approach, new code, and entirely unique submission systems.

The Wholesale Applications Community hopes to develop a common standard for applications by early next year. Likely it will be based on a familiar open source system, such as Linux. However, LG®, Samsung®, Sony®, and Adobe® have also gotten involved, so they could potentially develop something entirely new. In either case, a unified platform would be a boon to custom app developers everywhere.

BADA

Also in the news for mobile operating systems, Samsung Electronics has released its first phone to go along with the release of its new mobile OS: Bada™. The new phone, the Wave S8500™, is the latest in Samsung’s smart phones.

As the second largest phone maker, Samsung only has a very small share of the smart phone market, which is teetering around 3 percent of the smart phone market share. Samsung is hoping that the new phone and the new Bada OS will help push it back into the market.

Bada uses OpenGL APIs including OpenGLES 1.1 and 2.0, which makes development similar to many other platforms, and also means that porting existing applications over to Bada can be done with negligible effort.

Marketed as a direct competitor to Google’s Android, it will be interesting to see how well Samsung can leverage their position to make Bada a success; but it will be an uphill battle. Or if it fails, they always have the Wholesale Application Community, right?

Windows Phone 7 Series

We wrote a blog earlier this week exclusively about Windows Phone 7 Series. However, since then it has been leaked that the software developer kit will be based on Silverlight™ and XNA, an XBOX® development product.

What gets us excited about this is that we already excel at Silverlight development and could potentially start development for Windows Phone 7 Series applications now, more than 90 days before the development kit is even released.

Symbian^3

As an entirely open source release later this year, Symbian^3 provides some major advances in the mobile operating system market. In addition to being able to support 2D and 3D graphics, through improved acceleration, it also provides HDMI support which lets users watch high-definition movies from the phone in 1080p quality.

S^3 also emphasizes usability and simplicity by allowing one-touch connectivity, an improved widget manager, 4G compatibility and multi touch support. There are already an abundance of apps that have been developed for S^3, including a Skype™ app, even though the first S^3 phones will not come out until Q3 of this year.

Symbian is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to creating “the most innovative user experience on mobile devices” and had representatives from many major mobile players including Samsung, Sony, Texas Instruments, and Nokia.

Since it is entirely open source, it would be interesting to see if this is the model that Wholesale Application Community adopts, especially since many of companies are represented in both organizations.

Opera Mini

While technically an internet browser, not an operating system, this seemed like a good place to mention there are rumors that Opera Mini might be available for the iPhone. Opera Mini provides extremely fast web browsing by using its own server to compress websites before sending them to your phone, which reduces bandwidth costs by up to 90%.

Unfortunately it was only available on Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms, however it was announced this week that the iPhone and Android could be getting Opera sometime this year.

Adobe Air

Also, not an operating system, per se, Adobe® Air® will function as a cross-platform development tool that developers can use to create apps for Flash, Android, and BlackBerry. Air seeks to solve the problem of cross-platform development by using one development kit that can then export the program to versions that will be compatible with each individual platform.

Air is currently used to create desktop applications but will be updated to provide the updated features. This release will happen in conjunction with the Flash® 10.1 update which is expected to happen sometime around April of this year.

Amadeus Consulting considers itself an expert when it comes to the Adobe development and their suite of products, so this latest feature only enhances the experience our talented team of application developers can offer.

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