Power of Arduino and Raspberry Pi combined in $99 Android/Linux PC | Ars Technica.
As per previous post, Android comes to Raspberry Pi. Time to kick the tires on Android’s performance, and see what happens. Can Android and Raspberry Pi revitalize the PC market? Find out for 99 USD.
I was reading the article by CNET, Samsung: Galaxy S4 for U.S. has four cores, not eight, and said, well that’s just not nice. I would have also said fair, but hey, life isn’t that fair, is it? Then I remembered about a few guys at my last few companies who build their own PCs. Then I thought of this recent craze called, Raspberry Pi, you might have heard of this inexpensive computer. The wheels started turning and I though, well, I want 8 cores, and maybe 32 megabytes of RAM, then I thought, hey why not more?
Now, I pulled back the reigns. How can I build a phone? What are the barriers? For one, what are the mechanics that I can’t handle? Well, there’s this whole concept of carriers, bands, and regulated waves. Solved, in limited form. I put together a phone that uses Voice over IP (VoIP). There are tons of hot spots all over, and every day the number grows and grows. The operating system, is that a problem, probably not. The article I saw the other day from CNET, Android originally designed as smart-camera system, also was another piece to the puzzle. The Android mobile OS is Open Source, and I thought amazing, it’s Open Source. Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available and licensed with an open-source license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software for free to anyone and for any purpose. Many of the other challenges, screen, and other components, are relatively not too bad of a challenge. So what I might end up with as a prototype is a VoIP phone from the 1980s, a brick phone. Well, not that impressive. Several companies, such as Avaya, and Cisco have been doing this a long time. Then I thought, if the Raspberry Pi Foundation can make a small computer inexpensively, anyone would be able to make a small VoIP phone as powerful as they want. Coming soon from a Geek near you.
Google Takes on Amazon and Microsoft for Cloud Computing Services – NYTimes.com. This is the first bit of ‘news’ I’ve read all week with regard to Technology. The article holds no suprises, but a good read to the uninformed. I am unable to disagree, or apply additional insight to this article. Amazon has a strong lead, and as I mentioned last year, I saw Google getting into this space with it’s software and APIs available. It may have needed the manpower, and or infrastructure to build the back end to support the extensibility of the front end. Google also may offer new business models to complement it’s existing API offerings, as well as expand those APIs, and provide user friendly tools. I’d see, from this article, an Android API SDK extensibility to grab market share from Amazon. The article quotes that Android applications are using AWS, so if Google adds Android APIs to it’s SDK, it would give developers an easy, plug in option.
Simple Question. I look at the simplified view of the Google Search home page, and see the most obvious thing missing is Google Play integration. Yes, they have a Mobile tab, but even under More, there isn’t a section for Music. Why wouldn’t Google have Google Play tab with / or without submenus to products on the Android OS. Makes no sense to me. It seems like a clear win for Google and the mobile platform. From an anti-competitive standpoint, you could hide it in the More menus, but I don’t think that may be necessary, if you believed that it may attract negative attention. Why would’t you, at a minimum put Google Play market in the Google Search. How much of the market share in technology is mobile? This is insane to me that they haven’t linked Google Play to their main Search menus. Even more fabulous, if they do a regular search, segregate, or at a minimum highlight the Google Play results integrated into all the other results, with the new description format when you look up a movie for example, and have a download Android application right from the search results, just as if Google Play was linked to Google Search. Yes, they do have a ‘Mobile’ menu tab, but that doesn’t touch the integration they can do. It explicitly abstracted, where they would be able to drive more consumers to the Android markets, and revenues. A short synopsis, Google has yet to truly integrate Android Mobile into its Search and that is missed revenue opportunity.
I walked into an electronics store today in Athens where they proudly displayed the latest Mobile technology like the iPads (iOS), Android and Windows OS tablets, and as you enter the store, I believe roughly in that order. However they had iOS in front of the store, but MSFT translation terminals for inventory, transaction execution, etc., which is interesting politics, in itself.
Anyway, as I was leaving the store, collecting my US power converter, I noticed something I’ve seen dozens of times before especially in previous iOS versions, but the latest iOS still has its multithreading implementation with applications exiting to the main menu, but not quitting, therefore leaving a memory footprint, and the application at the very least, is in a low memory, idle CPU, and at the most, a potential for issues with consumption of the resources mentioned. I’d suspect the application is still running in memory for notifications.
To the contrary, in the Android OS, you will typically have a quit application menu option; however, I don’t remember how they perform the notification process, think it runs as a separate thread, as a service, not Y application, which one may argue may take up more memory. However not all applications are designed to provide notifications to the user, therefore not a one to one correlation of Android application to a service. Apple iOS forces a memory footprint regardless. Inefficient resource management on a relatively resource constrained device.
Is this just a question of Samsung verse Apple, or iOS verse Android, but Apple is not battling the U.S. company, Google, and Google is not defending it’s partner because it has its own internally acquired hardware vendor, Motorola Mobility?
Since Samsung is a foreign company, should it be protected under United States Antitrust regulations, and if so, do they apply? If by taking Samsung out of the U.S. marketplace, would Apple monopolize the marketplace? Is it a grey area, the current number of mobile hardware manufacturers, relative to their share in the market, and how much control Apple would have shaping the U.S. marketplace if Samsung was removed? Are the mobile hardware and/or OS manufactures an Oligopoly or a Monopoly? As an example article, here is a brief statement on Monopolies and Oligopolies, and examples of Oligopolies. U.S Antitrust Laws could apply, but this decision should at least be presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, and possibly in a different context. Is this a hardware manufacturer issue, or a mobile Operating System issue?
I continually see news articles like, Apple wants ban on Samsung products, even more damages. Here is a solid paper from a Law student at Fordham regarding Oligopolies and Antitrust Law. It started to make me think, along with another article from CNN Money, Android races past Apple in smartphone market share. In the article it mentions how RIMM and Nokia / Symbian fell in market share significantly, and the top two competitors are Apple and Android. For me, these articles raised a few questions. Clearly RIMM and Nokia/Symbian differ in form factor and feature capabilities, and have been outpaced by Apple and Android. Google purchasing Motorola Mobility seemed to enhance the lack of Google’s interest in backing other hardware manufacturers. My first question is what is the difference between generic drugs and name brand drugs, and this situation, and how do Generics persist in the marketplace? Is this battle really Android versus Apple, but Google is keeping an arm’s length because they have their own hardware manufacturer internally? Second, are every single innovation adopted by one OS and/or hardware manufacturer, e.g. mutithreaded / multitasking support, all up for debate, fines, and closed the ability to compete in the marketplace. This situation smells of geopolitics, and how American Capitalism marketplace may be leveraging some form of Protectionism. Again, this case, and possibly Samsung should partner with another Android OS partner, possibly outside the U.S., to transform this case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and make this about the Operating Systems rather than hardware.
