I was at the Google I/O developer’s conference yesterday and saw Android (Google's new mobile software stack) on a new mobile device in one of the demos at the keynote sessions. This is wherer I go off into gadget land, so all of you looking for the connection to collaboration will have to wait until the end of the blog.

[More:]

Steve Horowitz, the Engineering Director for Android showed their mobile open source software stack(complete stack) running a variety of applications from Google Maps to Pacman.

I believe Android was demonstrated on an HTC device, that looked like some advanced pictures that I have seen of the HTC Dream or the Touch Diamond which HTC is rolling out this summer to compete with the Apple iPhone. HTC expects to sell 2 million of these devices. Personally, I am waiting for the iPhone 3G.

HTC may reuse a lot of the hardware specs from the recently launched HTC Diamond. As far as hardware goes, expect to see nothing less than a 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera, a 4GB or 8GB of internal storage, integrated ultra-sensitive GPS and A-GPS ready, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, and integrated speaker and FM radio with RDS. The Qualcomm MSM7201A 528MHz chipset will likely power the HTC Dream. I hope the HTC Dream will have a much larger battery than the Diamond’s 900-mAh battery. Actually, the battery with my Universal is at 1650 mAh is also very limited and only gives a few hours of use when the backlit screen is on. There’s a really good chance that HTC will implement a TouchFLO 3D-like user interface for Android and reuse their touch-sensitive navigation control.

What was cool about the device was when you went into “compass” mode, which I believe engages the accelerometer, it allowed you to look at a Google Maps Street View, and it could figure out where you are (the phone had GPS in it I think) and when you move, it shows you a new view in Google Maps of where you are based on your movements. This happened in real time and was a very impressive trick and it got a big response from the audience.

My Universal

On a side note, some of you know I have an HTC Universal, which unfortunately was not sold by any of the mobile vendors in the U.S and is about 3 years old now. It is a 3G phone with a full keyboard and a web cam for video conferencing as well as a flip, QVGA touch screen. With a 4GB SD card in it, it is almost like a mini laptop (except I have not figured how to do VGA out to do slide shows) and was priced that way to begin with.

It came out with Windows Mobile 5, which left a lot to be desired, and crashed about every other day, and was not intuitive at all. Unfortunately, neither HTC or the reseller iMate (sold as the JasJar) never updated the OS, and I was aware that on similar HTC devices (like the Touch Diamond) already have Windows Mobile 6.1 which have some enhancements and are also more stable. So I had to find a bootleg upgrade and installed it a week or so ago. One of the advantages of the new OS is that it supports the new SDHD cards with 8 or 16 MB. However, it still has some kinks in it.

To Android or Not to Android?

However after going through all this with my current device, and what I saw about Android from Google I naturally asked if I could run Android on the HTC device that I currently have. The answer was A: that Android would be out sometime later this year, and B: no it would not run on my device, and would only run on devices that supported Android. Evidently there are 30 -40 vendors in the OHA (open handset alliance, but Microsoft, Apple nor anyone I recognized except Spring/Nextel, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are not listed as partners on the site.

Google ran a $10M application development contest for Android (which was smart, as there are now hundreds of applications). The top 50 got a $10k reward, and the top few from that group will get $275K for additional development.

The problem is that I don’t want to get a new phone, and guess I will wait for Android to come out, work all the bugs out, and see if it is really that much better than 6.1 or the iPhone. I asked the Android guys what the big advantage was over other mobile operating systems out there, and their response was “its open” and follows an open source development environment. The Android SDK has already been out for 6 months.

It will be interesting to see what handset manufacturers come out with Android phones. HTC was already outed by Google, so they announced their Android phone, but they mostly do high-end smart phones like the Treo and many of the phones Microsoft runs on. When asked what the minimal hardware requirements for Android were, I was told at least a 200 MHz processor, 64 MB Ram and 64 MB Flash memory. Android uses the WebKit browser and its interface and touch interactions looked a lot like an iPhone.

Social Networking and Android

I did see some social networking applications that have already been built on Android (one called Social Monster)another one, that has locataion-based functions is a neighborhood-based social network called Beetaun. Commando is kind of like Twitter and gives people in that social network access to what their friends are doing and where they are 24 hours a day. Another location aware (but not collaboration tool) is called "Locale" which automatically adjusts the phone's functions to your location, i.e. it can be silent when you are at your desk in your office, or at home it automatically re-routes calls to your land line.

Collaboration Connection

What is interesting is that Android is a complete stack, the cost to license it is minimal, and it works on some of today’s and more of tomorrow’s phones (i.e. mid-high range phones which are more capable computing platforms). I am a big proponent of the open source model, after all it gave us Apache, Open Croquet, Linux and many other projects that have eventually been commercialized and are even used in the enterprise today. Many of these new phones are great mobile collaboration platforms. Not only do they have more processing power, memory and better cameras, but through Unified Communication platforms like IBM/Lotus SameTime UT (out this fall) they can be integrated (through rules and presence information) into your enterprise collaboration environment.