Android chief: We're still open

(WIRED) -- Android chief Andy Rubin took to the blogs Wednesday evening to combat recent reports of Google clamping down on Android's openness.
"We continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready," wrote Rubin on the Android Developer Blog.
"As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we'll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy."
Google has championed its platform as the open alternative to Apple's closed iOS system. That openness has been called into question recently, as Google has yet to release the Honeycomb source code to all developers and manufacturers.
Honeycomb is Android's first tablet-optimized software release. Rubin cites the difference in form factor between tablets and phones as the reason Google hasn't released Honeycomb's source code to device manufacturers and developers.
Motorola is the exception: The company's Honeycomb-fueled Xoom tablet has been on the market for more than a month, which makes Google's decision to hold the code from wide release a bit mystifying.
Members of the Android industry showed faith in Google, however.
"They say they're going to release it, I'm not gonna call them liars," Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told WIRED.com in an interview. The Android OS is based on a version of the Linux OS, which has been an open source, collaborative platform since its release decades ago.
Rubin's post also addressed questions raised in a recent Bloomberg story about Android's level of control over its partners. Bloomberg wrote:
Over the past few months, according to several people familiar with the matter, Google has been demanding that Android licensees abide by "non-fragmentation clauses" that give Google the final say on how they can tweak the Android code -- to make new interfaces and add services -- and in some cases whom they can partner with.
Rubin combats this claim directly, stating Google's so-called "anti-fragmentation program has been in place since Android 1.0," citing a list of compatibility requirements manufacturers must adhere to in order to market a device as "Android-compatible."
He's referring to Android's compatibility test suite, or CTS, an automated litmus test to measure whether or not a piece of hardware can claim to run Android.
"Our approach remains unchanged: There are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs," wrote Rubin.
Motorola vouches for Rubin's statement.
"In the time since we've started working with Google, our relationship has matured, but it isn't any more limiting than it ever has been," Christy Wyatt, Motorola's VP of mobile software development, told Wired.com. "I don't believe that anything has changed in the CTS since the beginning."
Finally, Rubin emphatically denied other rumors of ARM-chipset standardization in the platform, much of which arose in the wake of an anonymously sourced DigiTimes story.
"There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture," Rubin wrote. With the Nexus One, Google's first flagship phone, the company worked with Qualcomm to install its 1-GHz Snapdragon ARM processors in the HTC-manufactured handsets.
The subsequent Nexus S came equipped with Samsung's 1-GHz Hummingbird processor, which is also based on ARM architecture.
It's out of character for Rubin and Android to post such a defensive update. Rumors circulating in the media are usually given a brusque "no comment" by Google's communications team.
But the title of Rubin's post -- "I think I'm having a Gene Amdahl moment" -- explains it all. Amdahl coined the acronym FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in 1975.
After leaving IBM to form his own IT company, Amdahl claimed he suffered attacks by IBM sales staff attempting to undermine his new venture.
All of this negative attention isn't good for Android's "open" image, and maybe that's what overcame Rubin's reluctance to speak: too much FUD about Android's future.

iPhone 5 release date: Big buzz, few facts

(CNN) -- It doesn't take much to get the tech world talking about the iPhone.
The internet has swirled with speculation in recent weeks about a release date for Apple's iPhone 5, and even whether the company will update its iconic smartphone at all this year.
Now, the most tenuous of news reports has ramped the talk up again.
A South Korean news site reported this week that Apple plans to release the phone in the fourth week of June. According to a translation by the MacRumors site, ETNews.co.kr reported that "Apple has confirmed" that time frame.
There are a few problems here:
It seems highly unlikely that the typically tight-lipped Apple would have confirmed a release date. The report also says the phone will be released in South Korea the same day it goes on sale in the United States.
Possible. But, for comparison's sake, the iPhone 4 was released there about three months after its U.S. debut.
And, for what it may or may not be worth, the South Korean report appeared on April 1.
But as Western news outlets jumped on the report, excitement spread.
The words "iPhone 5 release date" were briefly at the top of Google's Hot Topics list Tuesday morning, and multiple U.S. blogs were following up the MacRumors report -- albeit skeptically, in most cases.
The original iPhone, the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 all had June releases. The iPhone 3G was released in early July. But reports have said that Apple plans to focus specifically on software, not hardware, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled from June 6-10 this year.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One X-factor here could be the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Earlier this week, comments by Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer suggested that his company is making a camera sensor for the new iPhone. He said sensors for Apple will be delayed because of damage to 15 of Sony's plants in Japan.
It's also hard to know how Apple CEO Steve Jobs' medical leave of absence has impacted development of the newest version of the phone.

So the only thing that seems certain about when Apple will release the next version of the iPhone is ... that nobody in the tech media really knows.

Android still growing, but some developers frustrated

(Wired) -- Google's Android platform has been growing steadily since its release in 2008. Now, one out of every three U.S. smartphone owners is using an Android-based device, according to a recent report.
So why aren't developers more excited about the platform?
Of the 69.5 million Americans who owned smartphones as of the end of February, 33 percent used Android devices, according to a report from ComScore. It's a leap of 7 points in a period of only three months.
The growth of Apple's iOS remained stagnant, seeing only a 0.2 percent increase over the same period of time. Competitors Microsoft, HP and RIM were the ones who suffered as Android grew, with drops of 1.3 percent, 1.1 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. The five companies' smartphone market share is shown in the table below.
The growth is partly a numbers game. One of Google's advantages is the sheer number of phone models running Android. Hardware makers have announced more than 10 different Android devices in the first three months of this year, far more than those running Google's competitors.
By contrast, HP announced two new phones in February (the first mobile phone hardware release from the company in far too long), only one Windows Phone 7 device has appeared in 2011, and we're probably not going to see the iPhone 5 anytime soon.
For all of Android's success, however, the platform has yet to fully satisfy its application developer base.
Baird Research shared the results of a recent developer survey with Wired.com, showing that more than 50 percent of developers questioned "view fragmentation" -- the disparity in software versions across device manufacturers and handsets -- to be a "meaningful or serious" problem. Developers also expressed concern over the fragmentation of the app ecosystem on Android, saying they generally preferred a "unified, single-store experience like Apple's App store."
For customers who enjoy Android's openness, the lack of a single app store is hardly a problem. Those who wish to go outside the walled garden of Apple's iOS (but don't necessarily want to jailbreak their phones) can do so fairly easily on an Android device -- or they can use alternative app stores, like Amazon's.
But for developers who wants their programs to make serious money, a nonunified app ecosystem may be less than desirable. Fully 74 percent of respondents said developing for Apple's iOS gave the best opportunities for paid-app revenues, and twice as many developers claimed their apps were more visible in Apple's app store than they were in the Android Market.
We may see a shift in developer attitudes as Android continues to mature and further improve its app ecosystem. Google launched the Android Market web store in February, and just last week it officially enabled in-app billing, allowing developers to charge customers for items purchased within an application.
In addition, a several developers have made six-figure revenues from Android apps, with a couple scoring million-dollar paydays.
With the promise of big money, and a huge base of customers to target, developers have a strong incentive to continue coding for Android. Indeed, despite the complaints, 71 percent of respondents said that they have developed apps for the platform.

Whether they're currently satisfied with Google's OS or not, it looks like developers will continue writing code for it.

Apple's three biggest weaknesses

(Business Insider) -- Apple and CEO Steve Jobs have celebrated a string of huge hits over the past several years, including the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook Air.
Reviews have been mostly glowing, sales have been strong and investors have cheered, sending the stock up 40% over the past 12 months. Apple, which was struggling a decade ago, is now the world's most admired and highly valued tech company.
But Apple is not perfect. In fact, the company has several weaknesses to address:
1) The cloud. Apple has been bragging about how the iPad 2 is a "post-PC" device, but you still need to plug it into a computer to activate and sync it. The easiest way to get photos off your iPhone is to email them to yourself. You still can't sync your iTunes music over Wi-Fi or 3G. This is a shame.
Apple needs to think about the cloud the way Google does -- as the future of mobile services. You shouldn't be tied to a USB cord to access files. You shouldn't need a PC to use a "post-PC" iPad. You shouldn't have to email a map link from your computer to your iPhone.
Perhaps this is part of Apple's new version of iOS, due sometime this year.
The company has a huge new data center in North Carolina and can't be blind to the fact that other companies -- Dropbox, Amazon, Google, etc. -- are doing very cool things with the cloud.
But for now, Apple is still weak here -- MobileMe and Apple's iOS push notifications not withstanding.
2) Social. Apple has tried to do "social" a bit with Ping, its social network based around iTunes music, and GameCenter, its social gaming service. They aren't huge hits. Apple has not been able to go as deep integrating Facebook or other social networks into its products as some Android devices or Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 have.
Some of this could be to reduce Apple's dependence on other companies, so the iPhone is more reliable. But it seems that Apple and Steve Jobs don't really get social, and don't see its value. That could burn them in the long run.
Or perhaps, again, this could be addressed in the next version of iOS. For instance, Apple could go a long way by making the iPhone's built-in Photos app more social, like the popular Instagram app. And Apple's marketing boss Phil Schiller is all over Instagram. So it's not like the company isn't highly aware of what's out there.
This isn't to say that Apple should replicate Facebook, or even try to build its own general-purpose social network. But integrating your existing online social connections could be useful for many of Apple's products, ranging from the iPhone's address book to the App Store to photo sharing. So it's time for Apple to do more here.
3) The living room. The new Apple TV just got a small upgrade, in the form of live video streaming for MLB and NBA games. But it's still the weakest of Apple's products, with a relatively limited selection of video. And it's definitely not something TV companies like Comcast or DirecTV are worried about.
Apple could improve Apple TV with an app store within the next year or so -- gaming could be big! -- and more video content sooner. But it's a challenge, because this is a situation where Apple has to decide between being a good platform -- and allowing rival companies like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon to thrive -- and being a dominant content seller by keeping an iTunes monopoly.
The good news for Apple is that no one else is really putting up a fight here yet. Google TV isn't a big success, while Boxee, Roku and TiVo Premiere haven't caught on with mainstream consumers. So Apple can take its time. Heck, Apple may even come out with an actual television someday.
Also, these are all areas where Apple is relatively in control of its destiny, and can make improvements.

There are some other areas where Apple is vulnerable, such as the threat posed by Google's Android system, and possible production problems because of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But that's a different list.

Messages feature among Facebook's 'biggest undertakings'

Palo Alto, California (CNN) -- The goal of Facebook's new messaging client is to simplify private communication, but as it turns out, executing that has been astoundingly complicated.
Facebook announced and began rolling out the new version of Messages in November, and even now, the company has yet to activate the feature for all of its more than 500 million users.
Reaching everyone could take several more weeks, said Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook director who oversees product development. At least one-fifth of all Facebook users now have access to the feature, and millions more are added daily, said people overseeing the release.
If Facebook engineers could have flipped a switch and activated the feature for every account simultaneously, Bosworth would have given the order without hesitation, he said.
But the new Messages entails more than just dropping the subject line from correspondences and giving everyone a chic @facebook.com e-mail address.
It's an amalgamation of very different communication media. Facebook's system needed to be able to connect with cellular carriers' networks for its text messaging component, operate on standard e-mail channels, and interface with instant-messaging conduits.
Once all that was figured out, Facebook developers went to work on promised features that will be added later. One such element is IMAP access, so that people can pull up their Facebook messages from software like Microsoft's Outlook.
For the Messages project, Facebook assembled a team that consists of 15 to 20 people at a given time, executives said. At the time, it was the largest product-focused group the company had ever formed, they said.
"This is probably one of the biggest undertakings we have ever taken on," said Joel Seligstein, a lead engineer on Messages.
The Messages team grew last month when Facebook acquired a fast-growing startup called Beluga, which makes a group-messaging service. Facebook will maintain development on Beluga for now and plans to integrate the information sent over the service into Messages within the next six months, Bosworth said.
With that purchase, Facebook has staked a claim in the up-and-coming mobile messaging arena. Managers are still deciding whether it makes sense to have a dedicated app for quickly sending messages in addition to the all-in-one Facebook software, Bosworth said.
"The fact that they're one click from the home screen is a valuable trait," Bosworth said of Beluga. "We see them as very consistent with what we've been doing -- real-time, shorter messages, more social, more contextualized. They've done a great job of taking that idea and doing something new and different with it."
In the years since Facebook first made a play to be your inbox, many new communications tools have appeared. Seligstein is the only developer involved in the new Messages who also worked on the original, which launched during Facebook's early days, he said. Based on discussions, he's often the one most critical of it.
"It had the wrong features," Seligstein said. "We were missing a lot of the communicating that was happening."
A lot of those shortcomings were conceptual, developers and executives said. Even the most minute components slowed the process of composing a message and needed rethinking, including having a subject line and the size of the text box. "People just naturally wanted to fill the box," Seligstein said.
So they took their cues from the rise of mobile and instant messaging. Facebook's chat feature, which is being integrated into Messages, is among the most used functions on the site, Bosworth said.
"It's not about establishing relationships. Relationships are assumed in this world," Bosworth said. "Our relationship is established. I don't need to say: 'Hope you are well; how's the kids?' ... If something is wrong with your kids, I'd know. I'd see it on Facebook."
Once those hoops vanished, Facebook observed that people using the new service were sending shorter messages and at a much higher frequency, Seligstein said. In essence, the design changes had morphed behavior, and that's no accident.
"We were expecting this to happen," Karthik Ranganathan, a senior engineer on the project, said flatly.
As the story goes, the impetus for redesigning Messages was a conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and some high school girls during a Thanksgiving weekend, not long after the first version of Messages was released. "E-mail is too slow," Zuckerberg recalled them saying.
"That was probably the first time in his life that he felt like the old guy in the room," Bosworth, a longtime collaborator of Zuckerberg's, said with a laugh.
From that experience, Zuckerberg was determined to solve a problem he wasn't aware existed.
"We don't think that a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail," Zuckerberg said during the news conference last year. "We think that we should take features away from messaging. We think it should be minimal."
But in the time since cementing the concept and in the months since beginning the rollout with much fanfare, engineers have run into some monumental hurdles.
Amid the big launch, they were taking the opportunity to clean up their databases and build a smoother bedrock. One false step and countless messages could be lost. For that reason, they kept many backups and added new users carefully.
"The amount of infrastructure we had to build for this is huge," said Prashant Malik, a Facebook senior engineer. "There are many unknowns."
Beyond the technological feats, Messages can be seen as a gesture to open communication beyond the gates of Facebook.
Traditionally, the products Facebook has built are about sharing things among people you know and within the confines of Facebook's large network. The Facebook service, Bosworth said, "is friend-centric. But communication is bigger than that."

"We've discovered new, cool things that we can do with communication that we didn't know about six months ago," he said. "This is a classic Facebook thing, man. We always want to evolve."

AT&T vs. Verizon iPhone: pretty equal, except for those dropped calls

(ArsTechnica) -- The latest mobile phone user survey from market research firm ChangeWave reveals similar levels of overall satisfaction between iPhone 4 users on Verizon versus those on AT&T.
However, Verizon iPhone 4 users seem to suffer from dropped calls far less often than their AT&T peers, supporting early anecdotal evidence from Verizon iPhone users.
"In terms of overall satisfaction the two iPhones are virtually indistinguishable," according to ChangeWave vice president of research Paul Carton. In March, 82 percent of Verizon iPhone 4 users reported being very satisfied with the device, while 80 percent of AT&T iPhone users reported the same. Only two percent reported any dissatisfaction with the device on either carrier.
Half of Verizon smartphone users mulling switch to iPhone
That doesn't mean users on Verizon don't see at least one significant benefit: fewer dropped calls. Verizon iPhone 4 users reported a dropped call rate of 1.8 percent. AT&T iPhone 4 users, in contrast, had a dropped call rate of 4.8 percent -- more than double that of Verizon iPhone 4 users.
That difference isn't limited to iPhones, though. Comparing dropped call rates for all mobile users on all four carriers, Verizon users reported just 1.4 percent of calls were dropped unexpectedly, while AT&T users reported a 4.6 percent rate. T-Mobile and Sprint users reported rates of 2.3 percent and 2.7 percent respectively.
16% of AT&T customers ready to jump ship for Verizon iPhone
A look at ChangeWave's historical data suggests that AT&T is actually improving. At the height of the iPhone 4 release, AT&T users were reporting dropped call rates as high as 6 percent -- the highest rate recorded by ChangeWave's survey since tracking began in 2008. At the same time, however, Verizon has also been improving. The 1.4 percent rate is the lowest recorded since 2008.
While our own testing didn't reveal much of a difference in dropped calls, ChangeWave's results jibe with the accepted dogma about using an iPhone on Verizon versus AT&T -- namely, that dropped calls were much less of a problem.

If voice calls are a primary reason you use a smartphone, Verizon is likely to be a better choice if you don't want your calls to unexpectedly cut themselves short.

iPhone 5 release date: Big buzz, few facts

(CNN) -- It doesn't take much to get the tech world talking about the iPhone.
The internet has swirled with speculation in recent weeks about a release date for Apple's iPhone 5, and even whether the company will update its iconic smartphone at all this year.
Now, the most tenuous of news reports has ramped the talk up again.
A South Korean news site reported this week that Apple plans to release the phone in the fourth week of June. According to a translation by the MacRumors site, ETNews.co.kr reported that "Apple has confirmed" that time frame.
There are a few problems here:
It seems highly unlikely that the typically tight-lipped Apple would have confirmed a release date. The report also says the phone will be released in South Korea the same day it goes on sale in the United States.
Possible. But, for comparison's sake, the iPhone 4 was released there about three months after its U.S. debut.
And, for what it may or may not be worth, the South Korean report appeared on April 1.
But as Western news outlets jumped on the report, excitement spread.
The words "iPhone 5 release date" were briefly at the top of Google's Hot Topics list Tuesday morning, and multiple U.S. blogs were following up the MacRumors report -- albeit skeptically, in most cases.
The original iPhone, the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 all had June releases. The iPhone 3G was released in early July. But reports have said that Apple plans to focus specifically on software, not hardware, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled from June 6-10 this year.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One X-factor here could be the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Earlier this week, comments by Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer suggested that his company is making a camera sensor for the new iPhone. He said sensors for Apple will be delayed because of damage to 15 of Sony's plants in Japan.
It's also hard to know how Apple CEO Steve Jobs' medical leave of absence has impacted development of the newest version of the phone.

So the only thing that seems certain about when Apple will release the next version of the iPhone is ... that nobody in the tech media really knows.