Thursday, February 21, 2008

Next-gen mobile devices

Reading and watching about Nvidia's APX 2500 platform and its capabilities, combined with another session of Google's Android platform, I wonder how short will be the period of time in which we will have in our pockets those magnificent devices.

Able to sustain OpenGL applications (Quake III Arena is old and deprecated, but not for mobile devices), HD movies (running on a silicon chip instead of spinning hard-drives gives the opportunity to use better the battery power in two manners: crisp and detailed videos and image processing or increased operating time of the devices), special efects and lots of other additional features (accelerometer, wi-fi or hi-speed GPRS connections are consuming a lot of power), the APX 2500 devices are a dream that must become operational in the shortest amount of time.



A 750MHz processor, a powerful 3D video processing unit, 1280x1024px resolution and camera's capabilities up to 12Mpx, also offering S-video and Composite in-outs, this is a must-have device.


The APX 2500 chip as GeForce ULP (ultra low power) includes OpenGL ES 2.0 and Microsoft Direct3D Mobile, playing over 10 hours of HD 720p videos, all of these on Windows Mobile OS.


Entering in production from the second half of the year, Nvidia is already prepared to deliver to big industry names.





How about creating your own phone applications? Maybe using phone's camera in another way than intended or maybe with much more available functions?

How about organizing your day taking as reference the location all your interviews and business meeting and so on, using Google Maps?

Well, these are only few examples of your imagination.
Imagine that you could do that with your phone. Wait, what phone?

It doesn't matter. YOU are creating the applications, so you are not forced to buy a phone for its business or entertainment functions, you are simply buying a phone with a decent handling of java/image/sound/connection routines.

Take Android SDK for start (with Eclipse for java/C programming or any other development environment) and "engage!".

Nothing is too complex for anyone who wants to learn or to create better products than the big and rich and evil companies products.

An Open Handset Alliance Project - Android project was started these days for anyone and Google is giving away 10 millions of dollars in prizes for the best visual and/or useful applications created by, you guessed, ANYONE.

A brief introduction of Android


Did I mentioned how easy it is to build great mobile applications? Yes, I did. Well, for beginners it's not quite that easy, but with the help of the developing manner and structured thinking of other technologies they've learned (html, javascript, php, mysql, etc), nothing is impossible.



By the way, there isn't a Gphone for this time, so don't trust others claiming the fact that they own or saw or something like that in the present or near future.
Real working devices are available, but not as "Gphone"s.



And for last, the XPERIA X1 from SonyEricsson.

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