Samsung Android phone

Samsung seems to make announcement of its first Linux based Android phone . This Linux based phone will be a first release of Android phone from World's number two OEM after NOKIA. Samsung comes second after Nokia in the smartphone market share worldwide. This release of Samsung's Android Phone is a real booster for Android and OHA dominance over other mobile platforms like LIMO.


Samsung is core member in both the prominent industry collaborations namely LIMO and OHA of Linux based Open Mobile Platforms. An insider report which says about Samsung working on Android phones release seems that the equilibrium seems to get tilted towards OHA & Android.

Report also reveals that there has been addition in workforce of Samsung's Android Phones Development team. Though different in expected looks from HTC G1 this Samsung Android phone is rumoured to be launched in Q2 by the same carrier T-Mobile in USA. No confirmations has been from either side.

Samsung Android Phone is supposed to be a touch screen smartphone with support for various Google services. It will be really nice to see whether Motorola comes up with Android Phone before Samsung or not. Motorola has announced about its ongoing work for Android based Phone in early October of 2008.

Linux Camera on Moon Rover

One project for Linux camera is in for Google's Lunar X PRIZE competition. The paper describing feasibility & announcing participation in Google's Lunar X PRIZE competition discusses use of Open source software & a donated Elphel NC353L network camera for the purpose of capturing , compression and store/transmit of extremely high-resolution videos.

Author of the paper Anders Feder is a volunteer with Team FREDNET. The discussed Elphel camera device has also been previously used by Google for Books Library and Street view projects.

Team of the volunteers at Frednet is currently designing a remote-controlled robotic rover intended to be sent to the surface of the Moon. Futher updates on the project can been on the their blog.

Moca Medical Diagnostic Application

Well i think this application actually gives hint of what can be an imaginative use of development for Web 2.0 & free Linux software like Android. Moca is an Android based application for HTC G1 which merges mobile technologies & telehealth. It is designed to provide better medical diagnostic, screening, and therapeutic services in developing nations & remote under-served areas. This application is actually based on the fact that nearly 80% to 90% of world population is under some kind of network connectivity through tower infrastructures.

Moca provides an Android application for medical screening which integrates a Linux server application and the open source OpenMRS medical records database. The Moca app is designed to be used by nurses and careworkers who work from clinics or mobile vans from remote areas sent out to remote villages.

Moca choosed Android as its target platform because of it being open source which may lead to lost cost handsets. Also Moca developers choosed Android because of its high end camera feature & advanced application development environment.

To deal with the various problems related to existing global cellular framework Moca developers provide innovative technolgies for packetization, synchronization, and multimodal communications . For more you can visit mocamobile website.

Android Development Hardware

Google has reportedly started providing an unlocked version of the Android based T-Mobile G1 to registered Android developers from its website. This network and bootloader unlocked kit namely "Android Dev Phone 1" is available at cost of $400 to the existing registered Google Android
members & developers. This release is basically aimed to provide developers a real hardware platform to test their applications on."Android Dev Phone 1" is available in USA, UK, India, Japan, Germany, Canada, Taiwan, France, Spain, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Finland. This can be used with any SIM card & also with custom builds of ANDROID OS . Development kit namely Android Dev Phone 1 features same specification as of T-mobile HTC G1. According to Google Android Dev Phone 1 comes with stack compatible with Android 1.0. More updates on same can be found here

Android 1.0 ported to Nokia N810

Now this can be considered as news of weekend. Google's much hyped Linux based mobile phone stack Android is ported on Nokia N810 tablet. Some week back there was news of Linux was ported to IPhone. Now this news can again be taken in same taste. This shows the penetration & attempts of Linux hackers to make Linux run on various proprietary devices.



This hack was done by Beijing based consulting firm NthCode. NthCode specializes in Linux device development, in markets that include mobile phones, set-top boxes, and "converged" multimedia devices. The NthCode team also did a comparative study between Android's Linux kernel and the mainline kernel and found the differences to be "significant." Google had changed 75 files and added an additional 88, making substantial changes in emulation, power management, Netfilter, debugging, memory handling, and other areas.

Video of Android booting on Nokia N810 tablet can be seen below :



But still there are few things left to be done. Most important of all is making ANDROID applications work & secondly to make wifi work on Nokia N810.

Linux on IPhone

For all Linux enthusiasts who were waiting for IPhone & Linux integration here comes a piece of news chunk which may pass a sheer wave of joy. IPhone hacker "Planetbeing" along with his team of hacker contributors Poorlad, Cmw, Saurik , CPICH and Ius has reverse engineered Apple's hardware drivers to get a thing initial port. Video of their work is shown below



The port contains drivers for serial, framebuffer and SerialOverUSB functions. Once OpeniBoot bootloader is installed, it lets iPhone user can choose between booting into the IPhone's native OS, or into a rudimentary linux port's console. When the console comes, user can use USB download a kernel and root filesystem to the phone . Being an initial port , developers plans to integrate support for stuff like accelerometer, WiFi,baseband functions,NAND write, sound and touchscreen. As a next step we may see may be Android being ported on IPhone using OpeniBoot bootloader as iphone-dev.org is luking for Android hackers to contribute for development.