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Zeichick’s Take: Android and iOS advance, BlackBerry retreats, Windows Phone re-launches


By Alan Zeichick


 Alan Zeichick
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June 29, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
The last few weeks have seen a lot of excitement in the mobile space. This past week had Google I/O, where we got a first look at Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean,” which offers solid improvements. The previous week, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8, a near-total re-launch that will excite future customers and ISVs, while disappointing existing Windows Phone 7.5 customers. This comes on the heels of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which highlighted iOS 6’s new social-media integration, homegrown mapping engine, and faster browser engine.

All of these platform upgrades are due to ship in 2012.

We also heard from Research In Motion about a delay in its already-pushed-back BlackBerry 10 smartphone operating system. It’s now scheduled for the first quarter of 2013. The company also lost a ton of money in the past quarter. It’s reasonable to predict that BlackBerry is toast, or soon will be.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the three, uh, more viable smartphone platforms, and what they mean for us.

Apple’s iOS 6 is merely an incremental upgrade. Apple has moved from Google’s mapping system to its own Maps engine, which is fully accessible via APIs. You can also integrate Facebook into apps, tap into the Reminders system, get closer to the hardware with the camera, and leverage an improved WebKit rendering engine.

The good news is that from the developer perspective, not much has changed: You get some new capabilities, but if you don’t need them, you don’t need to do anything.

Existing Apple customers won’t be standing in line at midnight to download iOS 6, but they will appreciate its upgrades. That’s because Apple continues to win the award for best support of older hardware. All current iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, should be able to run everything in iOS 6. Most features will run on 2011’s iPad 2 and even 2010’s iPhone 4.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo, is a huge, huge, huge upgrade. Everything changes. It’s a real reboot, as the platform moves from the Windows CE kernel to the Windows 8 kernel (either x86 or the new Windows RT kernel for ARM processors). For the first time, Windows Phone can run on multicore hardware and use screens larger than 800x480. Because the WP8 kernel is the Windows 8 kernel, WP8 phones should work with any Windows 8 device driver. That should let you do some pretty interesting hardware integrations, and it gives WP8 a huge advantage over iOS and Android.

Near field communication (NFC) is a big part of WP8, as it is with Android. iOS still doesn’t get NFC, but I expect Apple to catch up fast, perhaps with the next-generation iPhone and an iOS 6.x update.

Most importantly for app developers, you can also write apps in C/C++, or even use the .NET framework with C# or Visual Basic. That truly enables code migration to the mobile platform.


Related Search Term(s): Android, Apple, BlackBerry, Google, iOS, Microsoft, RIM, Windows Phone

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