don’t call them phones, the g-phone and i-phone battle

FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – British chip designer ARM (ARM.L: Quote, Profile, Research) will demonstrate a prototype of Google Inc’s (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Android mobile phone platform in action next week at the world’s biggest wireless fair, a source close to the company said.

Source: Reuters

I’ve played a bit last week with Android, it’s a really promising technology.
It’s a full stack, based on Java, it’s open and it should be really a “write once run everywhere” technology (not like JavaME!).

It’s a big change: they first wrote the OS, the software and then finally they found an hardware to support it. It might really work.

I like to think that the Google team was so frustrated working with J2ME for their (very nice) JavaME apps like GMail and Maps that they suddenly decided to write a full OS to support their ideas.
I remember an old Cédric Beust post about his intense, crazy experience on writing the Gmail app.
Is it only a coincidence that he’s working on Android?

Android offers many things, missed for too many years by Sun on the JavaMe platform.

- Deep phone integration (ability to interoperate between apps, make calls and so on with the phone)
- Ready to use “widgets” like maps
- Pretty nice pattern to write an application: what was a MIDlet in the JavaME world is now and Activity.

- Easy to write apps from any platform (yes, also Mac!)

The battle begins now, I-Phone: closed source, basically only web apps, nice screen with nice features or G-Phone. I can’t predict who’s gonna win but I’m sure that there are some losers on this battle already: Sun Microsystem, Nokia, Microsoft: all the old good companies, unable to make any decent progress in the last years. (where is MIDP3?!!!)

I’ve been very frustrated with the JavaME technology, I hope that Google will change now how things works in the mobile world.