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.

I had some downloads and some feedbacks, so why not spending another couple of "boxes" and write some more code?

• In this "release" there's a simple sound (next step will be to have something like a rooster/alarm clock, that would be great)
• There's a countdown with the minutes, seconds remaining for the current task (work or break)
• Screen is still fullsize, someone told me that he doesn't know what to do with it when it starts, perhaps I'll add in the future a customized menu with some graphic button at the bottom of the screen

The code, if you wanna have a look is on Google code here, the current MIDlet is here.

I wrote a small, very very simple MIDlet for time boxing since more than one person mentioned in last weeks that it would be nice to use such an application. It's a MIDP 2.0 app and it should work on any phone, on my N95 works fine. Depending on the number of downloads and feedbacks maybe I'll improve it. (UI is poor, no customization possible for instance...) MobileBoxing MIDlet