MIPS Technologies, a provider of processor architectures and cores for digital consumer, home networking, wireless, communications and business applications, announced that support for the MIPS® architecture is included in new SkypeKit™ developer tools available now from Skype. Through the SkypeKit closed beta program, MIPS Technologies has developed a Skype reference implementation for the MIPS® architecture—the leading architecture for the digital home.

Skype is software used by individuals and businesses to make video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Developers now have the ability to build Skype functionality into MIPS-Based™ devices such as DTVs, set-top boxes and digital media adaptors. 

According to Art Swift, vice president of marketing, MIPS Technologies, “We are pleased to offer our licensees yet another key piece of the picture for next-generation connected devices. By participating in the SkypeKit beta program, our licensees and their customers can now develop Skype solutions to enable Skype users around the globe to communicate through a range of MIPS-Based products. The MIPS architecture offers compelling performance and power consumption advantages. These advantages, together with the work we are doing with platforms such as Skype, Android™, Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1, Yahoo! TV Widgets and others, are enabling our customers to quickly and easily create the next generation of innovative SoCs.”

Intrinsyc Software International today announced a license and services agreement with Tattu Mobile for RapidRIL telephony technology.

Tattu Mobile is developing a series of Google Android tablet devices based on ZiiLABS ZMS-05 processors. Licensing RapidRIL enables Tattu to integrate a cellular radio and handle the unique features needed for their platform and targeted carriers. Tattu Mobile’s device is targeted at the rapidly expanding tablet device market and is expected to be available in global markets beginning Q4 2010.

Intrinsyc’s RapidRIL supports several radio baseband solutions, such as Infineon, Sierra Wireless and Novatel Wireless, covering various UMTS and CDMA technologies. These solutions give OEMs and ODMs a head start in producing connected devices.

The ‘Google App Inventor’ lets users create apps “visually” and through a series of “blocks”, a process which the technology company claims requires “NO programming knowledge”.

This all sounds good, but early demos of the tool still look a tad too daunting to the average consumer.

However, The New York Times reports that Google has been testing the app inventor out in groups that include sixth graders, whom the company claims are able to develop their own apps. Not that these apps are any good, of course.

See here how it works:

While the Android Market is far from perfect, it’s still gets the job done just fine. And, with recent performance charts popping up from all mobile app stores, it looks like the Market stands out in a couple different ways when compared to competition. Whether or not these differences are good or bad is up for question.

The Android Market has the highest percentage of free applications of any mobile app store out there. Free apps in the Android Market comprise a full 57% of the entire market place, easily besting any other application store’s availability of free applications. Some might say that the Market isn’t primed enough to make the kind of money that the App Store generates. They may be right, but more free applications is still more appealing to the average consumer. And “free” doesn’t necessarily mean lesser quality, either. The developers just choose to make money in other ways, and ads seem the be the way to go with Android right now.

The average price for all paid Android applications is $3.29, with the average price for the top 100 paid apps around $4.27. This is cheaper than Apple’s $4.65 and $6.02 price points, respectively, but it’s hard to deny that apps coming from the Android Market lack the polish of those coming from the App Store. With almost no interface guidelines to help keep user interfaces consistent across different Android apps, some can look like a complete mess. This is where Apple’s improvement process for applications, love it or hate it, comes in handy.

Google is activating about 160,000 devices a day, about 2 phones every second, so it will only be a matter of time before the OS will outpace almost all competitors with units sold. At that point, developers will flock to the Android Market with premium app offerings. But I wouldn’t expect to see that until Google gets some improvements rolled out to their application store.

Software has played a critical role in transforming the mobile industry since the beginning of the century. Since 2008, mobile software and applications have moved from the sphere of cryptic engineering lingo to part of the essential marketing playbook for mobile industry vendors.

In stock market terms, developer mindshare is one of the hottest “commodities” in the mobile business, one whose “stock price” has ballooned in the last two years. Platform vendors, handset OEMs, network operators, hardware vendors, and infrastructure providers all want to contribute to mobile apps innovation. Mobile players, from hardware vendors and handset OEMs to networks, are now vying to win software developer mindshare, in order to add value on top of their devices and networks. But how is the landscape of mobile developer mindshare looking today?

The new report Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond, offers many new insights into mobile developer mindshare, and analysis into every touch point of the developer journey, from platform selection to monetisation. The research is based on a set of benchmarks and a survey across 400+ developers globally, segmented into 8 major platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash Lite, and mobile web.

In terms of developer mindshare, the research shows that Symbian and Java ME, which dominated the developer mindshare pool until 2008, have been superceded by the Android and iPhone platforms. Despite Symbian remaining in the pole position in terms of smartphone market penetration, ‘out-shipping’ iPhone 4 to 1 and Android many-times to 1, the signs of dissatisfaction with the way the Symbian platform has evolved have long been evident.

Indeed Android stands out as the top platform according to developer experience, with close to 60 percent of developers having recently developed on Android, assuming an equal number of developers with experience on each of eight major platforms. iOS (iPhone) follows closely as the next most popular platform, outranking both Symbian and Java ME, which until 2008 were in pole position.

Electronics manufacturer Dell continues its love affair with Android, lifting the curtain on a five inch tablet to be made available on the O2 UK network in early June.

The Android-based Streak has a five inch touch screen, which Dell claims is large enough to present web pages in their natural form. It is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor, a firm Android favourite, and packs 3G, wifi and Bluetooth connectivity as well as GPS.

Despite its size it can also be used to make voice calls, and also boasts a five megapixel camera, a Micro SD slot, 2GB of internal storage, integrated Google Maps with turn-by-turn navigation, and a removable battery.

No word on pricing yet, which should be announced by O2 shortly, but Dell said it also plans to make the Streak available in the US later this summer.

The Dell Streak hits the sweet spot between traditional smartphones and larger-screen tablets. Its unique size provides people new ways to enjoy, connect, and navigate their lives, according to Ron Garriques, president of Dell communication solutions.

On a related note, Android 2.2, codenamed FroYo, is right around the corner. The seventh platform release since Android 1.0 launched in September 2008 introduces; the Dalvik JIT compiler, which delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1; Exchange capabilities including account auto-discovery and calendar sync, remote wipe, minimum password, and lockscreen timeout; the V8 JavaScript engine integrated into the Android browser; new data APIs to enable apps to participate in data backup and restore, allowing an application’s last data to be restored when installed on a new or a reset device; app installation on device or memory card; and application error reports.

Read in Embedded.com

In developing consumer electronics and embedded devices with operating systems such as Linux, developers must painstakingly customize their software for devices to be production-ready. This process can take a significant amount of time and resources to meet increasingly small windows of opportunity. Due to the fragmented natures of Linux and proprietary systems, applications tend to be device-specific, and in this environment, only the largest companies with substantial in-house software development teams can port applications across multiple devices.

Android as an open-source platform supported by Google provides a rich, well-defined software stack that allows easy application development and portability across a wide variety of embedded devices. It removes the barriers created by the fragmentation of Linux development and creates a single framework on top of Linux to allow applications to be written once and run on many devices. Android has the potential to bring a vast array of applications to consumer electronics devices that weren't previously possible. With it, companies no longer need to invest millions of dollars in feature and application development to compete with the world's largest OEMs.

iTunes, Windows Mobile, OVI, and now Android
Availability of a wide range of applications for a large number of platforms leads to broader industry adoption. This success is driving consumer electronics companies outside the mobile handset space to consider this model for device development. Until now, digital home devices such as DTVs, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players have primarily been closed systems with limited applications such as program guides, DVR, and service messages. Android will bring a full Internet experience to these devices, enabling compelling platforms for internet content such as digital pictures, video, music, news, weather, calendar, and traffic. Existing Android applications can be downloaded for a customized user experience, and as Android continues to develop for devices beyond handsets, developers will create a broad set of new applications.

Developers are also looking to Android to enable user interfaces in a number of other embedded platforms that require user interactivity and visual presentation, such as multi-function printers, kiosks, point of sales systems, and digital signage. Android provides a license- and royalty-free way to create simple user-intuitive interfaces for these types of devices. For example, multi-function printers, which have historically been peripherals to PCs, are becoming more intelligent, standalone devices where the PC is potentially not even needed. For example, people can connect their digital camera to a printer, then view, edit, upload to Facebook, and print their pictures without going through a cumbersome PC boot-up. Android can help drive this transition as it enables a rich, intelligent, and user-friendly experience.

Could this be done without Android? Of course, but Android makes development much faster, easier, and less expensive—leveling the competitive playing field.

Read the complete article.

NXP and Trusted Logic today announced the release of an open source NFC Android™ API. This will enable mobile phone users to access a new range of contactless applications such as mobile payments, transport and event ticketing as well as data sharing directly from their Android phones.

NXP and Trusted Logic pioneered the integration of NFC technology into Android with the first versions implemented and showcased already last year. The companies are now leading the open source community to define an industry standard for the integration of NFC technology within Android. Opening this API to the community will enable application and service providers to develop their NFC applications with a standard framework as they did with the JSR 257 specification. This will drive the creation of compelling NFC applications by handset manufacturers and independent application developers alike.

The API has been released following consultation with various eco-system partners, including mobile network operators, handset manufacturers and NFC controller providers.

A second-generation NFC Android stack based on this Open NFC API is now available from NXP and Trusted Logic. It provides a complete integration into the Android framework, comparable to the Bluetooth® & Wi-Fi services already integrated in Android.

The API specification is accessible via a single mail request to NFCforAndroid@trusted-logic.com. An Apache License 2.0 model was selected in order to provide a legal framework to new contributions.

From Google’s Android Developer site — evidence in graphical form of the fragmentation of Android devices. This is a potential problem for Google and its service provider customers.

For Android, fragmentation comes in the form of different “dot” releases of the core OS, which even in the short time it’s been around have diverged rather significantly. For instance, only the latest releases of the OS have talk-to-text input options and other key new features, and for app developers having to keep up with different OS versions can be particularly complicated.

Somewhat surprising in the graphic above is the concentration of pre-2.0 Android devices out there — mainly T-Mobile myTouch’s but including other devices as well that either launched early or chose not to go the full 2.0 route. The over-the-air upgrade process by operators for Android has been somewhat mixed — for instance, Verizon took forever to upgrade the Droid from 2.0 to 2.1 — only exacerbating the problem.

At a time when Android growth is outpacing other players, fragmentation poses a real threat to that momentum by frustrating developers, confusing customers and placing an undue burden on operators that have to support the platform.

Intrinsyc Software International today announced its user interface (UI) and Application Center of Excellence, based in Beijing, China will support Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) customers with development of innovative UIs and applications with Microsoft Silverlight 4. Intrinsyc has enabled hundreds of mobile and embedded devices with platform level software as well as UI design and application development.

Intrinsyc supports the development of mobile devices and the applications that enhance the value of those devices on a broad set of operating system platforms including: Windows CE, Windows Phone 7, Linux, Android, Moblin, and Symbian. Mobile device experience includes expertise in Smartphones, e-readers, tablets, personal navigation devices, industrial handhelds, and other consumer and enterprise mobile devices. The company also provides innovative and reliable, turn by turn navigation software on a variety of OS platforms.