Researchers at Standford University are building a brand new mobile operating system from scratch called Cinder. Philip Levis, a Stanford assistant professor, explains that building a mobile OS on top of a platform like Linux which is built for large systems, is a bad idea because those platforms are not tailored to the requirements of a mobile device. Apparently, work is being done to make it compatible with the G1 handset. One very interesting feature is the ability to increase the amount of power that is being used by an individual program, providing more performance. Cinder’s power management system should allow for much better battery life as well. I cant wait to try the first public build of this OS.
Google really surprised me when they released their own mobile operating system. Why do I say that? Because Google was always supposed to put out a web-based OS, one that you would access through nothing more than a web browser. This was what we all were anticipating 5 years ago. That still has not become a reality, but they are really making waves in the mobile world. Here is the latest list of improvements to Android 1.5:
Overall User Interface Improvements for:
- In-call experience
- Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
- SMS & MMS
- Browser
- Gmail
- Calendar
- Email
- Camera & Gallery
- Application management
Performance improvements
- Faster Camera start-up and image capture
- Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
- Smoother page scrolling in Browser
- Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling
New features
- On-screen soft keyboard
- Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
- Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
- User dictionary for custom words
- Home screen
- Widgets
- Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
- Live folders
- Camera & Gallery
- Video recording
- Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
- Bluetooth
- Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
- Auto-pairing
- Improved handsfree experience
- Browser
- Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
- Copy ‘n paste in browser
- Search within a page
- User-selectable text-encoding
- UI changes include:
- Unified Go and Search box
- Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
- Contacts
- Shows user picture for Favorites
- Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
- One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
- System
- New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
- SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
- SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
- Google applications
- View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
- Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
- Upload videos to Youtube
- Upload photos on Picasa
mobile, operating systems | admin | 
April 15, 2009 6:00 pm | 
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