How much do you spend on each platform?

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Mobile Development is such a hype nowadays. Frow West to East, everybody wants to create an app and publish it for free or paid. It's not free to develop and publish your apps. In this blog, I'll give you an illustration on how much the capital do you spend as a single developer. The cost might not exact, but I try to be as close as I can.

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Nexían, how it can be a smartphone trendsetter in Indonesia

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In my previous post, on my hands-on nexian experience, I have given nexían credits for its excellent hardware (with some glitch on its SD card slot) but lousy software (OS) beaten with community-made CMLMod. By using CMLMod, the device has more features and perform faster.

Nexian has a good track record of leading the market of phones. Usually featured phone bundled and packaged with songs for certain selebrities. That's why I'm suggesting that Nexian Journey is featuring Aura Kasih, it's sexy and elegant. Okay, the last part is just kidding :D. Nexian takes a good (and risky) moves on pushing android as its phone platform. In this post, I'd explain further what my opinion of what nexían needs to be a leader of local smartphone and furthermore to gadget market using Android.

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My First Android Experience on DevBoard and Phone

I've been playing with Android for few years, but to be honest I never have an android phone. All I know about android is when I in in progress on creating an Game Console on http://gdi.nerd.web.id/. I suspend the project since I don't feel FroYo is appropriate for game console, I wait for GingerBread to be dropped in to the source code. This is how android runs on the board:

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When I spend about 4-5 hours a day to study mods for the UI, it turns out that I have no UX designer. And I heard that Gingerbread will have friendlier UX for tablet/bigger screen, I would ilke to wait for it rather than hacking around Froyo. The funny thing is that this device will called 'Ginger', really coincidence with codename from Google. The other reason is that my business doesn't get really good traction at that time and I'm loosing partners and money. Thus, I relocate to Jogja, got a very good partner to start other company. *Yes creating companies is addictive*, thus for last 6 months I have no free time on hacking either Linux or Android Kernel but all driver codes for kernel 2.6.34 is ready on my github account. I cannot say much about the device, you can see the diffs on the source code. The device itself doesn't have telephony function.

Finally it turns out yesterday I heard that Nexian lower their phone prices to IDR 1,999,000 (US$ 220) from IDR 2,500,000 (US$ 300). I really interested on this phone and began researching it. It turns out that the device is relatively Easy to be mod-ed.

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Unix as Mobile Operating System

Mobile Operating System is getting really high hype these days. The competitions between smartphone vendors such as Apple, Google, and Blackberry to deliver the best OS for their customers is really fierce. Therefore, Mobile Operating System plays an important role on smartphone market. Interestingly, those OSes are unix, unix-like, ore somehow has connection to Unix directly or indirectly.
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Apple iOS - by Apple
This operating system powers millions of devices produced by Apple; iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Formerly known as iPhone OS, but recently it's renamed to iOS to match Apple naming scheme. The OS is unix-like OS, similar to Mac OS X, but optimized for embedded devices running on ARM architecture. The origin of the OS can be traced to NextStep/OpenStep that inherit code from FreeBSD and NetBSD project. The OS has compatibility with POSIX in several of their components (threading, socket, etc). You can easily call POSIX API from Cocoa Touch App.
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Android OS - by Google
This operating system is controversial one. It uses linux kernel optimized for ARM architecture, yet it just doesn't support full POSIX on its bionic C runtime, such as C++ exceptions. It uses Linux Kernel but not using its userland tools. Applications runs on Dalvik, and native apps cannot run by itself and should be imported to dalvik API call to be able to be used by Apps. Thus, it's hard to classify the Operating System is Unix POSIX or not. Nevertheless, it has origin of Linux which is known as Unix-like operating system. It's not genetic though.
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QNX - by Blackberry
QNX is well known on embedded device development as a commercial Unix-Like operating system that uses Microkernel architecture. Now it's owned by Blackberry. Blackberry OS 7 will be based on QNX. QNX is compatible with most of POSIX standard. Compatibility with POSIX standard make porting native code from other unix/unix like operating system such as FreeBSD, OSX, and Linux to QNX easier.
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MeeGo - by Nokia
Unlike android, MeeGo runs on top of Embedded Linux distributions. Thus, MeeGo can be considered as a Linux distro for Embedded Devices such as Mobile Phone, Tablet, and set-top-boxes. The GUI is based on Qt. Since MeeGo is a Linux distro, the Operating System can be classified as Unix-Like Operating System.

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WebOS - by Palm (now HP)
The same as MeeGo. WebOS is a form of commercial/proprietary distro of Linux. It uses libC, GStreamer, libpurple, and other libraries typically used on Desktop Linux. The uses on Linux classifies this OS by Palm is a unix-like operating system.

It's really interesting to see the competitions and development between mobile operating systems. From the list above we can say that the existence of Linux, made by it's Benevolent Dictator For Life, Linus Torvalds, really benefitting mobile os developers and foster the innovation of Mobile Operating System.