While Sprint is trying desperately to get this WiMax thing going, Verizon announced they’ll be going with LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology for their 4G network. The interesting part about this is that LTE is actually an enhancement to the UMTS standard, which is the choice of GSM carriers, not CDMA holdouts like Verizon.

Not only does LTE have excellent data pipe specs (100 Mbit/s down, and 50 Mbit/s up for every 20 MHz of spectrum, and Sub-5ms latency for small IP packets), but it could finally mean solid international voice and data roaming to and from the US. Could there come a day where you step off the plane in France with your Verizon 4G phone and immediately go online with a 4G connection on Orange? Well who knows what it will cost, but at least it’s looking like a possibility in the future.

What’s more, if AT&T and T-Mobile continue with LTE, we could see significant coverage enhancement in the US as people get to roam between the networks, similar to the Sprint/Verizon roaming deal in place now.

One disadvantage for Verizon, is that LTE is designed with elegant handoffs to HSDPA/UMTS-based technologies, but not CDMA. So if AT&T rolled it out, people would see smooth transitions between the older and newer services, and would not lose their connection. However, Verizon’s CDMA network operates completely differently, so from where I stand, it seems like if they didn’t include both radios in a phone, leaving a 4G area would drop calls and data. Even if they did include both radios, handoff will probably be kludgey. But maybe they have a secret up their sleeve, or they’re just going to upgrade every damn tower they own at once. Wow. That’s a huge undertaking.

The Verizon press release follows:

VERIZON SELECTS LTE AS 4G WIRELESS BROADBAND DIRECTION

Technology Platform to be Trialed in 2008

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Verizon today announced plans to develop and deploy its fourth generation mobile broadband network using LTE - Long Term Evolution - the technology developed within the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards organization. The selection of LTE provides Verizon and Vodafone - joint owners of U.S.-based Verizon Wireless - with a unique opportunity to adopt a common access platform with true global scale and compatibility with existing technologies of both companies.

Verizon and Vodafone have a coordinated trial plan for LTE that begins in 2008. Trial suppliers include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia-Siemens, and Nortel. These suppliers, along with others in the world community, have contributed significantly towards development of the standards in 3GPP. Discussions with device suppliers have expanded beyond traditional suppliers such as LG, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson, as consumer electronics companies anticipate embedded wireless functionality in their future products.

Working within 3GPP, Verizon and Vodafone, as well as a broad group of infrastructure suppliers, device suppliers, and technology companies from around the globe, have advanced the standards to enable a technology that will deliver unprecedented wireless broadband service for high performance mobile computing, multimedia, and consumer electronic devices and applications. The technology is designed to deliver mobile data networks with higher speed and throughput performance, lower latency, global roaming, and improved efficiencies.

Today’s LTE announcement builds on Verizon Wireless’ technology leadership as the first company to launch high-speed wireless broadband service in the United States using CDMA Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO) technology. Its data innovation and leadership have been marked by the introduction of new multimedia handsets and innovative applications such as V CAST Music, V CAST Video, VZ NavigatorSM, V CAST games, e-mail, Internet access, and picture and video messaging on a variety of devices, including handsets, PDAs and laptops.

Richard Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Verizon Communications observed that “while this next generation technology will be exciting to develop and deploy, it comes at a time when we are adding record numbers of customers to our existing CDMA2000 1x and EV-DO networks. We relish the challenge of preparing for the time when our customers start demanding such 4G capabilities, while continuing the expansion and operation of our existing technologies for many years to come.”

“The company’s move toward a 4G network is driven by our vision of pervasive wireless Internet connectivity and mobility,” said Lynch. “Customers want to be truly untethered with advanced communication devices that provide functionality comparable to today’s wired networks - whether it’s downloading or uploading video, gaming, downloading their favorite music, or social networking. They want to be able to communicate in new and innovative ways whenever and wherever they choose around the globe. A number of factors are setting the stage for our 4G network migration; most importantly, our view of customers’ evolving appetite for more information, entertainment, and functionality, combined with an increasing customer expectation for easy access, high speed, easy handling, and seamless mobility. With a host of new devices and applications, and a particular focus on embedded wireless in virtually every piece of electronics you buy in any store, we believe LTE is the best technology with global scale to deliver on the promise.”

“Vodafone is delighted to be working alongside Verizon in the development of LTE technology, and we’re looking forward to assessing the results of the joint engineering trials. We fully support Verizon’s decision to select LTE as their next generation wireless broadband solution,” said Steve Pusey, Vodafone’s global chief technology officer. “We expect LTE to form a key part of Vodafone’s future technology strategy, and the prospect of moving towards a common platform with Verizon Wireless is an attractive long-term goal. LTE will build on the capabilities of Vodafone’s 3G broadband High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network technology, which is available across the entire Vodafone 3G footprint.”

“Today’s 4G announcement, coupled with our Open Development initiative announced earlier this week present a major growth opportunity for Verizon Wireless,” said Doreen Toben, chief financial officer of Verizon. “Fourth generation’s higher data speeds will usher in a new era of wireless applications and appliances, all of which can benefit from connecting to the nation’s premier wireless network.”

My favorite mobile picture uploader, Shozu, has just added support for uploads via MMS. This gives them reach into the world of featurephone users who don’t do the email thing, and don’t have a smartphone that supports the full-featured Shozu upload client.

Unfortunately, for me and my iPhone, I’m stuck with reduced resolution images through email. But there’s an app for Jailbroken phones called SendPics that will preserve the original resolution of your photos before uploading. You can get it through Installer.app.

I’d love to see some adoption numbers posted after this thing has been out a while. Do users who prefer MMS over email intersect with users who will want a power uploading service like this?

I finally had a chance to sit down and digest the Android API docs and emulator.

First of all I have to say that the Android emulator is the snappiest phone emulator I’ve ever used. After the KITT-sensor style startup animation, a very usable phone interface pops up, and everything seems to flow as it should on an actual device.

That said, I don’t know if this thing is throttling performance to emulate the expected horsepower of the devices themselves. If not, some initial developers may be in for a surprise if their smooth-running apps get choked on production devices.

Development seems dirt simple. The Activities, Views, Intents, Notifications.. component model is phenomenally simple and presents a natural architecture framework for apps that encourages readability and maintainability - perfect for the collaborative, distributed world of open source. User interfaces can be designed programmatically or with an XML descriptor file, providing a bit more MVC-style separation, and interface themes are a concept built in at the core.

Creating custom components is a straightforward affair as well, with relatively few methods to override, and with Android even allowing you to easily extend or customize built-in components, of which there are many. You can even create groups of custom or built-in components into a custom, reusable layout that you can then treat as a single component. I can see a wonderful world of websites dedicated to sharing, trading, and rating Android components popping up, encouraging experimentation and super-rapid development through public components. Who would have thought you’d be mixing and matching mobile software components like people mix and match Flash components now.

It’s nice to see OpenGL-ES included as a prominent API feature on a mobile platform. It is listed as an optional API - meaning it might not be on every phone. But when it’s there, it should support hardware acceleration. Even though the Android 3D API is based on J2ME JSR239 OpenGL-ES, they say it may deviate, so here’s another point of fragmentation concern. But the basics are all there, drawing on inspiration from the famous GLU toolkit. This includes plenty of matrix ops, but only on 4×4’s it seems - the standard 3D transform matrix. You’re not getting a generalized matrix toolkit built in, but since their matrix representation is just a float array, you can easily create your own operations and interchange them with the provided ones.

Playing and recording media is handled by some nice provided classes - MediaPlayer and MediaRecorder. MediaPlayer can handle both local files and streaming over the net. I don’t see exactly what codecs it supports, but I assume it will be a plugin model as it matures. You can have the player draw to any Surface object, which is a building block for UI’s in Android. This is neat, since you can do a lot of things with Surfaces at runtime, including size and stack order transforms and alpha value mods. So I’m assuming you could move a video around the screen, resize, and alpha blend with other objects easily. On a mobile device. Nice. One thing I’d like to see is some kind of binding between a Surface and an OpenGL texture. You see what I’m getting at. Yeah - yummy. But I don’t see that in the current API.

Check out some GL surfaces in action in the emulator:

There’s an optional LBS API as well. This is still in a preliminary form, and isn’t complete. But they’ve given you a way to create some fake LocationProviders to test your next mind-blowing LBS app before real devices are released.

One super-unique API here is the Android Interface Definition Language (AIDL). You’d think this was the name of the XML UI descriptor format, but it’s not. It’s a way to define inter-process communication (IPC) between two separate processes running on the device. Yeah, we’re talking about kernel-assisted IPC messaging here. Very cool. There’s no shared memory, but AIDL lets you define your objects using primitives, and will pass them around for you. Makes the imagination run wild, doesn’t it?

For years, my imagination has produced some exciting ideas for mobile applications, and no matter what devices I wanted to aim for, the implementation details, limitations, and write/test cycles have just stifled my energy and enthusiasm. This is the first time I’ve read a mobile API and have actually been inspired to dream harder rather than restrict myself. It’s unobtrusive, organized, straightforward, and has a low barrier to entry while providing cutting edge functionality to the developer. This is the crux of the Android announcement. This is what the excitement should be about.

Now lets get some of these phones out there so the dream can live in the wild, not in a desktop sandbox.

I’m at MobileCampNYC2 today. I’ll be hopefully uploading some pics to flickr during the camp, and I’ve put a badge below to catch them.

Yeah, I was waiting with baited breath too. As a consumer I’m excited, as a technologist I’m interested and concerned at the same time, and as an entrepreneur I’m nervously optimistic and scared shitless at the same time. Here are my initial questions:

They mention LBS support, but how exactly will this be exposed? Will they pull the game-changing move of putting LBS info in HTTP headers?

What is going to be the policy of signed versus unsigned apps for the devices? If the devices encourage unsigned apps, what will the support be like from the carriers and handset manufacturers? It could get to be a nightmare if everyone is installing software from all over and their phones start acting weird. Just because the devices themselves are open doesn’t mean the carriers won’t lock them down - and if the carriers lock them and don’t encourage the real power features, your innovative apps get a smaller addressable market.

They say that their browsers will be “full power browsers”, but my full power browser on the desktop takes up an insane amount of memory for a mobile device. Which leads me to the question…

Are these phones going to only be high end smartphones? The high end is starting to converge with internet features as it is, so introducing another high end platform won’t help so much in that department. S60, WinMo, Symbian, PalmOS (*cough*) already let a good bit of innovation happen. The pain is getting innovative services to people with the affordable phones. Plus this could fragment the smartphone platform space even more. So it has the potential of not solving as many problems as it creates if manufacturers refuse to adopt.

I can’t wait to see the SDK. I wonder what UI tools they’ll give. GTK is nice and all, but certainly can’t compete with iPhone’s UI at this point. I’m curious to see what enhancements Android will add.

For the hackers and hobbyists, this is a great day. They just need some compatible hardware to run it on. I wonder how this will play out with Maemo? I bet many Maemo apps will be almost directly portable to Android, but will the developers stay with Maemo if the only mass market devices are the Nokia N-series tablets? Nokia did wonders building up Maemo, so will they gradually merge themselves with Android? Will they take too long and see a loss of developers to the platform?

Can’t wait to see how this plays out.

Hey it looks like my wishes might be granted after all!

Slowly, Windows Mobile devices are getting higher res screens. Though I’m not too sure about a square aspect ratio, and the increase in resolution isn’t mind blowing… But whadya know, 320×320 screens are here.

That’s the Samsung SGH-i780 in the pic. It has an optical joystick for zooming through menus, and A-GPS too. Rumor has it the next WM Treo will sport a 320 square too.

MOSH is Nokia’s social network entry for their new “We’re a Web 2.0 company too!” push. I’m a firm believer that great mobile apps are and will be backed by great web services in the future, so I think Nokia’s dedication to merging web standards and practices with their devices and mobile apps is a solid move.

What is MOSH? Well it’s a social network for sharing stuff. And I do mean “stuff”. It’s not just limited to pics and videos and blogs. Nokia wants you to share pretty much any media type you want, and with their S60 support for third-party apps, videos, customizations and various document types, they have the perfect platform to pull this off.

So you can share files, great - but what’s the social aspect? Well, they’ve gone through the community how-to playbook and pulled out the old standards: ranking and popularity. Their ranking systems are based on three metrics - how much stuff you create (upload to MOSH), how much stuff you share to other people (this is an active process where you push content to another person), and how much stuff you collect for yourself. You get little wireless signal - style icons to rank how awesome you are at each of these things. Crafting, sharing, and ranking is a solid metric to keep you engaged and promote community champions, but the service really seems most useful for digging through content when you’re bored and mobile.

Being bored and mobile is actually a pretty interesting area to tackle. Let’s face it, when you’re done texting, emailing and have consumed all your sideloaded content like music and video, what if you want something fresh and interesting? Oftentimes browsing the mobile web isn’t an attractive experience. If you’re not actively engaged in a community that you can access from your mobile device like Facebook, or one of the many mobile only social networking sites popping up like IXENLand, you’re likely not going to find interesting things to do on the mobile web.

Of course, the demographic we’re talking about here is people with open data plans. The featurephone users are not going to find content that doesn’t have the carriers nickel and dime-ing them. But those people are probably not going out to discover new mobile content anyway. So let’s just level-set to that at the onset.

Apple has made strides with solving the mobile boredom problem with YouTube integrated on the iPhone. I’d love to see some usage statistics for that. Are people using it on EDGE while mobile or just using it as a novelty when they’re in WiFi range? I’d like to see some stats on YouTube’s WAP site too. The breadth of content on YouTube, given a proper interface for the phone and reasonable download experiences (I believe the iPhone offering does this), would keep bored people entertained for hours while mobile.

Back to MOSH. Nokia has historically had many third-party apps to keep you busy. S60-specific media have had a huge international presence on the web for years, with download sites dedicated to them. Some of the games for S60 are actually compelling, in a mobile phone kinda way. But being able to download this content for free, in a single place, with a powerful search mechanism driving it? For people with Nokia devices, that service is probably the best cure for mobile boredom ever.

Before you dive into the service, you can download an app to your phone and not deal with the browser. Refreshing the catalog in the background and not having to deal with page loads is a big plus right from the start. I’ll choose a native phone app any day over a mobile web page. The only problem is that I can’t get it to work. I’m here on an N75 with an EDGE connection that seems to be fine, but it sits at the Updating Collection List prompt until it times out. Maybe in 3G service it would be better? Maybe it’s beta bugs? Regardless, I had to fall back to the WAP interface.

Though the WAP interface is really basic - they went lowest common denominator for compatibility - you can upload and browse content from the device. Browsing content and searching for “theme” brought up a ton of S60 and S40 themes, many of which were quite good. But that’s a bit unfair - searching for Nokia-specific files on a Nokia service. However, searching for “cartoon” got me a few Bugs Bunny videos. Easily downloaded and watched. Are those copyrighted? Here’s Nokia’s policy:

As between MOSH and its publishers, MOSH publishers own the content they upload. MOSH cautions all its publishers only to upload content that complies with applicable copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, privacy and publicity, and child-protection laws.

So I guess if someone complains, they take it down. Good move for bootstrapping.

Searches for “books” brought up a bunch of ebooks, and “games” brought up a bunch of J2ME and Symbian games. Say what you want, but having this kind of mobile catalog of rich content to browse through when mobile sure solves the mobile boredom problem.

Searching for “Games” on MOSH’s web interface

You can see, I’m not reviewing much of the community aspects here. There’s nothing special to them, aside from being tied to content and giving you the ability to create networks of people and collections of items that you find interesting. This just accelerates getting you to the good stuff next time you’re browsing. In my mind, the breakthrough here is content. S60 has a lot of content already - getting that organized and downloadable while mobile in a fun, easy to use environment is pretty big for these devices.

To get this off of Nokias and into the rest of the world, they’ll need to make it easier to filter by content that will work on your device. There’s so much out there for Windows Mobile and Palm - those are obvious next targets. Extending into paid content isn’t out of the question either. If all that happens (I give it about a 30% chance), watch out Handango - social mobile content catalogs will beat your service hands down.