Pocket-lint.co.uk have a series of shots up from the Mobile World Congress of ARM's android prototype. This is the same handset we saw a spy shot of before.

The early prototype that Pocket-lint was shown was running on the company's ARM 9 chip, two generations old, on a device that is unlikely to come to market, however that still didn't stop it performing incredibly quickly.

Although the interface will be fully customizable by the handset manufacturer, the prototype design we were shown featured a scroll bar of applications along the bottom of the screen.

The interface also had, as you'll see by the gallery of pictures, a very Apple feel to it, heavily graphical in its interface.

Meanwhile, OHA member Texas Instruments has announced it will unveil a couple of prototypes as well:

Today at Mobile World Congress, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announced it will demonstrate an early look of the Android mobile platform in two forms: a prototype handset based on TI's OMAP850 processor that also includes TI's Wireless LAN (WLAN) and Bluetooth® wireless technology solutions, as well as an OMAP3430 processor-based Zoom Mobile Development Kit from Logic PD. Both demonstrations highlight the flexibility of the OMAP platform's multi-core architecture to deliver high-performance multimedia and sophisticated user interfaces (UI) on the Android platform.

Kinda anti-climactic, ain't it?

[via AndroidGuys]

This article at UK site Marketing Week postulates that Dell may be working with Google to build the gphone.

Dell. And Google.

The evidence? Well, Dell did recently hire a Motorola executive! And, Dell has built PDAs. And some "senior industry sources" apparently mentioned something about it. "Senior" as in "been around a while", or as in "over-65"?

The last Google rumours we had emerging from the UK was that they were looking to buy Skype. That still hasn't happened, by the way.

Digitimes is reporting that HTC CEO Peter Chou recently told analysts that the company will be delivering 2-3 Android handsets this year, an estimate which just ambiguous enough to qualify as interesting tech news.

Google has extended the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge submissions, ostensibly in order to allow submitters to make use of a new SDK they'll be releasing sometime soon. From the official Android Developer blog:

Based on the great feedback you've given us, we've made significant updates to the SDK that we'll be releasing in several weeks. In order to give you extra time to take advantage of these forthcoming UI and API enhancements, we've decided to extend the submission deadline. In addition, a fair number of developers have also asked for more time to build and polish their applications.

Here is the updated time line:

April 14, 2008: Deadline to submit applications for judging
May 5, 2008: Announcement of the 50 first round winners, who will be eligible for the final round
June 30, 2008: Deadline for the 50 winners of the first round to submit for the final round
July 21, 2008: Announcement of the grand prize winner and runner-up

First the start of the Developer Challenge was delayed, and now the end is delayed as well. These guys have to get their shit together.

The fine folks at AndroidGuys have posted the fourth installment in my 34 Weeks of OHA feature. In this week's action-packed installment: Broadcom, legal drama, and domestic violence.

Go here to check it out.

The Boston Business Journal is reporting that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be offering an Android-based course this semester, the school's Computer Science program's first Mobile-programming course.

The class... is being offered to students in the computer science major at MIT and is designed to give them an early edge in what could soon become a dominant platform among cell phone operating systems.

This is the sort of early endorsement Android needs more of. MIT is not only the school most associated with really hard-core tech geeks, but has a cool-ass logo as well.

Nokia, the blonder-than-you 800-pound Finnish gorilla, has made itself a little acquisition this morning -- Trolltech, the Norwegian software house.

Why is this significant? Well, aside from owning the Qt technology at the heart of KDE, Trolltech also posesses Qtopia Phone Edition, a mostly-open-source linux-based OS for smartphones (sounds familiar).

It's hard not to see this as a response to Android. It is also, without doubt, a big win for Linux, as it seems more and more likely that Linus' open-source kernel is going to become the standard pillar on which the next generation of mobile devices stands.

Nokia has got itself a honey, here. Trolltech has some no-question open source cred, a robust and well-storied software chest, and a gaggle of open source developers already well acquainted with the Qt framework. Furthermore, Trolltech is a LiMo member and producers of their own open handset, the Greenphone, which is more a developer platform and a proof-of-concept than a viable real-world-use device, but is nonetheless cool. And all for a paltry $153 million? Good deal.

[via Engadget]

The Android Developer's Blog has announced a number of "Android Code Days" taking place in major cities around the world. Munich Jan 29, London and Tel Aviv on Jan 31, Boston Feb 23.

What's a Code Day, you ask? Well, it's just our name for a day-long introduction and immersion session for Android. We'll give a technical introduction to the platform as well as a more in-depth look into topics of interest to the attendees. Then we'll have a free-for-all coding session that we like to call the "Laptop Lounge".

It's kinda like the .net CodeCamp I'll be at this coming weekend, except interesting.

The 3rd installment of my 34 Weeks of OHA guest column is up over at AndroidGuys (a real blog.) This week we're profiling Audience, Inc.

Got some positive feedback on last week's article. The profilee, Ascender Corp., posted on their blog describing the profile as 'humbling.' This, in turn, humbled me, and everything quickly descended into choruses of "I love you, man!" The blogosphere makes me feel warm inside.

Head on over and check out this week's happiness!

The San Jose Mercury News has an article up highlighting more developer dissatisfaction with Android. This time a new cause for bitching, the as-yet-unrevealed nature of the source code, is the thrust of the compaints, although the good ole "buggy and lacks features" bit is brought out again as well.

As Google seeks to position itself to be the Microsoft of mobile by offering a free must-have operating system, it is running into Microsoft-style problems that could complicate the Mountain View company's efforts to expand into the mobile advertising market, which is expected to be $11 billion in just three years.

Even with the bugs and delays, I'm not sure just what's "Microsoft-style" about creating an open-source OS and giving it away.

This reads like manufactured news. Find a complaint that may or may not have some legitimacy, get a quote from somebody in the industry (usually an executive from a San Francisco start up; both SF start ups and their executives replicate like bacteria, so there's always one available and they'll usually say whatever you want), then package the whole thing up as news. The public's love affair with Google is slowly degenerating into reality ("He's realy nice and everything, but sometimes he'll wear the same pair of briefs for, like, four days in a row!"), so these not-is-all-right-inMountain-View stories are hot.

In other words: move along, there's nothing to see here.