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Updated

The Federal Communications Commission has approved the much anticipated Google Android phone, and documents suggest a release date of about Nov. 10 at the latest.

That’s because in the document, the manufacturer of the phone, HTC, requests the Commission grant it a short-term confidentiality request on its design attachments until Nov. 10th, 2008.

If Nov. 10 turns out to be Android-HTC release date, this is in the window of our recent prediction it would be released between Oct. 15 and Nov. 30.

Note the Nov. 10 date could be used to confuse people intentionally. The FCC request by Apple for the iPhone, for example, had a longer confidentially request than it really needed (three weeks in that case).

Engadget broke the news of the FCC approval. The FCC documentation makes it clear that the most exciting things about the phone may remain confidential until as late as Nov. 10.

Documentation is here from HTC regarding fact that it has authorization, and a WiFi interoperatibility certification is here.

It has already been widely reported that the phone is called the HTC Dream. In the documentation, the handset is listed as type: “Dream,’ and model: “DREA100.” There’s also mention of a “jogball,” which has been seen on the handset in videos that have circulated.

The attachments for which confidentiality is requested include 1) schematic design, 2) block diagram, 3) theory of operation and 4) BOM.

Here are the next steps in the Android process:
1) release of public SDK [Update: This final Android SDK release has just happened.]
2) ADC winner
3) announcement
4) release

[Update 2: Google just published a roadmap that looks rather similar to the one we outlined.]

updated

Two weeks ago Google announced the first-round winners of its two-round Android Developer Challenge (ADC). The contest, which is promising a total of $10 million in prize money, is intended to entice developers to come up with exciting new applications for the company’s mobile Internet platform, Android, which is clearly important to Google’s future (chief executive Eric Schmidt says the mobile web will be bigger than the PC Web within a “few years”).

The contest’s first round drew in over 1,700 applications sent in from all over the world. And its 50 winners each get $25,000 plus the chance to compete in Round 2, where 10 winners will get $100,000 each and another 10 will get $275,000 a piece.

A number of sites have already introduced some of the winning applications. So, instead, we decided to talk to some of those winners about why they entered the challenge and how they rate their experience with Android against their experience with other emerging and established platforms.

Openness and flexibility
As it turns out, the winners we spoke to have quite a diverse background in mobile development. About half of them had never done mobile development before and so their impressions of Android were not quite as enthusiastic as with those who’d already finished projects on other platforms.

However, among developers who did have previous experience on other platforms, the concensus seems to be that Android is the best they’ve seen so far. Why? The main reason they gave us is that Android is extremely open and flexible. Part of that openness is attributable to Android being open source, which is an advantage both for hardware vendors and third-party developers, who’ll be able to better see what’s going wrong if an error occurs while developing their application. Another part of the openness is that Google is expected to allow third-party developers to distribute their apps across various platforms and carriers rather than requiring any kind of exclusivity. Says Joerg Hildebrand from developer Cityslikkers, “In contrast to Symbian, we don’t have to beg to run software on a specific phone.”

The flexibility winners talked about is the ability to replace core applications. The contestants from Phonebook2.0 did exactly this. “It really allows to do complicated things easily such as replacing a core component such as the call logs application or the address book. This isn’t possible on Windows Mobile for instance,” they said. This same functionality is the justification AT&T Mobility cited as its reason for rethinking its position toward Android.

Development costs
We asked some of the winning developers to rate the costs of developing on Android, since with multiple platforms in the market, developers will have to pick and choose where to invest their efforts. Android already includes quite an impressive set of tools that let developers advance relatively quickly: support for the Eclipse IDE, an advanced emulator and a subset of the Java programming language as frontend for its natively developed Dalvik virtual machine.

Another factor developers commented on was the time it took to complete a project on the platform. Cityslikkers’ Hildebrand said that “in comparison to all other platforms, you experience a lot of freedom which helps to keep the motivation high.” And Florent Stroppa from Voxmobili compared Android to the iPhone, which uses Objective-C and the Symbian platform, which is usually used in combination with C++. “It’s usually faster to program in Java than in C/C++,” he said. “It’s particularly true if you compare with the iPhone for which you need to learn a new language — Objective-C.”

Stroppa also pointed out that the pool of available Java programmers is bigger than those who program in Objective-C, a language substantially only used for Mac OSX. Augusto Ferrarini from Teradesk goes even further and ranks Android above developing in J2ME, which has the language (Java) in common with Android but uses a completely different (some even call it fragmented) API. Alan Lee from FreeFamilyWatch, who has worked with a lot of experienced mobile developers and architects, goes so far as to call Android a breakthrough in the mobile application landscape.

The iPhone and other competitors
All the developers we asked considered the iPhone important. They see the iPhone as heralding a wave of innovation that Android is also a part of. So it’s no wonder that Chris Hulls from LReady said he expects that this latest generation of phones will mark a paradigm shift similar to the Web 1.0 to 2.0 movement. Sergey Gritsyuk from Beetaun said that Android is superior. He said he and his colleagues at Beetaun considered developing for iPhone at first but then Android seemed much more attractive to them. They believe Android and the iPhone will speed up developments in the mobile area and that both platforms will take the lead within the next five years if other competitors don’t ramp up dramatically, especially in the area of third-party development.

The reactions we’ve seen so far from Nokia (and Microsoft), for example, can only be considered blindness or arrogance towards Android. “A platform has three to four million lines of code,” said Niklas Savander, executive vice president of services & software for Nokia. “When Android has that many lines, we’ll make an assessment. Until them it’s just an announcement.” But Android already has approximately 11 million lines of code of which 8.6 million are already open source — free for everyone to grab on the net since the moment Android was announced.

VentureBeat’s Top 10 Google Android Developer Challanger winners
It’s hard to figure out which of the Android Developer challengers will be the most successful, since at this point we have very little information on the 50 first-round winners, and a critical factor in their success (besides the basic premises of their apps) will be how the teams proceed and how the user experience turns out. But here are the ten we think have the best shot to win. (By the way, we only had 46 of the 50 companies to choose from, since 4 asked not to be named.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Danger, the company that builds software for the “Sidekick” and other mobile devices, has filed an initial public offering after years waiting hungrily for three years to make such a move.

However, the Palo Alto, Calif., company lives under a big shadow emanating from Mountain View’s Google. That’s where one of Danger’s co-founders, Andy Rubin, is now working on a much bigger vision than Danger’s: A cross-platform mobile operating system called Android that lets you access your data from any phone or device (see our coverage ).
Danger plans to raise up to $100 million of stock.

Like RIM’s Blackberry, Danger’s device is popular because it offers a converged client-server application for carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint, giving consumers an experience few others have matched. While RIM lets the professional, email-focused crowd sync emails with their corporate servers, Danger has hit it off with the young, IM-focused crowd. RIM and Danger have this in common: If you break or lose your device, the data you carried on it is backed up on the wireless network, and its there to access again with your replacement device.

Danger did open up its platform for other developers to produce applications for it, so it was early to join the trend toward open platforms popular today. However, Danger’s weakness is that it is closed in other ways. It limits the range of existing popular software and applications you can access, and you can only access them with devices Danger chooses. It is popular among young people who haven’t invested years into popular programs such as Outlook or Exchange. While Google’s Android is a vision that has yet to be realized, and may not get anywhere, it represents a more radically open vision. Then there’s the Palm and the iPhone, devices that can be synced with your PC, and they are devices on platforms that are moving toward the wireless syncing model offered by Danger and RIM — especially in the case of the iPhone. Is it only a matter of time before Danger gets squeezed by such competition?

A year ago, the company raised $12.3 million, much of that coming from Sharp. (Sharp’s device using Danger is called the “Hiptop” while T-Mobile’s is called the “Sidekick.”

Danger was previously backed by $134 million, coming from players like Redpoint Ventures, Mobius VC and T-Mobile Venture Fund, Adams Street Partners, Deutsche Telekom, Diamondhead Ventures, inOvate Communications Group, Institutional Venture Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Orange Ventures, Softbank Capital Partners and VSP Capital.

The company is still not profitable. It lost a net $12.4 million for the year ending Sept. 30, compared to a loss of $6.6 million the previous year. That’s what concerns us. With so much funding, and so much time to have worked on its project, the company should be in the black, and the IPO comes when other aggressive players aren’t standing still.

The Google-led Open Handset Alliance, the industry consortium developing an open-source mobile developer platform called Android, is now providing developers with an early look at its software development kit (or SDK).

And to spur development, Google is also creating a $10 million fund for promising new applications built for Android.

The hope is that developers will build mobile applications that make the platform more compelling to consumers and to the many large handset manufacturers, carriers and mobile software companies that are not participating in the alliance. Our previous coverage here.

The kit will support a touchscreen, a webkit-based browser, threaded text messaging, 3G connections, 3D graphics and a variety of file formats, including MPEG-4, h.264, MP3 and AAC.

Last week, Google announced the Open Handset Alliance to create a Linux-based Android platform with a group of more 34 mobile partners.

We’ve already written about one startup that appears to work with Android, a mobile local search company in stealth, called Whatsopen.com.

Whatsopen.com, the secretive mobile local search company that lets you find local businesses and user generated reviews, isn’t just going to offer its service on Google’s Android mobile phone system.

It will let users search reviews from Facebook and other social networks that provide open access to their users via Google’s OpenSocial developer platform, a source tells us.

There are many local search companies and mobile search companies that have already launched publicly. Whatsopen is the first company we’ve heard of that is trying to tie them all together, although right now its not clear exactly how.

We should caution that all of this comes from a single source of ours, and we haven’t been able to get comment from Google or Facebook about it.  This information is definitely still in the “speculation” category.

The company hasn’t only been working with Google, it has consulted with executives and engineers from tech companies around the world, our source tells us.

It has been privately testing in the United States and China and has data on tends of millions of businesses and other local destinations.

It will let data be freely imported and exported from the site.

The company is self-funded. Our previous coverage here.