OS

According to the latest stats from Millennial Media, 2011 will be a significant year for Android operating system as developers are gearing up to focus on it. The statistics diagrams included in the State of the Apps Industry 2010 Report show that 600 professionals stated that their top priority will be Android platform, a good news for Google, while Palm is the last of the OSs that interests developers.

New research from Appcelerator firm shows that Android enjoys high popularity along with iPhone among US app developers and in some positions Android even gains ground on the Cupertino OS. The mobile developers survey found that 90% of 2,733 polled programmers were ‘very interested’ in creating apps for iPhone while 81% were ‘very interested’ to create applications for Android.

As Apple rejected any access of Adobe Flash on its iPhone devices the mission of Adobe is now circumcised to “just” all other major players.

Now Adobe hopes its Flash Player will reach 250 million smartphones by the end of 2012. The latest Flash Player 10.1 will soon be supported by nearly all the major smartphone platforms - Android, Blackberry, webOS, Symbian and Windows Phone 7.

Some analysts expect about 20 million smartphones to support the media technology in 2010.

Sony is being sued by a PlayStation 3 user who submitted a filing with US District Court in the Northern California District. The class-action suit charges Sony with downgrading millions of devices by removing their ability to run Linux.

Last month the company took a controversial measure a few months after the prolific hacker, George Hotz, aka geohot, devised a way to effectively jailbreak the console with the help of that Linux feature and a soldering gun.

Last week there were some speculations about a possible hack that would allow installation of Google Android mobile OS on the Apple iPhone devices. While they were only rumors now people posted a video on YouTube that proves the theory in practice showing a 68-step guide on how to convert a second generation iPhone into an Android running smartphone.

The video shows that the hacked model can boot to either OS at startup. The person behind the video piece says that even if you install Android on the device iPhone can still run its own OS normally.

Dell is reported as developing a new mobile device on Windows Phone 7 Series platform called Lightning. The phone will be a slider equipped with QWERTY keypad. The design shown in images presented by Engadget looks very nice and elegant. The device also has a good specification.

Nokia and Intel announced that developers now have access to MeeGo operating system's source code. The timetable of the official release of the OS has not been established yet. Still the key elements of the system are available to allow developers to begin working with--and developing for--the new platform.

Imad Sousou, director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, said on the MeeGo community blog that available elements were placed in online repositories. At the moment MeeGo comprises a Linux kernel and OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer.

Sony announced that starting April 1st users of non slim PS3 will no longer have the "install other OS" option, marking thus the end of the era when gamers could install Linux OS on their consoles.

Intel said this week that migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 platform would be labor and time consuming and cited application incompatibility and system readiness as some of the challenges.

Intel staff engineer Roy Ubry said that there is still a lot of heavy lifting involved before migrating PCs to the new OS inside Intel's environment.

"It means that a significant amount of work needs to be invested to prepare for Windows 7 application readiness," Ubry wrote.

At the end of last week Samsung revealed the first phone based on its own operating system bada. The technology underlying the operating system is Samsung’s TouchWiz system used on its touch-screen non-smart phones. The company wants this way to challenge Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry markets.

J.K. Shin, the president of Samsung's phone division, said the goal of bada was to expand the market for smart phones, making them available to people across the world who have made do with non-smart phones.

 The Internet brings more rumors about Nokia’s potential decline of the now used Symbian platform on its N-series smartphones. At an event in London last night, unnamed members of the “Maemo marketing team” allegedly told blog The Really Mobile Project that Nokia plans to substitute Symbian for Maemo on N-series devices such as the N900 by 2012.

According to the latest gossips Maemo representatives have allegedly confirmed that N-series Nokias will soon lose Symbian. The shift will likely be gradual.