SlashGear has been hanging out with Google this week, at the I/O 2009 conference. You can read our first day and second day highlights for the full details, but perhaps the most interesting news was Google’s Wave demo for iPhone and Android, and Andy Rubin’s confirmation that there should be 18-20 Android handsets on the market by the end of the year. One of those is expected to be the HTC Hero; make sure to check out the promo video for the chin-heavy smartphone.
Vincent is covering the Google I/O developers conference right now. Google just dropped its newest service: Google Wave. This service offers combined communication through an email and Instant Messaging type service, where it offers real time communication and easy messaging capabilities, and oh so much more. Better yet, they’re launching iPhone and Android applications for it.
Video after the jump
Vincent is once again at the Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco, and right now, he’s sitting through a keynote on the new service from Google called “Google Wave.” Google Wave is referred to as Hosted Conversation. It’s a new tool for communication and collaboration Basically, what Wave will offer is a place to host all of your communication mediums and archive them all. Wave combines your email and instant messaging into one aggregate service.
Google expect eighteen to twenty phones running their Android platform to be on the market by the end of 2009, according to mobile platforms senior director Andy Rubin. Of that number – the handiwork of eight or nine manufacturers - five or six will deliver what Rubin called The Google Experience, one of three levels of Android deployment.
Breakdown of the three levels after the cut
Spotify have demonstrated the mobile version of their custom internet radio app, set to launch later in the year and allow offline access to the company’s huge catalog of audio tracks. The demo – which is running on a T-Mobile G1 Android smartphone – shows how playlist tracks can be easily synchronized with the phone’s internal memory for offline playback.
Spotify Mobile video demo after the cut
The iPhone Latitude news was only the start of it: Google’s I/O Conference has been throwing up all manner of news, and our own Vincent Nguyen was on hand to catch it on camera. After the cut, you can see Google’s video demo of Android OS 2.0 “Donut“; they then gave out an exclusive unreleased HTC Magic – with T-Mobile USA AWS support – which having unboxed Android Community are giving away to one lucky forum member.
Palm Pre news after the cut
Vincent is at the Google I/O keynote right now, and they’ve just announced that the next iPhone (meaning yes, there will be another one) will have Google Latitude built in. In case you’re wondering what Latitude is, the service is built into Google Maps, and offers users real time location of their friends and family, with the ability to use the GPS to send notifications of location to whoever they want to. Of course, all this information is protected if you don’t want to share it, but for those that do, it allows a great way of communicating with and finding people near your location.
video after the cut
In roughly nine days time, Google’s I/O Developer Conference, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco will begin. Android Community will be there, bringing you all the news, but thanks to our friends at Google we’ve also got two I/O tickets to give away to SlashGear readers!
The major news this week came out of Google’s IO Conference, with the Android team unveiling the latest build of the mobile platform and a slick touchscreen handset to demonstrate it on. We usually leave cellphone news to our sister sites PHONE Magazine and SlashPhone, but the Android handset – complete with compass-navigated Street View and slick animations – was too good to miss. Considering the feedback over at Android Community, Google look like they’ve recaptured any momentum lost since MWC in February.
It seems this fresh Android prototype has once again stirred up interest in the open-source OS, and one of the common questions is “what smartphone is that?” After impressing the crowds with their live demonstration, the developers sat down for a Q&A session; you can see our exclusive video of that, together with a transcript, after the cut. While the handset maker couldn’t be revealed due to a pesky NDA, what we can tell you is that it’s based on a 528MHz Qualcomm chip, uses a Synaptics capacitive touchscreen and 128MB RAM/256MB flash memory. This particular prototype is UMTS, and the demo itself was carried out using a 3.6Mbps HSDPA connection.
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