Vodafone UK and Vodafone IT

Today is the Italy gDay day: Google Nexus One came on the italian market. WOW!! Then I browsed the Vodafone site and I saw offers around all technologies they deliver such as iPad, ADSL (...), but quite anything about Nexus in the home page, just a little link (?!?). I was a little afraid... Then I presumed that it was a market strategy of vodafone not to do that big marketing around the new gPhone... Then I went on the UK site and I found this: they say "Android smatphones to suit all pockets"... I'm a little surprised... Any consideration? ;)

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Android Camera performance: new Options for preview callbacks in froyo

I managed to install the new Android Froyo release on my nexus one yesterday (a bit late I know... ;) ). I was really excited by the new features introduced by the google team (WiFi and BlueTooth hotspot device transformation capability, increased JIT performance, and so on...). Among the other features the release note reported some improvement on the camera preview side. The problem with the camera was that using the preview callback didn't allow to directly access the buffered preview calls running into poor performance frame preview that involved too many gc() calls for camera applications (Further informations are reported both in google group discussions and in details at http://nhenze.net/?p=349 - see comment #6 of that post to find a reflection trick to avoid using native code). Anyway it seems that the new Android platform version fixed this problem on the SDK!!! I haven't already tested the new implementation in order to understand the real performances, but if you dive into the android.hardware.Camera documentation both on 2.1 and 2.2 version, you can find the possible reason of that: new methods that were @hidden into the 2.1 version are now available (in particular: addCallbackBuffer(PreviewCallback pc) and setPreviewCallBackWithBuffer(byte[] buffer)). They will not only help to avoid gc() but their usage will also help performances when manipulating image frames to realize real time camera applications... I'm gonna test the implementation in my spare time...

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Impressions on the WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference 2010

Friday the last I attended the WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference 2010. It has been a really big event if you consider that the idea has been created and developed in few months: the start has been given by Alfredo Morresi, my colleague at Funambol (www.funambol.com) when he posted the proposal for "Mobile development, an event I'd like to an I'll try to realize" - in his (italian) blog.

Here are my few impressions:

- The event was greatly organized: the WhyMCA staff did a really great work in order all things to go fine there beginning from the quality of the discussed arguments. I definitely must say it has been a "WOW" experience.

- The numbers talk about 250 persons involved, also not italian people; the event was attended, of course by developers, but also by sales and courious users. This is important as the spread of mobile technology in Italy is a little complicated to be explained, but it is anchored to the billing model that carriers created during the latest years: just to understand SMS is always king feature for a SIM data plan as italian users prefer to send SMS than other way of communication such as push email and voice in general. Finally I think that many users just don't use internet data plans just because the capabilities of their devices.

- A lot of speech were about the emerging Android platform and iPhone latest architecture development. A room was quite entirely reserved for the Android platform discussion and I think this is good. Win Mobile 7 was presented personally by a Microsoft representative at the beginning of the conference and also RIM sent an italian sales representative to talk about the BlackBerry cloud services. Technologies like HTML 5 and flash were covered.

- Many Speakers (like me) were not technology gurus: I mean that the topic of their speech is out of their work field and they did it for passion. In my case I talked about Augmented Reality (see next bullet) but in the latest 4 years I've always been developing synchronization mobile clients and API for Funambol. In other words I think the whole event was "Passion Driven" both for the speakers and the attendees.

- I'm not surprised that Augmented reality is so a really hot topic also in Italy: I personally presented a speech that was intended to show how simply an Augmented Reality Application can be created using the android SDK (if anyone's interested, please take a look at my slide here). A parallel discussion track was related to the iPhone technology and the speech was realized by Stefano Zingarini and Lucio Riccardi (I directly worked with them previously to solve some Blackberry signature issues but I personally met them at the event).

In general I think it the WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference 2010 was one of the most interesting event I've ever attended and I hope there could be more and more like that in italy.

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