Google’s Android OS is branching out beyond smartphones and rumoured netbooks into digital photo frames and a conventional landline phone for the home.
It’s compact, flexible, fairly stable, open source and free. So the question might not be why we’re starting to see Android move beyond the confines of the mobile phone space, but why it
shouldn’t turn out to be The Next Big Thing in an embedded OS for consumer devices.
At this week’s Embedded Systems Expo in Tokyo, Fujitsu showcased a digital photo frame built around Android. The prototype device supports the Digital Living Network Alliance standard so it can hook into any DLNA-compliant home network via Wi-Fi, while the local processing power (courtesy of a tiny 624MHz ARM processor of the same type used in several HP iPAQ Pocket PCs) can apply on-the-fly visual effects to your snaps.
While the photo frame is intended as a single purpose device, there’s plenty of scope for similar devices to do much more – using widgets to display weather forecasts and world times or pulling in news and sport headlines from an RSS feed, for instance.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, US carrier T-Mobile is said to be cooking up a home phone powered by Android. An article in
The New York Times cites ‘confidential documents obtained from one of the company’s partners’.
“The phone will plug into a docking station and come with another device that handles data synchronisation as it recharges the phone’s battery” says to NYT reporter Ashlee Vance. T-Mobile is also believed to be developing an Android ‘Internet tablet’ with a 7 inch touchscreen.