Google is slowly doing the unthinkable—insinuating an open operating system into the cellular phone market. Google's stated goal for Android is to create a mobile platform that makes surfing the Web from a smart phone as painless as surfing it from a PC.
Android, if successful in getting a foothold, is predicted to launch a whole new ecosystem of cell-phone apps, all able to communicate using internet standards. The chipmaker ARM, whose chips currently power 90 per cent of all mobile devices, will be showing off Android running on their hardware at next week’s Mobile World Congress.
With oBIX, every building system can be operated remotely using only standard interaction patterns of the web. There is now no reason that any system can’t be operated from a cell phone. That is not entirely new—there have been products for years that allow this in a limited way. Existing products have been for limited use with particular hardware in special circumstances. Those who needed them got them as a lagniappe on top of an expensive custom integration.
oBIX 1.1, currently in draft, will offer RSS/Atom style subscriptions. With RSS subscriptions, you can subscribe to a news sources and receive it on any number of applications that can receive news feeds. You could even have the information you are tracking on your Google home page.
What if you could download to and run this kind of application on your phone yourself? What application would you choose? How would you select one application over another? In other words, what will we do when we can get to information and function so easily?
Open standards, open interfaces, open cell phones…what will you write today?