Simon’s Blog

Eric Schimdt thinks the fundamental problem with most phones today is that they don’t have full power web browsers. That seems to be it. The “GPhone” platform will have a full power web browser. Wow! If there isn’t more to the GPhone platform than this, there’s going to be some big problems ahead. We need to wait the technical announcements to see if something important has been lost in translation.

In any case, what does “full power” web browser mean? Does it mean the same “power” as a web browser running on a desktop computer? In that case, if the Android (aka GPhone) web browser doesn’t support Flash, Java and Silverlight plug-ins (and I suspect it won’t), how can it claim to be able to run web applications that are equivalent to web apps that run on the desktop? And, if all we’re talking is reasonable support for JavaScript, how is that different to the iPhone or Nokia S60 browsers? Something really isn’t right here.

Surely, there has to be a lot more than Android than an HTML web browser with JavaScript support… Like… Java, perhaps? Even though there wasn’t actually any mention of Java in the Android announcement…

Update:

So… it seems the the Andriod SDK coming next week is actually a Java SDK (see more about the Android JVM). Why didn’t they say that then? There’s something very weird going on here…

However, despite the weirdness, it will be interesting to see how Android stacks up against JavaFX Mobile…