By Karl-Johan Dahlström
29th March 2012. 21:42
Blog Archives
Upon request we’re today releasing an Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) beta for Xperia™ PLAY, and we’re really interested in getting your feedback on this beta release. As games are such a crucial part of Xperia™ PLAY, we would like to know how well this ICS beta for Xperia™ PLAY works when you’re playing games. Read on for download links and installation instructions!
As part of our continuing efforts towards openness and knowledge sharing, we are now stepping up our open source activities. For a long time, we have been one of the major contributors to the Android Open Source Project. We’ve also been active in the open developer community where we most notably published an ICS alpha release a couple of months ago. And now, we’re excited to release a couple of new open source projects that are available on our GitHub. As you can see below, we have just now released two very interesting projects as open source: the analysis tool ChkBugReport, and our WebGL implementation for Android™ 4.0.
This way, we would like to continue to be transparent, share our knowledge, and get external developer contributions to make the tools even better. On our GitHub, you can also find our Web SDK project we published a while back, and a project called DrmLicenseService, which we will tell more about soon. Stay tuned for more information about open source projects going forward!
Last week we made an Ice Cream Sandwich alpha ROM available for unlocked Xperia™ phones. The response we got was overwhelming, and we want to say a big thank you for all your great feedback and the huge interest shown! We will look through all the comments we received in the survey, on the blog post and on the video, and incorporate the input into our planning of future software and product releases. We have now also made the open source archive for the Ice Cream Sandwich alpha ROM available. In addition, the sensor HAL will also be available as open source soon.
In developer forums worldwide, there is a huge activity and engagement in the open Android™ ecosystem. And we also know there are a lot of independent developers out there who are creating their own custom ROMs or modifying the kernel. The Sony Ericsson Developer program is following this community with great interest, and even though Sony Ericsson is not supporting all the activities by independent developers, we recognize that custom ROMs are a part of the Android ecosystem.
We therefore decided to assist a group of developers called “FreeXperia”. The overall open developer community is important to Sony Ericsson, and we hope to learn from it, and share knowledge ourselves. The FreeXperia group was supported with devices and technical know-how, and they are now in the process of creating custom ROMs based on the CyanogenMod for several of our latest Xperia™ phones, including Xperia™ PLAY and Xperia™ arc.
Karl-Johan Dahlström, Head of Developer Relations, explains more after the jump.
Important note: By unlocking your phone and running a custom ROM you may void the warranty. See your phone’s warranty statement for details.
As announced earlier, we are now launching a web page where you can get instructions and a key to unlock the boot loader of certain series of Sony Ericsson 2011 Android™ Gingerbread phones.
With its new generation of 2011 Xperia™ smartphones, Sony Ericsson will allow advanced developers to unlock the boot loader in a secure and legal way. We will enable this opportunity later this spring, although it will only be possible for certain releases of these phones.
Find out the details after the jump.
A couple of days ago I got into a plane heading for Tokyo Game Show 2010. For all of you who are not attending this amazing event, I thought I should share my impressions after the first 2 days here.
Last Thursday I attended the first Nordic Mobile Developers Summit in Stockholm arranged by the Swedish magazine mobile.se. I gave a presentation with the highly innovative title “Android for Developers” where I gave some tips and insights into successful Android application development. It was a very well received session that I will mostly likely repeat in updated forms at later events. All the slides from the event can be found online.
The sessions covered the major mobile platforms with representatives from both the device manufacturers and independent mobile application development companies. The common message from the device manufacturers was around the marketplaces for their platforms. While some platforms provide a very low entry barrier for application developers (i.e., Android Market) most of the marketplaces had a surprisingly high threshold for publishing applications.
Despite the name of the event, there was surprisingly little hard facts around actual application development. Most of the sessions concerned the business perspective of mobile applications. As for my own session, I tried to give some concrete tips’n'tricks for Android application development, what is most important to think about and what tools to use.
One of the more interesting presentation came from Johan Lindfors from Microsoft that demonstrated the development tools for Windows Phone 7. It is obvious that Microsoft knows how to make tools for developers. This is something that I believe could inspire for better tools in the Android community as well.
The second half of the event started with shorter presentations from various companies doing mobile application development, like Spotify and Bambuser. There were some quite interesting case studies, and it seems like Android is the easiest platform to develop for, from all aspects.
The event was summed up with a Q&A panel with many interesting (and challenging) questions. The interest for mobile application development is very high and it is obvious that developers want to have a much larer choice of tools and programming languages for their applications than what is available today.
Last week I, Karl-Johan Dahlström, and some of my colleagues at Developer Program went to San Francisco for Google IO. I wanted to give you some reflections from the event that took place at Moscone West centre. First of all the Moscone West center, with a capacity of 5000 people, seems a bit small if you ask me considering the number of people who could not get tickets to the event. Let’s hope for bigger venue next year since the interest in Android will continue to increase. I had some really interesting and intense days and got to see all the amazing things that is happening with Android and products based on Android. Below is my top 5 list of things that was announced and happened at the show:
1) FroYo announcement and of course the performance boost via JIT compiler. http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2-highlights.html
2) PayPals Mobile Payment library available for Android, need to check if apps are allowed to use this on Android Market. https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/05/paypal’s-mobile-payments-library-now-available-for-android-io2010/
3) The first Google TV from Sony, this is soooo cool how the TV and Internet get seamless integrated and together with the Cloud to device API it gets even more interesting. http://www.google.com/tv/
4) Cloud to device APIs, this will definitely create new opportunities, check the demos on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQFXRW5ZiE
5) Tried the Perceptive Pixel multitouch screen at the After Party. Loved it. Not sure what I can use it for back home, but I want one 
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/index.html
Comments and your personal top 5 lists are welcome
Besides me and my colleagues from the Developer Program, Sony Ericsson participated at Google IO with a good mix of people, everything from Product Managers, Software Architects, UI-people, and software developers. We showed off our great Android devices at the OEM Sandbox station, and the interest for X10, X10 mini and X10 mini pro was huge. The people I spoke to love the small size of mini and the experience we created on all of our devices. The fact that X10 mini stands out from the crowed of Android devices was really appreciated.
For the people that have not yet seen the keynotes, below is a link to the sessions.
Srikar Kasarla, Partner Manager
Srikar Kasarla is working as a Partner Manager in the Content & Services team here at Sony Ericsson. At the Symbian Exchange Exposition in London next week he will be talking about “Shortening the path from code to cash” . I grabbed him in the corridors of the Sony Ericsson Lund office and asked him a few questions about his talk.
Developer World: So, what will you talk about?
Srikar Kasarla: I will be talking about open source as the future for mobile development and what new business models this shift opens up for.
DW: What kind of business models?
SK: We’re seeing a growth in mobile advertising and service subscriptions for example.
DW: Sounds like mobile is moving in the direction of the web. What benefits are there to working with the Symbian platform in this environment?
SK: One big benefit is the fact that you have multiple application stores compared to other platforms. This competition is very good for the developers. It also makes it possible to target different markets. Another benefit is that different application stores can have different philosophies behind how they accept application submissions. Sony Ericsson has chosen Quality over Quantity, with a fast approval process and free submissions.
DW: OK, that’s certainly sounds like a short path between code and cash?
SK: Yes, we are working hard to make sure applications are reviewed as soon as possible after submission. But we welcome feedback from developers on how to make things even better so I’m looking forward to SEE to meet the people behind the code.
Don’t miss Srikars talk if you’re attending SEE09: “Shortening the path from code to cash“, it’s the 27th of October at 16:30-17:00.
![Showing HTML5 device orientation on Xperia with Ice Cream Sandwich [demo]](http://img.youtube.com/vi/Q4CTkjaYumM/default.jpg)
