beer planet

Updated: June 1st, 2008

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

Visual voicemail and slide zoom touch interface from Apple, compass from Google, … from Sun? What's next? My Sprint contract is up and I am definitely looking forward to Q3 and Q4 of this year!

Edit: I found a nice related video by G4TV. Here it is:

One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.

Last year, Sun already made an announcement of JavaFX, a Java-based mobile platform but didn't provide any concrete timelines, so I was excited to hear the more on the subject. With Apple iPhone's advent last year and Google entering the same space later on this year with Android, Sun's addition to the game definitely won't hurt consumers. After all, competition usually leads to better products.

So when is the phone coming, Jonathan? My guess is you're going to try as hard as possible to compete with Google's second half of 2008 timeline but are you going to manage to beat it? And will it blow us away? I guess time will show.