Motorola Completely Open Windows Phone As Platform

Motorola already stated that it was open to Microsoft and its new Windows Phone platformback in October last year, at the time of Redmond's OS release. More recently, the company's CEO has reconfirmed the interest towards the Metro-platform.

Speaking at the Oppenheimer Technology and Communications Conference, CEO Sanjay Jha said that "clearly, all of our focus today is on Android". That aside, he also stated that the phone maker is "completely open to the notion of Windows as a platform" and that a Microsoft partnership could be possible given Redmond signs a deal with Motorola that is similar to the one they currently have with Nokia.

Despite the fact that interest is there, CEO Sanjay Jha also mentioned that Motorola will evaluate just how viable Windows Phone was, as a platform. In his vision, besides Apple's iOS and Google's Android, it is questionable which one of the remainder platforms (Microsoft's Windows Phone, HP's Palm webOS, RIM's BlackBerry OS) will survive.

Could HTC Embrace a Completely "Open" Hardware Platform?

HTC has promised to allow unlocking of their phones bootloaders within the coming months. Most see this as a hat-tip to the custom ROM and open-source community. Perhaps there's more to it than just that.

We all know that Apple's patent war with virtually everyone isn't going away. HTC has entered intopatent agreements with Microsoft, but they may not be enough to protect them from Apple.

Could HTC be looking into skirting the patent issue completely by offering a "blank slate"?

Sure, it's a stretch, but let's imagine for a moment an HTC device that's OS agnostic. It would come pre-loaded with a bootloader (unlocked, of course) and the ability to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi or 3G -- that's it. 

This simplistic shell could be pre-programmed with a list of possible ROMs that could be loaded onto the device -- and for those of us who prefer a custom ROM, we'd be able to manually input a ROM server. Note that no ROMs would actually be stored on -- or distributed with -- the device.

The first part isn't difficult to comprehend. HTC's HD2 and HD7 are very similar devices, the former started out with Windows Mobile and has gotten Windows Phone 7 and Android ports, proving not only that a generic set of hardware can run multiple operating systems, but that it can do so with relative ease.

Why would HTC do this you ask? Simply put, they'd be able to distribute their hardware without worries of infringing on any software patents. (Hardware patents, however, might still get in the way, but they're usually not as ambiguous and overreaching as software based patents are.)

What do you think? Could HTC or any other hardware manufacturer ever embrace a completely "open" hardware platform? Would you be interested in shopping around for the hardware that you want, and load the operating system of your choice? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. 

Android Revolution - Lots Of Leaks, Skype Expands Video And More

Watch this week's Android Revolution as we go through all the leaks we discovered this week, and since the list is topped off by the LG Prada K2, trust me, they're all good. We also go through current deals in Amazon Wireless and a cool service called GetJar for getting free Apps. We go through all the recent smartphone releases and even the phones we're currently reviewing. Finally, we also talk about the new HTCDev.com portal for their future unlocked Bootloaders and all the progress with the CyanogenMod in the LG Optimus 3D.

Speaking of What's Not Hot we talk about Sprint pulling the Gingerbread update from the Kyocera Echo due to tons of problems users are experimenting and we bring you details on more delays regarding Gingerbread updates. We also go through the sad news of the NVIDIA Tegra 3 Kal-El Quad Core processor delay until next year. 

All this and more after the break.

SE Xperia Play PlayStation Emulator Hacked to Play More ISOs

With the release of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, Sony started selling some stand-alone PlayStation games for use with the new smartphone. These titles include an emulator alongside the gameimage, all ready to run. Now the format Sony uses has been reverse engineered, letting you re-package the official PlayStation emulator with the ISO image of your choice.

Developer Yifan Lu debugged the emulator from an official Xperia Play title to see how it was loading its files. After figuring out how the app was expecting to see ISO data formatted, he was able to patch it to read clear game data right from a file, instead of processing encrypted data and reading it out of memory. Some other adjustments are needed to make sure the app doesn't choke on a file that's too large, but he's still managed to make a tool that automates the process.

Once he makes a nice GUI, we should see the tool released, letting you create your own Play-ready PlayStation images. It's not perfect, lacking features like multi-disc support, but it's still a pretty neat accomplishment, and will do much towards expanding the library of games taking advantage of the Play's controls. 

Editorial: Facebook Chat Is the New Standard for IM

While being frustrated by all of the various instantmessaging clients available for mobile devices and PCs, I noticed that the majority of the people I know were often available on Facebook chat. I had been thinking about this for a while and recently I noticed the same thoughts expressed by Zack Wittaker over at Zdnet. There's no need for Blackberry Messenger anymore, everybody you know is on Facebook and Facebook chat is supported by all major operating systems on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.

Blackberry Messenger only ever worked on Blackberry devices. You couldn't instant messagesome one on a PC. Apple's new "iMessage" feature in iOS5 aims to bring instant messaging to all of their iOS devices including WiFi-only iPads and iPod Touch devices. It still doesn't have a web-based client, or PC client, or support on any other non-iOS device. It's not even compatible with Apple's own iChat on a Mac. I suppose one advantage is that little indicator that shows the other person whether you've read an instant message yet, but is that more important than actually being able to contact people regardless of what device they're using?

Apple and Blackberry would like you to communicate only with people who own the same type of device that they've already sold to you. That's why there's such a market for things like WhatsApp, KIK, etc.--apps that let you send instant messages to other users with the same app but maybe not the same type of phone. Then there's the originally PC-based instant messengers like AIM, Gtalk, Windows Live Messenger, and Skype which also integrate voice and video messaging, but aren't so big in the mobile-device messaging arena. Wouldn't it be great if there was a standard for instant messaging just like there's a standard for email, phone calls, and text messaging? 

Well there actually is a standard called XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and that's exactly what Facebook chat uses. Anyone can make an IM client that interfaces with XMPP since it's an open standard. Jabber and Gtalk also use XMPP for instant messaging, but there's often no centralized server that communicates with all of these other networks which is why you can't really IM Gtalk users from Facebook.

A number of the largest proprietary centralized-server type instant messaging networks have recently added Facebook chat support. Windows Live Messenger is one of the largest IM networks with about 330 Million active users and they've added some great Facebook integration last year. Even more recently, Skype and their 882 million user network has also started integrating with Facebook. Skype even enables video calling between Facebook chat users and Skype users. Facebook's network is around 750 million users, but not everyone uses Facebook chat I guess so the number of instant messaging users there might be smaller. That should take care of a huge number of people on the PC based side. There are still a few million people using other instant messaging networks that aren't compatible with Facebook just yet. AIM still has about 53 million users, Yahoo has 22 million, and ICQ has 4 million. Then there's one large super power country that actually blocks Facebook from everyone who lives there, but they've got a niceTencent QQ instant messaging network with about 448 million users.

What about mobile? Of course the iPhone's Facebook app supports Facebook chat with push notifications so you can stay logged in at all times and receive messages as they arrive. The Android and Blackberry Facebook apps do the same. Actually, as I was writing this, Facebook released a new app for iPhone and Android called Facebook Messenger which makes it much easier for users to access Facebook chat in a dedicated app (along with Facebook group messaging and a few other cool features.)

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango has Facebook chat fully integrated right along side Windows Live Messengerand SMS/MMS text messaging along with the awesome speech UI for hands-free instant messaging. Yes, the speech UI works with Facebook chat in case that wasn't clear. Palm's Web OS 2.0 will have Facebook chat integrated with the messaging app as well (eventually). Even if you're a die-hard old-school Windows Mobile 2003SE-6.5 user, you can get a Facebook chat program.

You might not want everyone who you're friends with on Facebook to always be able to instant message you no matter where you are. Luckily on Facebook's website you can create lists of people who you may want to appear online or offline to. When you log into Facebook on the web, the little chat bar has a settings button with an option to limit availability. From there you can turn on/off lists of people that you may or may not want to appear online to. You'll have to go to Friends > Manage Friends first in order to create lists of people you may want to use in the chat permissions feature first though.

Is Facebook Chat cool enough to possibly be the world's leading instant messaging platform?