Motorola To Hire 300 Android Developers

ruphus13 writes "Google's Android is starting to see more industry support. Motorola recently announced plans, despite hardships within the company, to hire 300 Android developers. Quoting: 'A quick search of Motorola's job openings suggests that, indeed, Android is set to become a permanent fixture at Motorola, which has long built Linux-based phones but hitherto used MontaVista's Mobilinux. The goal? Move from an internal development pool of 50 Android-savvy developers to 350. Motorola, recognizing that most developers won't have deep experience with Google Android, is looking for a somewhat general skillset ... Java and Google Android programming experience is listed as 'highly desirable,' but not required.'" T-Mobile has already made plans to use Android as well. Xconomy has a related interview with a member of the MIT team that won a $275,000 prize in the Android Developer Challenge by creating an application to automatically modify a phone's settings depending on its location, which they say "wouldn't even be possible on an iPhone." We've previously discussed the Challenge itself and some of the other winning apps.

This could be very promising.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Motorola makes some fairly solid hardware; but their cellphone software has been marked by galling suckitude for some time. If they can use android to give their typically solid lower midrange hardware software with higher end features(real browser, email, not sucking, etc.) they could have a very promising product on their hands.

Re:Good ol' Motorola

[lysergic.acid]

um... i really don't think their membership was motivated by "pure desperation" considering how many major industry players are a part of the Open Handset Alliance [openhandsetalliance.com]:

• China Mobile - the world's largest mobile phone operator.
• KDDI - formed in 2000 in a 3-way merger and is already Japan's second-largest cellular operator with 20% market share and growing.
• NTT DoCoMo - the number one mobile phone operator in Japan.
• HTC - a premier Taiwanese ODM who designs a large number of popular handsets which are sold rebranded by major carriers like: Orange, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, O2, Vodafone, AT&T, Alltel, Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility. (the T-Mobile G1 [wikipedia.org] was originally conceived as the HTC Dream.)
• Telecom Italia - the largest Italian phone company and cellular operator.
• Telefonica - the dominant phone operator in Spain, and the 3rd largest carrier in the world. (behind China Mobile and Vodafone)
• Broadcom - one of the top 20 semiconductor/IC suppliers in the world (after companies such as Panasonic, Qualcomm, NEC, etc.)
• Qualcomm - another top 20 worldwide semiconductor sales leader. they also developed EV-DO and other CDMA-based wireless transmission standards.
• Marvell Technology Group - producer of storage, communications, and semiconductor products. they designed the first Gigabit all-CMOS read channel, the first Gigabit-capable system-on-a-chip (embedded system), and the first SATA interface solution. their wireless devices are used in the OLPC program.
• Synaptics - a touchpad OEM provider for most laptop manufacturers, like Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway, IBM, Lenovo, Samsung, Packard Bell, etc.

not to mention the more well-known members, such as: Spring Nextel, T-Mobile, Intel, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Google, eBay, LG, and Samsung. given the purpose of the Open Handset Alliance, it wouldn't make sense for Motorola not to be a member. Microsoft and Apple are pretty much the only industry leaders for it not to make sense for them to join the OHA.

if you want to remain a relevant player in the mobile industry, wouldn't it make sense for you to be a part of the organization that is developing the open standards that are going to be used? unless you have an exclusive contract with Microsoft to only use Windows Mobile, or have your own mobile platform like the iPhone, and thus do not require interoperability with any other technologies.

Re:Every digit of pi...

[AliasMarlowe]

Uh, it's been a while since I actually was in math class, but shouldn't it be:

1 base pi

Nope. 1 base X is 1, 10 base X is X, 100 base X is X*X, and so forth. Oh, and 0.1 base X is 1/X.

Many years ago, before the dawning of the age of calculators, I spent hours in school math classes converting numbers to base pi (or e or phi or gamma or other interesting number) by hand. I was one of the first to finish in-class assignments, which left me with lots of time to kill. Did you know that e base pi is approximately 2.20212010021 for instance?