blog.q8lug.org

Neither LG nor Samsung have ever gone so far to as pin down an actual release date for their promised Android-based phones, but it looks like they could each now be giving themselves yet more wiggle room, at least if the supposedly in the know Mirae Asset Securities is to be believed. According to it, we now shouldn’t expect to see Android handsets from either manufacturer before the second half of 2009 “at the earliest,” which doesn’t exactly match up with earlier word that both companies were aiming for a release in “early 2009.” Venturing even further into speculation, Mirae says that the delay is a result of “negative responses” from mobile phone operators like Vodafone, as well as some general skepticism among advertising sponsors about Google’s profit model for the phones. Of course, none of those parties mentioned are actually saying anything themselves just yet, so you may do well to take all of this with a hefty grain of salt for the time being.

Samsung, LG said to be releasing Android phones in Q3 ‘09 “at the earliest” - Engadget.

The iPhone may be the only game in town for serious mobile Web developers right now, but that won’t last long. Next year, the iPhone will see some serious competition from Google’s Android platform. Of course, T-Mobile will start selling the first Android phone, the G1 made by HTC, on October 22. But other cell phone manufacturers are gearing up for a major Android push.

The most significant of these may come from Motorola. One of the original partners in the Open Handset Alliance behind the open-source mobile OS, Motorola already has 50 people on its Android team and is growing that to 350, according to an Android developer approached by a headhunter to join the team. That is a huge commitment that shows how big a bet Motorola is making on Android.

Motorola Building Up 350-Person Android Team. Nokia Also Sniffing Around..

Cisco Systems Inc., the $35 billion king of proprietary networking, has transformed its data centers to an automated, service-centric on-demand model based, at least in part, on open source software.

The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant is four years into a nine-year restructuring and virtualization project that will consolidate its compute, storage, networking and application resources into a unified, on-demand pool that increases IT responsiveness to evolving business requirements and lowers costs, according to IT Manager Sidney Morgan. In addition, it will boost availability and redundancy and chop provisioning time for new servers from as long as eight weeks to three days, a task that ultimately will be automated and filled in real time in response to changing business needs, he predicted.

Cisco taps Linux for agility, low cost in data center.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen argued Thursday that open source software can help fix some of the flaws in electronic voting systems, which have proliferated throughout the country since the 2000 election yet been criticized as unreliable.

Software that designs ballots and operates electronic voting machines would benefit from more scrutiny, Bowen indicated during a panel discussion on e-voting at EmTech, the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. As secretary of state, she is able to examine the code of proprietary software under nondisclosure agreements, but privileged information about voting-software flaws is not easily accessed by the general public or many county workers given the job of purchasing voting machines, she said.

“I have a separate set of documents that only I can see, that tell me what some of the flaws are related to proprietary software,” Bowen said, arguing it would be better to disclose all the details of the software through an open source model.

Voting machines are purchased by individual counties, rather than the state, and in many cases the people purchasing these machines don’t have any good way to verify their reliability, Bowen said.

Open source could fix e-voting flaws, California secretary of state says - Network World.

Visa has become the latest player to try and start a fire under mobile payments and mobile commerce, a concept that in the U.S. has remained mostly in the imagination over the last decade. Visa’s first partners in its roll-out are Nokia and Google’s Android platform. Its partnership with a major credit company is a win for Google’s fledgling mobile operating system.

Linux News: M-Commerce: Visa to Turn Android, Nokia Phones Into Credit Cards.