Monday, December 29, 2008

Sprint Titan 1.0 released - Mobile OSGi goes Mainstream

Sprint has released the 1.0 version of Sprint Titan™ - a first class Mobile OSGi implementation for Windows Mobile 6.x Standard and Professional devices. Officially the following devices are supported, however, the stack essentially runs on any Win Mobile phone:
  • HTC Touch
  • HTC Touch Pro
  • HTC Touch Diamond
  • HTC Mogul

Official support for a selection of Windows Mobile Standard (these are typically the ones with the mini Querty keyboard and no touch screen like the Samsung ACE (i325)) is said to be announced shortly as well. Moreover, Sprint Titan is said to be integrated on Sprint’s mainstream Feature Phones.

In addition to the production stack which installs only on devices operated in the Sprint network (Sprint branded phones as well as non-Sprint branded phones provisioned by Sprint), Sprint offers 90 days trial versions of the stack which install on any Win Mobile 6 device. I have tried with a HP iPaq 614c and it works great! In my opinion, with these trial stracks Sprint offers a great service to all OSGi enthusiasts around the world who can pick up the stack and get started.

Compared to what Sprint released in December last year, the new stacks now support Location API on the CDC side, contain a bunch of bug fixes and have been performance improved. Functionality wise, there is still work to be done (full web widget and service remoting support, additional JSR support on CDC (like 135), OSGi Bundle App Model support, etc.). However, the new releases are a major improvement over the old versions and should be fun to use!

The new release package also consists of a new version of Sprint’s Eclipse IDE plugins (now Eclipse 3.4 is supported, several bug fixes were applied) as well as an 80+ page developer guide that helps developers get up speed. A set of application demos (binaries, source code and documentation) will come out shortly as well.

It’ll be very interesting to watch what the creative people around the world will start doing with this beautiful and powerful platform!