OStatic

The smartphone market has remained very healthy throughout the economic downturn, and it looks like the next big area of opportunity for smartphones, mobile operating systems and applications will be China. As we reported a few days ago, the iPhone is headed to China through a deal that Apple has struck with China Unicom, and China Mobile--the market leading wireless provider--has increasingly embraced the open source Android operating system. Specifically, Dell's new Android smartphones are part of China Mobile's application platform, and? the company has its own Ophone operating system (based on Android).

It's already been clear that there will be a huge battle between open source and proprietary mobile operating systems in China, but now, as The Register reports, things are getting even more complicated. It seems that Symbian, the platform on nearly half of smartphones, could start gaining a Chinese foothold even before the iPhone and Android phones arrive there.

HTC has announced its fourth mobile phone based on the open source Android operating system, dubbed the HTC Tattoo. You can take a visual tour of it here. The Tattoo runs the HTC Sense user interface on top of Android, and the name Tattoo comes from its design customizability.

Tattoo users can choose from a variety of phone colors, and even design unique covers. There are also inking options for illustrations on the phone's case. Meanwhile, the HTC Sense user interface allows users to create their own home pages, combining links to frequently used sites and services, photos, and more. It's particularly loaded with social networking conveniences.

Sprint needs a hit. Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, announced that it will start selling HTC Hero, a touchscreen phone based on Google?s Android OS, on Oct. 11th for $179.

Google Android: Is the party over? It's open source, hardware-agnostic, and developer-friendly, but why are developers unhappy?

Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD? Open source pundits recently held a smackdown debating the merits of various open source licenses, and here were the highlights.

Useful Ubuntu links. After helping a friend switch to Ubuntu, a veteran compiles a list of helpful sites to know about.

Red Hat CEO: Choose flexibility or Larry Ellison. At Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst took on Oracle's inflexibility as his company launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

That's the open source Android operating system running on this fairly slick looking ARCHOS tablet, which is concrete proof that Android is headed for more than just smartphones. As JKOnTheRun notes, the ARCHOS 5 Android-based Internet Tablet isn't scheduled to go on sale until September 15th, but online retailer B&H jumped the gun and has a 500GB version of it shown and listed on its site. The ARCHOS 5 is a 5-inch slate, and JKOnTheRun reports that at one time B&H listed both HDD and SSD models, with prices ranging from $294 to $420, depending on configuration. Those specs have since been removed.

At those prices, I'm betting this tablet has a chance. Tablet computers have never taken the market by storm, but they have their loyal users, and ARCHOS' primarily video-focused devices have had a loyal user base for years. How might people use these tablets, will they get their own applications, and is there a good future for Android on them?

Are you old enough to remember black and white TV, vinyl records and 8-track tapes? What about the Pet Rock? If you are old enough, you're acutely aware of how limited and almost laughable old-school technology can seem--even technologies that are not so old in relative terms. The market for smartphones and applications for them is raging, and, whenever I'm out in public I notice how tightly integrated with people's lives their smartphones are.

Open source, is, of course, going to be a huge part of the future of smartphones, and I don't doubt that application contributions from the open source community could shift their future dramatically. This week, I noticed a number of developments that made me think of some seemingly far-out but entirely doable scenarios for the smartphone future. They could make today's phones seem like stripped down novelties, and might even qualify as revolutions.