OStatic

The Associated Press has an interesting story out today about a group of MIT students who set out to show the power of open cell phone systems. MIT professor Hal Abelson challenged them to design an application for cell phones based on Android, Google's upcoming Linux-based mobile operating system. According to the AP story: In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do. Is there something to this?

Sun Microsystems is out with an answer to Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight Rich Internet Application tools: JavaFX. At the JavaOne show in San Francisco today, Sun's head of software, Rich Green, discussed what to expect from the new offering. Green claims JavaFX will arrive on 91 percent of desktops, 85 percent of cell phones, and 100 percent of Blu-ray players--no small claims. While I'm not positive it will have that bright a future on so many platforms, Green showed JavaFX running on Google's Android mobile platform, which is Linux-based. Here, there could be promise.

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco today, Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker gave an address on opening the mobile web, which Webware did a nice job of analyzing. Many people have been wondering if Mozilla will deliver a version of the Firefox browser to work with the many Linux-based phones currently in the works, including phones based on Google's Android platform. While Baker didn't concretely confirm those details, she did discuss an upcoming mobile browser from Mozilla, to arrive later this year, code-named Fennec. (A Fennec is a small fox--get it?)