Notion Ink, a Hyderabad-based technology start-up, has developed the first touchscreen tablet which uses Google’s open source operating system Android, Nvidia’s yet-to-be launched Tegra processor chips and a power-saving display screen from the US-based fabless developer Pixel Qi.

The tablet PC developed by six IITians and an MBA will be showcased for the first time at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January 2010.

“After the evolution of desktops, laptops and notebooks, the next innovation is going to be a complete touchscreen you can write on. And, we thought we needed to take the first step. It took us a year to come up with the design, requirements and proposed technologies to make this device a reality,” says Rohan Shravan, founder and director (creatives) of Notion Ink. The company was floated in February 2009.

Called Notion Ink, the new tablet has a 10.1-inch touchscreen. In terms of portability, it is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra processor chip, weighs 770 grams and offers features like Bluetooth, a 3-megapixel digital camera with autofocus, video recording and 32GB data storage.

“Theoretically, it can work for 25 days if one just listens to music. To be precise, it has 48 hours of standby, eight hours of high-definition video and 16 hours of Wi-Fi internet surfing usage time,” claims Shravan.

For designing the device, the company collaborated with Bangalore-based National Institute of Design. “We wanted to adopt an operating system which would make our device ‘talk’ to any other device. And we chose Google’s Android. But India doesn’t have people working on Android and those who have, charge Rs 1 lakh per resource per month (like Tata Elxsi or Sasken). So, we opted to train 46 students from the Hyderabad-based information technology institute BVR IT who are now working full time with us,” he adds.

Notion Ink has filed two patents — one for the design and the other for technology — in India, Taiwan and China, which makes it easy to tie up with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in Taiwan. It is yet to file 67 patents, most of which are for user interface, hardware changes and software optimisation . It is also working on creating digital books, songs, movies and media content for the device.

Four Taiwanese companies have already evinced interest to manufacture the device. “We have global ambitions, so the US is a very important market for us, and that needs networking. For this reason, we are going to showcase our product in Las Vegas,” Shravan says, adding they are planning to launch the smartpad commercially in June 2010.

The company would adopt a complete service model, wherein the Taiwanese OEM will have 90 days to manufacture and Notion Ink another 90 days to pay them back after selling the devices. It is targeting to sell 1.5 million units of the tablet PC in the first year of launch. The device is tentatively priced at below $400 (Rs 18,800) in the US and below $300 (Rs 14,100) in India (with subsidy from telecom operators).

“The device will be bundled with internet services by telecom operators. Already 10 telcos in the US and four in India, which offer 3G services, have shown interest. We will be finalising one telco for the US and one for India during the four-day Mobile World Congress, which is scheduled to be held at Barcelona, Spain, from February 15, 2010,”

As you might know, Microlog has support for logging on the Android platform. However it has been living a rather discrete life in the shadow of the rest of Microlog. The other day I chatted with one of the other Microlog developers (Jarle) and we decided that it was suitable to create a new project for Microlog support on Android. We aim to re-use the Microlog core, but to optimize and such for the Android platform.

But why should I care? Android already has built in logging support that works rather well. I think that there are a couple of reasons for using Microlog on Android:

• Log4j API
• Resource effective
  
• Remote logging
  

As a embedded developer working with mobile phones, there is a new interesting kid on the block; the Android platform. If you are a mobile developer you most certainly had heard of it.

The interesting thing from a Java developer point of view is that all the APIs are in fact in standard Java APIs. But the developers of the Android platform has selected a subset of the Java SE APIs. Thus the implementation is not a fully compliant Java implementation. Further on the code is not executed as bytecode. The source code is first compiled to bytecode. In the second step the bytecode is converted to Dalvik bytecode. The Dalvik bytecode is then executed on a Dalvik Virtual Machine. The Dalvik is optimized for devices with limited power. According to the people behind the Dalvik VM, it should consume less power than a normal JVM.

I have bought a HTC Hero to have the opportunity to use an Android phone and to develop applications for the Android platform. It is possible to execute a Android application on an emulator, but still I think there is a need to be able to execute on a real device. The emulator is real good and I think that it is very close to the reality. My experience tells me that in the end it is always better to run on an actual device.

As of now I have not developed an real Android application from scratch, although I have attended an Android course. I am really looking forward to making an Android application. If its gets good it would be interesting to put it on Android Market, aka Google Market.

But what will happen to Java ME? I think that Java ME will live long and prosperous, although some programmers that are tired of Java ME will move to Android. The devices that are out on the market today are primarily high end phones. Java ME is found on many low end and mid end phones. What do you think? Will Java ME survive now that Android has arrived?

Maybe a little bit of old news, but I thought I would share it anyway. Microlog was mentioned in this article:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/editor/archive/2009/11/10/microlog-220-provides-reliable-small-footprint-j2me-and-android-loggi

I have just finished 3 intense day at the Öredev conference here in Malmö. As always I have a lot of thoughts, ideas and inspiration after attending a conference. These are my reflections from the conference:

• I was missing a sessions about Android. Everybody is talking about the Android platform, but I wonder how many developers are actually developing for Android. It would be interesting to hear about some real Android projects. But maybe next year we will have some Android sessions?
  
• I was surprised by the session "Design to Development- Collaborating and Communicating Interaction Design". I have never heard of Theresa Neil before. She has some really good ideas. It was about communication between developers and interaction designers. This is something that I could relate to.
  
• My friend and colleague Davor had an interesting presentation called "Snow white and the seven dwarfs". It is a true about Davor (Snow White) and his team of developers (the dwarfs). He introduces the concept of Developers Exploratory Testing (DET), which is a way to do continuous testing in an agile project. The James Bach really liked the way how Davor has taken some ideas by James Bach and evolved them even further. Note: I am one of the dwarfs.
  
• Maven 3.x has some genuinely interesting news. The thing that I would like to try out the most is the new Maven console. I hope that it will help me to do faster builds.
  
• The keynote by Scott Hanselman was interesting. He gave some nice hands on tip for improving your efficiency as a developer.
  
• I have been registered as a Twitter user for some time now. Never used it much for anything other than Microlog news. During the conference I twittered a lot. I used the "I Tweet" Android client. Now it feels like I am hooked on Twitter. The Tweets was displayed on large screens all over the place, so it became very popular for many attendees. In fact tweets about #oredev was on the top list for Scandinavia.
• I attended a session by Neil Ford that was interesting. He is the author of "The Productive Programmer", a book that I recently read. As the name implies it is all about productivity for programmers.
  
• Some interesting stuff going around with the Java app store. I have always wondered why Java desktop applications are so underrated. I hope that Java desktop apps will get more popular.
  
• Ze Frank is very funny. He has a lot of very interesting social experiments going on and some unusual games.
  
• I liked the sauna and dinner on Monday. Did meet some interesting people there like Marc Lesser and Chris Hughes. The Swedish pickled herring on a toast was superb. The main course was Swedish fish, not candy kind, but a codfish.
• In general a very good conference. Of course I am a little bit biased since my company is one of the founders of Öredev.
  

The last couple of weeks has involved very much work. First of all I have been preparing the Microlog V2 release. Second I have been writing an introductory article to Microlog. It is now published over at Sun Developer Network. Please read the article and rate it.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javame/javame-logging/

As always, feedback is very welcome. What do you think about the latest Microlog (V2) release? What do you think about the article?

Voice Text can now be used from any Android app. (You can probably figure most of this out by clicking around, but be sure to read this first section.)

How to allow Voice Text as an input method (like the soft keyboard):

1. Make sure you have at least version 2.0. Go to Voice Text -> Settings -> About


2. Go to your phone settings. Hit Home -> Menu -> Settings


3. Touch "Locale & text" ("Language and Keyboard" on the Droid) in the main phone settings


4. Check "Voice Text." A warning will come up about possibly enabling a key logger this way (Voice Text is not a key logger). You won't need to uncheck this every time you want to switch input methods. See the next section.

1. Go into any Android app that has text input (Browser, Gmail, Messaging, ChompSMS, Astrid, Ak Notepad etc).


2. Long press (that is, touch and hold) on a text box. A popup should come up that says, "Input Method." Click on it.


3. Choose Voice Text from the menu. Set it back to "Android Keyboard" anytime to use the soft keyboard again.

1. Go into the app where you want the text to appear (Gmail, Messaging, etc.)


2. Touch any text box.


3. Push "Start" in the menu that pops up at the bottom (if it doesn't, check that you've followed the instructions above correctly).


4. Speak when the prompt says, "Speak now."


5. Push the text box again. The Start button will now have your dictation on it. Push the dictation if it's correct, or the revert button to the left to clear it.


6. That's it! You can continue to use the other app as you normally would, stopping to dictate as you like.

Important: Use the best available internet connection — 3G or WiFi — while dictating to avoid the "Connection problem" error.


Examples of good and bad dictation

"Did you leave the keys by the door?" This is a tricky sentence because it is easy to run the words together and there are lots of short words.

Bad technique. Too fast, no space between words. Remember that the inflection you use when talking to someone doesn't matter in voice recognition. You're trying to get a computer to understand. Think of it as typing with speech.

Bad technique audio

Bad technique audio (alternate link)

Good technique audio

Good technique audio (alternate link)

Too loud/Noise

Too soft

Just right