Peterism

Note:  I don’t have time to complete this posting right now, so it’s in a draft format.  I just wanted to briefly document my findings before I forget.  Back to studying for the Patent Bar…

I finally pony up the Benjamins and got myself an Android handset, wait for it – the Sprint HTC EVO 4G!

You may not share my enthusiasm, but finally ditching my HTC Mogul (running WinMo 6.1) and moving into an even more open platform opens up a lot of possibilities for me.  I’ve always been more comfortable developing on the *nix realm, and although I don’t have anything against the iPhone, Apple’s tight control on the iPhone OS just doesn’t sound that appealing to me.  At this point in the mobile platform ecosystem, iPhone enjoys a  almost 4-to-1 margin in the number of developers probably due to its two year head start in reaching the mainstream market, but the fact that Google opens up the entire Android platform, allowing me to develop apps that interface the hardware in a low-level way is much more appealing.  I hope for a day when the mobile platform mimics the general purpose computers that makes it possible to run almost any OS on the same hardware.

A bunch of people have been having problem building a true phone recorder on the Android.   Almost all smartphones these days come with an application processor (AP) and a baseband processor (BP).  The BP is responsible for handling the radio, and voice encoding -decoding, among other related tasks.  While the AP is used to run the OS and applications.  The fact that despite having an API that supports recording voice call (both uplink and downlink), none have been able to successfully implement the feature suggests to me that there’s more than meet the eye.  Upon further digging through the Android platform source and documentation, I found an interesting project within the platform that seems to be responsible for implementing what I want…, the Radio Interface Layer (RIL).

More to come…