Google Mobile Phones Debut in Feb? 127
SpinelessJelly writes "It appears that Google's Android, criticised by Microsoft as vaporware, has sprung to life. Prototype devices are circulating, software developers are experimenting with the SDK and PC-based Android emulator, and there are rumours of a show-stopping debut at February's Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. Numerous examples of the Android GUI are also starting to leak out."
Re:Screenshot != not vapor (Score:5, Informative)
It comes with an Android emulator, and a few of the Google applications. Included is an address book, a dummy dialling application, a working Google Maps application, a working browser... and any other applications that Android developers decide to write for it.
The only thing that is missing is the phone hardware, but we've seen pictures and videos of phone hardware running this. I'm surprised the release is so far away considering the resources available and how complete everything seems to be.
Re:Comparisons (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
OpenGL ES supports floating point or fixed point math. Using floating point is going to severely reduce your performance if you don't have a Floating Point Co-Processor. And fixed point math is incredibly inaccurate, leading to a lot of graphical glitches in pre-accelerator games. (And is *still* slower than pure integer computations.)
Doom was a 2.5D raycaster, not a true 3D engine. Quake is a better comparison. Quake did run on a 90MHz processor, but it also ran in 256 color mode with rather small textures. Model meshes consisted of a handful of polygons wrapped with a single (low-res) texture. Visibility and lighting were pre-calculated using a modified BSP Tree structure that took HOURS to generate.
Android phones lack such a luxury. Graphics will be produced real-time using high-color, high-resolution textures. Scaling, rotation, and lighting are expected to be smooth and responsive. Graphical output should be crisp with little to no blurring. (Poor rendering quality is VERY bad for on-screen text.) In these situations, a 200MHz processor becomes barely adequate. In fact, it still remains to be seen if it will be able to handle the load.
It's possible that the phone manufactures who use the 200MHz chip with no 3D accelerator will keep the graphical effects to a minimum. (Obviously, a non-rotated 2D image with GL_ORTHO is going to be WAY faster to render than a full-3D scene with rotation matrices.) But that would tend to put the phone at a disadvantage in the market. The hardware is powerful enough to demand a higher price, but doesn't appear to be a good value when stacked against other smart phones.
Re:Comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
Easy to develop ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Designs - RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
And yes, this big drab-looking device is dog ugly - but this isn't a slick made-for-media concept phone, it's merely a functional prototype on which the developers and engineers can tinker (and we all know that as rule, they're not big on elegant design).
RTFA!!
Re:Designs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Designs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Android on Existing phones (Score:3, Informative)
If HTC re-use some of its existing hardware to deploy some Android phones, maybe... I've seem some threads at xda-developers and MoDaCo with people talking about flashing their phones with alternative WinMo versions.
My guess is: it probably will be possible... but HTC won't support it. Another possibility is that Android might appear as an paid upgrade, but it's very unlikely.
Mind you that you DON'T need to wipe Windows Mobile to try Linux on your smartphone, there are some bootloaders out there that can boot Linux straight from the expansion card... so we might be able to try Android before flashing it definitely into the phone.
I have a HTC s710 BTW, HTC make some cool phones indeed.