High Expectations For Google Android 274
Several readers have pointed out recent articles discussing the development and features of Google Android. Silicon.com has what is essentially an FAQ for Android, providing the relevant basic information about it. Apcmag questions whether Google can meet the high expectations most enthusiasts have for the platform, and The Register discusses Google's claims that it will be competitive with Apple and worth the wait. We discussed a preview of Android last month. Quoting The Register:
"Google mobile platforms guru Rich Miner acknowledged that for the moment, Apple may have an advantage. After all, Steve Jobs and company have actually shipped a piece of hardware, while the first Android handset won't arrive until 'the second half of this year.' But Miner also told the crowd that Stevo hasn't treated developers as well as they deserve. 'There are certain apps you just can't build on an iPhone,' Miner said. 'Apple doesn't let you do multiprocessing. They don't let your app run in the background after you switch to another. And they don't let you have interpretive language in your iPhone apps.'"
android is running on hardware you can buy today (Score:5, Informative)
I am running the zaurus version which uses Poky linux as its base, and it looks quite cool. Admittedly, it is a bit of a hack, as it's not fully working, but it's much better than using a desk-bound virtual machine!
Re:First post? (Score:4, Informative)
And regarding revenue stream, the iPod is something like 40% with 50% going to the Mac.
Re:They're really stretching (Score:4, Informative)
As written, yes, those flaws aren't going to make sense to Joe or Jane Six-Pack.
For example, "won't let you do multiprocessing/won't allow running in background", near as I can tell, means "your IM chat session goes kaput if a call comes in", as your application will be shut down, causing your sockets to close, causing the IM provider to assume you've gone bye-bye. Likewise, multiprocessing will be key for any alternative music players (vs. the built-in stuff) or anything else that needs to be at least partly running when other applications come to the foreground. Android has the same freeze-and-kill-the-app logic, but only invokes it when memory is low, and you can set up independent services (think daemons) that won't be subject to those effects.
Android, in that it allows more handset makers to adopt Android without forcing as many dependencies on the underlying hardware. Phone vendors can choose from multiple Android-ready chipsets, or assist in porting Android's Dalvik VM and APIs to yet another chipset if they so choose. To Mr. and Mrs. Six-Pack, this means more phone options and, hopefully, lower prices.
Re:They're really stretching (Score:5, Informative)
Re:First post? (Score:4, Informative)
As the owner of a jailbroken iPhone I can tell you that in addition to being a phone, email & web device, camera and iPod, mine is also:
- a guitar tuner
- a scientific instrument. I can ssh into my office computer and start, stop, keep track of my data analysis from wherever.
- a remote control. using a variant of VNC I use my phone as a remote touchpad to control the media PC hooked up to my television.
- an IRC client
- a musical device. The multitouch piano (iAno) is actually quite good and can be used for working out melodies if not more.
This is obviously just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible considering all this was made without the SDK.
Re:First post? (Score:5, Informative)
The lack of background processing in 3rd party iPhone apps will hamstring whole classes of new apps. The best summation of iPhone SDK problems I've seen is here:
Apple's iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation [whydoeseve...ngsuck.com]
Re:Lengthy analysis of the iPhone vs. the Blackber (Score:1, Informative)
You can do all of that on the iPhone
Re:First post? (Score:5, Informative)
At work earlier today this happened:
Usually I bring along my iPod. At the office I plug it into the USB of my MacBook and just use iTunes to play music from the iPod. Well, today I brought along the iPone (with all my music on) and what happened? You can't play music from the iPhone! I can't do anything in iTunes, transfer movies/music from my office MacBook.
As I was about to go home, I had to bring with me some rather large files. Usually I just use Finder and drag the files over to the iPod. Does my iPhone show up in Finder? No!
Is my iPhone broken?!
It's not a small computer. It's a pretty black box, with very limited use. Yes. It has a great interface and good screen. But there the good things seem to end.
"As a computer, it can also browse the web, take notes, watch videos, listen to music, check your stocks, check the weather, take pictures, and email."
What videos? Only those you get from YouTube or the ones you transfer from the one special chosen Mac?
What if you want to transfer videos/music from another computer?
Can it watch my chosen stocks and notify me when they hit a certain limit? Can the stock-program do this in the background?
Where is MSN for iPhone?
Browse the web with which browser? Opera? Firefox? Lynx?
SSH? I often use SSH clients from my computers to log into and manage my servers. A computer should do this. Does the iPhone?
All the things you mention my previous phone could do too.
It's a rather new Sony Ericsson. Difference was the screen and the UI on the iPone, -and- the SE's ability to transfer files with IR, BlueTooth and USB, use exchangeable SD cards for storage, ability to use mp3 files as ringtones, or just play ordinary mp3 files.
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Informative)
Competition is good...but... (Score:5, Informative)
Right now, I don't like the Android emulator one bit. It's not an emulator. It's a marketing demo that pretends to be a phone, and tries to comfort me by adding "developer tools" as an option. An emulator is supposed to be able to run a ROM image of the OS taken from a machine. If the Google people put the OS on a piece of hardware and dump an image, THAT is what I want for testing my apps. Not some fake toy app for salespeople to be wowed by. I should be able to right click on the thing and load another ROM, save a ROM, and encapsulate a ROM for testing. Palm did that with their original emulator, and while it had lousy network support (I believe you could get a third party app called Mocha PPP that fixed that), it was easily my favorite mobile OS emulator for development that I've worked with. The Windows Mobile emulator is great for debugging and communication, but is crippled in a zillion other stupid ways. I disliked the Symbian and Brew emulators I've used as well, and most of the Java emulators out there have been equally bad. Folks always forget about how important emulation is, they just think that we can just buy a dozen phones and test on all of them. THAT is why homebrew apps don't get made, and those are the kinds of apps that build the entire economy around your OS.
The development environment needs to provide extensive command line support for automated scripting along with a system that makes it brain dead simple to debug and build apps. I don't honestly care if I'm writing an app in Java, C#, or C...I just want an IDE that lets me hit a simple, easy to remember control sequence that builds, debugs, runs, checks code into the repository, whatever. I don't want something that barks at me because it wants me to do things IT'S way, I want it to be flexible enough to do things MY way.
If Android can't deliver this, and a whole lot more, it's going to be only one of many mobile Linux OSs currently hitting the market. Everyone and their mom is releasing mobile Linux OSs. Like we saw on the desktop, it doesn't matter if the big corporations (like Novell) are backing you.
Re:First post? (Score:5, Informative)
Units shipped for Q4 2007 were as follows: As you can see, apple are competing with Toshiba, not Dell - unless you call trailing by 80% to be competing?
Re:First post? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They're really stretching (Score:4, Informative)
I don't believe this is correct. Apple wants no interpreters other than those that they approve/install. To quote the iPhone SDK Agreement
Re:First post? (Score:2, Informative)
> calls. As a computer, it can also browse the web, take notes, watch videos, listen to music, check your stocks, check the weather, take
> pictures, and email
Like I said, it's just another phone. Or have you not been paying attention to the spec of mobile phones over the last 5 years or so? Perhaps you're in the US, where phones (range, price, coverage, usage) is a fraction of that of the UK, EU and Asia.
Re:Apple's NDA Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
-Ted
Re:First post? (Score:5, Informative)
To save you clicking, here are the interesting bits :
"
Highlights - Full year 2007, at 31 December 2007
* 77.3 million Symbian smartphones shipped to consumers worldwide in 2007 - a 50% increase on 2006 (51.7m)
* 188 million cumulative Symbian smartphone shipments since the formation of Symbian to 31 December 2007
* 68 mobile phones based on Symbian OS commenced shipment in 2007 through 250 major network operators by 8 licensees including Fujitsu, LG, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony Ericsson, a 4.6% increase on 2006 (65 models)
* Of these models, 49 (72%) were based on Symbian OS v9, 46 (68%) for use on W-CDMA/ HSDPA (3G) and 20 (29%) were GPS enabled
* Symbian OS v9.3 is the latest version on Symbian OS to ship in devices (November 2007). Symbian OS v9.3 is optimized for convergence with performance and feature enhancements
* 8,736 third-party Symbian applications are now commercially available, a 27% increase on 31 December 2006 (6,896 applications) Source: Symbian research, see Notes to Editors
"
"
1. PSP - 23.7%
2. Nokia N95 - 20.2%
3. iPAQ HX series - 20.1%
4. Palm TX - 3.6%
5. Apple iPhone - 3.4%
"
Of course, the figures do not justify the headline (that 'N95 bests iPhone', though the headline is a question not a statement). In any case, I'd like to see where you get your figures from.
Nokia 52.9%
RIM 11.4%
Apple 6.5%
Motorola 6.5%
Others 22.7%
A paragraph from that same page gives a (IMO) balanced commentary :
"Apple, perhaps not surprisingly, made a strong entrance to the worldwide market at the end of last year. To get to 6% so quickly (and with a single product) is an impressive achievement. RIM's OS continues to improve at a rate of knots (see my Smartphones Show Blackberry slots, for example) and it continues to be a surprise how fragmented the Windows Mobile world is, in terms of manufacturer success. Plus, even in their home territory of North America, Microsoft is now down to 3rd place in terms of their mobile platform (after RIM and Apple). If Microsoft don't pull a cat out of the bag very, very soon then their in big trouble"
Re:First post? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple's NDA Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Read the post - it's still really counter to any sort of openness, even for a beta. One would think that you would want to support discussion around any sort of beta product, under any forum so as to spur enthusiasm for the platform. This continues to be a problem with Apple, HI 1990 called and it wants it's business strategy back!
Re:They're really stretching (Score:5, Informative)
When you accuse others of not having their facts straight, it helps to, well, have your facts straight: [boygeniusreport.com]
I apologize for not linking directly to those guidelines mentioned, as it appears you have to be registered in some way...
Re:Competition is good...but... (Score:-1, Informative)
Android emulator is based on qemu - which is a machine emulator, and can abd does run the actual kernel and everything else on top
so "toy" it is not.
"adb" provides command line access to the OS running on the emulator. So you can happily script away.
SDK explicitly supports Eclipse integration, and is quite simple.
Re:First post? (Score:3, Informative)
and without carrier-specific rules you won't have the limitation on things like VoIP, although everyone seems to have really inexpensive unlimited plans nowadays that the only reason I would see VoIP being worthwile is if you want to tie your phone into your business's phone system)
Re:Competition is good...but... (Score:-1, Informative)
> Right now, I don't like the Android emulator one bit. It's not an emulator. It's a marketing demo
> that pretends to be a phone, and tries to comfort me by adding "developer tools" as an option.
the Android emulator is a derivative of the QEMU program (www.qemu.org) and emulates a complete virtual ARM hardware (CPU + a bunch of devices).
I fail to see why you would call that a marketing demo ?
> An emulator is supposed to be able to run a ROM image of the OS taken from a machine.
the emulator is distributed is part of the Android SDK which includes also an ARM kernel image, and ROM image files (named boot.img, ramdisk.img and system.img).
> If the Google people put the OS on a piece of hardware and dump an image, THAT is what I want for testing my apps.
the same ROM image files are exactly what has been used to port Android to other hardware like the Zaurus. these non-official ports do not work 100%, due to hardware differences, but show that the binaries distributed are the real thing, not some fake/lame demo stuff
a company is even already selling hardware designed to run these binaries (see http://www.anddev.org/first_android_hardware_development_board_available-t981.html [anddev.org])
did I mention that the kernel and emulator sources are already available from: http://code.google.com/p/android/downloads/list [google.com] ?
it's funny to see that what you describe really looks like the iPhone simulator: it's not a real device emulator (it runs x86 code), won't allow you to access the system images (don't even know if there is one), and comes with all tons of crippling (who talked about balls and chains ?)
> The development environment needs to provide extensive command line support for automated scripting along with a system that
> makes it brain dead simple to debug and build apps.
yeah, surprise, it's called the Android Eclipse plugin (http://code.google.com/android/intro/installing.html#installingplugin)
but there is now a NetBeans plugin as well (http://undroid.nolimit.cz/), and you can still use command-line tools to do development
and debugging. heck, the Android VM implements JDWP and can be used with *any* compliant Java debugger on the fly.