Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

First Sight of Google Android

Posted by kdawson on from the it's-little-it's-lovely-it-lights dept.

CorinneI writes "At the Mobile World Congress show, four mobile processor vendors demoed pre-production devices running versions of Google's Android OS — a Linux-based, open operating system for mobile phones that will sport Google applications. The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices. 'TI showed Android on a Motorola Q-like QWERTY handheld with its 200 Mhz OMAP 850 platform, where the user interface felt smooth and fast, even with little Apple-like animated transitions between screens.' HTC, Motorola, LG, and Samsung all belong to Google's Open Handset Alliance"

5 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprising by erick99 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices. TI showed Android on a Motorola Q-like QWERTY handheld with their 200 Mhz OMAP 850 platform, where the user interface felt smooth and fast, even with little Apple-like animated transitions between screens."


    I don't know why that would be so surprising. Google has quite a bevy of talented people at all levels. All products that come out of Google seem to have something to do with advertising and Android will be just such a vehicle for them. It's how most everything in cyberspace gets funded. You get something for free (a video, a song, a game) and an advertiser pays.

    --
    http://www.busyweather.com/
    1. Re:Not surprising by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The OMAP 850 is a multimedia-focused chip with graphics acceleration built in. The only surprise is that the reviewer called it "slow" based on the mere fact that it's a 200MHz chip.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    2. Re:Not surprising by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Rendering web pages takes a decent amount of CPU to do quickly, for one.
      Not really. Web-page rendering is memory intensive and I/O bound. The amount of device memory available combined with the speed of your connection and phone bus will have a much greater impact on the performance of page rendering than the CPU.

      In fact, there are few common tasks which are CPU-bound these days. Video encoding/decoding come to mind. (Thus the low resolution of the Android player.) This can easily be mitigated in a multimedia device by including hardware decoder chips. Gaming is another area where CPU can have an impact, but I imagine these phones aren't being presented as portable game machines. If someone wanted to make the next Android NGage, they'd probably look to NVidia for an embedded 3D chip to offload much of the work from the CPU.

      The iPhone's success wasn't because it had a fast enough CPU to render web pages. Quite the contrary. The success was that its memory, storage capacity, and touch screen allowed the iPhone developers to provide an easy-to-use interface to the browser. Safari itself isn't necessarily "better" than Opera Mini, but it is wrapped in a superior user-interface.
      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  2. 200MHz is slow? by bigdanmoody · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since when was 200MHz slow? My old Visor Edge has a 16MHz processor and it feels quite peppy. It does everything I would expect a smartphone to do (other than the fact that it can't make phone calls), and it's easy to use. Have we gotten so used to bloat and poorly optimized code that a 200MHz processor in a phone seems slow? It's a *phone* for Pete's sake.

  3. Android Source code by realdodgeman · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Google does have a GIT repo for all the open source components of Android. The kernel is here: http://git.android.com/

    You can also read (here) that

    Over time, more of the code that makes up Android will be released, but at this point, we have been concentrating on shipping an SDK that helps application developers get started. In short: Stay tuned.