First Sight of Google Android

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"

Comments

Not surprising

[erick99]

"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.

Re:Not surprising

[dotancohen]

Also, 200 mhz really isn't that slow for an embedded device. My Mio 339 had a 233 mhz processor running Windows Mobile 2002. It flew, I really loved it. I replaced it with a Dell Axim x50v Windows Mobile 2003SE. The Dell has a 624 mhz processor and I'm always waiting for it. I believe that speed is 10% hardware, 90% software.

I won't even talk about the performance of Compiz-Fusion on my Inspiron, as compared to Vista on the same hardware that an associate has.

Re:Not surprising

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Not surprising

[Brian Gordon]

I don't know why that's slow for any device? Why on earth do you need fancy graphics for a telephone anyway? Linux runs on much slower hardware.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing the ascii version of google earth wouldn't wow people much.

You are here ---> .

Your destination is here ---> .

Re:Not surprising

[dlim]

I can't say I'm surprised either. If you look at their design philosophy, the first subheading is "Fast". Coming from a web/desktop development background, I was surprised at first to see the constant focus on efficiency. But apparently, it's paying off.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

God...why do people need color and graphics? Why can't they just use the console to do everything on their phones? God, people are so stupid. If everyone would just learn how to use emacs and program in Fortran, every computer could just have a 133MHz processor and 128MB of RAM. People are so dumb.

./ruby phone.mask/maps fsk -kshk BOOM!!1 (fire, people screaming in the background)

Re:Not surprising

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Not surprising

[Gilmoure]

My Newton 2100 runs on a 162 Mhz processor. Is still plenty fast.

Martha will never know what hit her!

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. But am I the only person who thought how cool googleearth would be through aalib?

Re:Not surprising

[RulerOf]

If I was comparing 200MHz to 1Ghz, I would consider it slow as well. 1Ghz compared to 0.2Ghz. One fifth the power.

=Obligatory Car Analogy=
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
Unfortunately in this day and age, saying one CPU is faster than another based on clock speed alone is like saying one human runs a race faster than another based on his height, "Well obviously the big guy's going to win! He's 20% taller than the short one!"

Re:Not surprising

[Sparr0]

If the 300HP car weighed 6x as much as the 60HP one? I'd call the 60HP one "faster".

Re:Not surprising

[AKAImBatman]

If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?

What would I call it? Perfectly capable of driving on the Interstate, that's what I'd call it. The bar isn't being set very high when we're just talking about meeting the needs of graphics rendering. A CPU with a built-in GPU is quite capable of "driving on the interstate" as it were. Now if they were in an actual race, presumably the 300hp car would win. (Assuming it's not an oversized truck. ;)) But there's no race. Only a minimum requirement.

Re:Not surprising

[krazytekn0]

You young'uns and your new-fangled "FORTRAN" and "CONSOLES". It's like you don't even know how to use punch cards any more! Oh sh^t gotta go, my vacuum tubes are getting overloaded.

Re:Not surprising

[Mr Z]

If it weren't for you pesky kids, I'd be able to surf in peace with my Difference Engine.

Re:Not surprising

[Brian Gordon]

I've got a beowulf cluster of half adders in my basement that can do anything your fancy contraption can do.

Re:Not surprising

[olip]

If the 300HP car weighed 6x as much as the 60HP one? I'd call the 60HP one "faster".

I'd call it slower.
Both will have the same acceleration until air drag is involved.
Supposing they have the same shape (formally : equal CdA), the top speed of the 300HP car is approximately sqrt(6)=2,45 times the top speed of the 60HP one, which I would then call slower.
Weight has no direct impact on top speed.

Re:Not surprising

[Muad'Dave]

Is Smug's Pizza at 1034 G Street, Arcata, CA 95521 any good?

Re:Not surprising

[Erpo]

It's all right if you don't want to leave town. If you're up for a 45 minute drive, go to Ferndale Pizza Company instead.

Sadly, Android and OpenMoko...

[theGreater]

...seem destined not to converge in any significant way, in spite of some pretty awesome hacks:

http://benno.id.au/blog/2007/11/21/android-neo1973

-theGreater.

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[PCM2]

After the endless iPhone hype and the actual product turning out to be an overpriced and underfeatured commercial dud

Uhhh...I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but by exactly what standard is the iPhone a "dud"? Last I heard, it was beating every forecast sales target and had already captured 20 percent of the smartphone market in less than a year. In fact, if you haven't seen one at your local coffee shop, bar, or train station yet, you probably live in a cabin in the Ozarks.

not only that

[nguy]

Not only are the developers good, they have implemented exactly this system before and run it on low-end processors: they developed Danger's Hiptop (a company built from the ground up on Java, strangely enough recently purchased by Microsoft).

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[Anonymous Coward]

If the iPhone wasn't selling just to Apple fans it would have been a dud. It's more of a 'meh' product. Nowhere near the iPod, and nowhere near as bad as the Apple TV.

Apple having to slash shipment estimates from 2 million down to 1.1 million shows the product is quickly running out of marketplace demand after getting the high disposable income Apple fanbase to buy the product. There are just too many fantastic phones out there to compete with unlike the portable digital music player market.

We'll see if Apple learned their lesson with the first iPhone and come out with a competitive iPhone 2 that is focused more on features and usability and price instead of marketing.

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[BobMcD]

you probably live in a cabin in the Ozarks Hey! I in fact AM from the Ozarks, you insensitive clod!

I'm also stoked that I FINALLY got to use one of those phrases!

Linux_kernel+BSD_libc+gJava != linux based open OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Since only the kernel is Linux, and that is the only GPL component, I'm not sure you can call it linux (it the distribution sense), or open.

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[MidnightBrewer]

That's the disadvantage for the iPhone in Japan: fantastic phones already being present. Even though the interface doesn't compare with the iPhone, Japanese cell phones have long since been about style, and even on a bad day, they make "fantastic" American phones look pretty sad indeed.

The unfortunate thing about this Android is

[fohat]

it's got a pain in all the diodes down it's left side. (and it's very depressed)

200MHz is slow?

[bigdanmoody]

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.

Too long to wait

[rossz]

I'm looking for a new smartphone right now. The Android based phones will fit the bill, but I doubt any products will be available until near the end of the year - perhaps just in time for the Christmas rush.

What I want:

1. QWERTY keyboard, the LG Voyager has the nicest keyboard I've tried. To bad the Voyager is locked down in BREW hell.
2. Internet connectivity.
3. Supports IMAP email to any server (I run my own).
4. I don't have to pay a damn fee to enable for every little feature that it already comes with.
5. I can install new applications without using some paid for server, e.g. there's a Symbian OS version of Putty. An ssh client would be awesome.
6. Unlimited data plan available with provider - and reasonably priced.

Would be nice, but not required:

1. Linux based (not much out there, probably have to settle for a Symbian based phone).
2. GPS module.
3. Wifi support.
4. If the phone has music playing capability, support for OGG (I'm not holding my breath).
5. Camera, not really a big deal to me. I can live without one.

Deal breakers:

1. Locked down. It's my damn phone, you won't be telling me how I can use it!
2. Windows Mobile. I'm a Linux system administrator, running a windows based phone would be so wrong.
3. BREW/GIN or anything similar.

So far, the Nokia E90 is the closest to match what I want. The Road's HandyPC S101 surpasses it, but isn't available in the US (afaik).

Re:Too long to wait

[PitaBred]

I've got a Blackberry 8800 with all of the features you require (free apps for SSH and everything, I also run my own IMAP server) on T-Mobile, which has a flat-rate data plan and doesn't lock any devices. In fact, I just got a cheap Motorola L6 to toss in my pocket for when I don't feel like putting my crackberry on my hip when I go out. It has GPS, but no wifi. It does support music, but only MP3's, and no camera unfortunately. But the Pearl has Wifi and a camera, just no GPS that I'm aware of. So you can have most of your requireds and would-be-nice's.

Can you tell I'm a fan? ;) I also like how T-Mobile treats me over Verizon... the only bad thing is that the mobile Internet isn't as fast as it is with a CDMA phone, since T-Mobile is GPRS/EDGE.

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[Lonedar]

Having talked to some people around here (UK) it seems to me that Apple would sell many more Iphones by ditching the carrier lock-in it is plagued with currently. Seriously. I can get any phone on the market without having to sign any contracts - except for the Iphone.

Now, O2 is not a particularly bad carrier, but I travel a lot and I would really like to be able to use my phone abroad without paying the quite extortionate roaming fees.

Also, no 3G (yet).

Q9 P.O.S with WM6, also no push e-mail?

[marcushnk]

I can testify that the Q9 is a piece of crap with Windows Mobile 6. very sluggish and clumsy feeling after coming from the slick responsive world of a Blackberry 8800.

Also I notice there isn't any "e-mail" icon on any of the screenshots...
Does this mean it's going to be another iPhone (can only get push mail from Yahoo) type device..

that would really suck if true. I _really_ hope that they're thinking of the enterprise with these things.. having to accept either RIM or MS devices only sucks balls when I know that Linux based OS's would be so much better.

Yes I've seen it..

[biscon]

going trough the trash outside my block.. mumbled something about having seen tank ships on fire off the shoulder of orion or something..

Smooth and Fast

[wiredlogic]

The UI was smooth and fast on my 486/33 running Windows 3.11. It's still quite capable running a no-frills X window manager and Pentium Overdrive. The Apple ][GS was reasonably snappy when it didn't have to access a drive. The only reason why a multi-hundred MHz device could be slow is programmer laziness.

Re:Smooth and Fast

[hey!]

In part it's laziness; in part it's architecture; in part its economics.

Economics means you have to have a product in user's hands if you want to make a difference. That's true even in open source. Things would have been much different for Linux if BSD hadn't had licensing issues. I myself, when faced with downloading either 386BSD or Debian 0.9 over a 28.8KBaud modem, went with Debian first because of uncertainty over the licensing. I wanted a "real" unix, but it turned out Linux was good enough.

Then there is architecture. Since economics means you have to get things done quickly, the most attractive way of doing that is standing on the shoulders of a couple of giants, who are each in turn standing on the shoulders of a couple of giants. This means that each increment of functionality tends to be accompanies by an exponential increase in code executed, roughly speaking. Since we had exponential increases in computer power for a long time, things seem more or less the same; there's little incentive to improve once things are good enough.

Believe me, I started out writing software for CPUs with sub megahertz clock speeds. The things we did to make things "fast" back then really wouldn't take a modern piece of software, with all its bells and whistles running on top of a modern system with its own bells and whistles (and recursively down to hardware), and make it exponentially faster. Crimes against maintainability were common back then, only most people didn't even know maintainability was a problem. In fact, I'd have a hard time saying that programmers were better back then; true, it was a more elite profession, and certainly it was an easier profession to know more or less every relevant thing about. But the flip side is that we know a great deal more about good practice, and even a tiny bit more about theory than we did back then.

Which brings us to the rub. Back in the day, bad programs were always the product of lazy programmers. Now it takes even a conscientious programmer considerable time to learn the ins and outs of some programming environment. Conscientious programmers still write better programs, all things being equal, but not necessarily on time.

Re:Linux_kernel+BSD_libc+gJava != linux based open

[meringuoid]

Since only the kernel is Linux, and that is the only GPL component, I'm not sure you can call it linux (it the distribution sense), or open.

Only the kernel of my Kubuntu system is Linux. It should perhaps be properly called Mozilla / OpenOffice.org / KDE / X.org / GNU / Linux.

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[meringuoid]

We might think that browsing Facebook on your phone is cool, but that's obviously not the case for most consumers.

I often browse Facebook on my phone. It's a Sony Ericsson K800i - high end 18 months ago, nowadays it's getting to be the standard issue free-with-cheap-contract phone that everyone in the world seems to have. Certainly it doesn't compete with the iPhone as a web browser, but it's capable enough, and Facebook has a perfectly good mobile-optimised site. And you can always install Opera Mini.

Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud

[Takichi]

Are you trying to say the iPhone won't do well because it isn't stylish enough? I don't see the Japanese phones being more stylish than an expensive, globally buzzworthy product that has a sleek physical design and ubercool user interface. If anything the iPhone will do well because of its association with style and the status that comes with it. I think Apple products in general have an extra sense of style because of their computer designs and the success of the iPod. I can't tell you how many Japanese people look at my powerbook and go, "Makku? Coooru."

Re:supposedly open source

[nguy]

Just use Google!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=android%20open%20source

Then you find:

http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html

"Android will be open source; it can be liberally extended to incorporate new cutting edge technologies as they emerge. The platform will continue to evolve as the developer community works together to build innovative mobile applications."

snappy

[Joe Snipe]

Am I the only one who thought snappy meant you didn't see the apple like animations?

BTW- slashdot: fix mobile.slashdot.org so us new centro owners don't have to fight with the webpage!

I ran Wincows CE and Androiid side by side

[EmbeddedJanitor]

... both on ARM simulators (ie a reasonable comparisons). Android is about 5-10 times as fast as WinCE for equivalent tasks.

As others have posted, 200MHz is nothing to sniff at (unless you're throwing it away with bloatware). If Windows 3.11 could run snappily on a 50MHz 486 then there is no good reason for slow software on a 200MHz ARM.

One of the interesting outcomes of the speed difference is that this means Android based devices should have far better power figures than equivalent Windows CE devices.

Efficiency is something you have to design in early. The idea that you caan make a bloaty architecture efficient is broken. You don't get a gazzelle by shaving an elephant's legs.

Android Source code

[realdodgeman]

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.

Nuts

[Jivecat]

I'm out of it... I was really hoping Google Android would be something that could walk around my house and help me find my keys.