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High Expectations For Google Android
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.'"
iPhone will be hard to beat. Apple is way ahead of the curve no matter how you cut it.
hopefully this will be it. then i can crack a beer, sit back and enjoy the nerd rage as apple fans go into great detail as to why their status symbol is so much better.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm all in favor of openness and thus I don't plan to buy an iPhone, but it sounds like Google has to look pretty far to find advantages for Android. These "flaws" in the iPhone are obscure enough that I don't think most regular people would even understand them.
It's interesting to note that iPhone doesn't allow interpreted code... while Android doesn't allow native code. Which one of these is more "open"?
Using my many years of reading Slashdot as a gauge, the enthusiasm for the Android handsets, and lack thereof for the iPhone, that are evident on this site lead me to believe that Android will flop and the iPhone will take over the mobile market. Large-scale market trends always seem to defy the common wisdom brokered by the denizens of this site.
Of course, I'm not making a prediction. Just a hunch, based on self-selected observations. My take means nothing, ultimately.
I don't think that Google really intend to try beat iphone. There is room in the phone space for more than one phone.
Waiting for Android. Fuck the iPhone.
Without reason? Why not go with:
"Waiting for Intelligent Design. Fuck evolution".
or "Waiting for Windows Server 2009. Fuck Linux".
or "Waiting for SCO. Fuck the GPL!"
Without any kind of supporting reason, all the above statements are about as reasonable as yours.
That's all I have to say about that.
This is where the logic bomb kinda goes off. Because you said more about it, you said that you'd posted it before, and further, that it's all that you have to say about it. So you don't have any more to say about it, other than the fact that you do, but you don't have supporting arguments...
There lies madness....
In any event, come back when you DO have something more to say.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
iPhone will take over? When is that going to happen?
OpenMoko will put all the pretenders to rest.
I'll make some predictions here...
.NET...
Apps for Android will be few and far between. Most of them will be ports of games from other java mobile platforms that hasn't done well.
Apps will be slow. It's like compact
original apps for Android will be crappy in quality. (very few consumer level application written in Java has done well, also think CS101)
Social apps for Android will fail because of the lack of users.
Android is unable to attract ISV's because a 10Mil prize pool is 10x smaller than a 100Mil prize pool.
Android apps will be hard to install.
Get back to me when you have an honest-to-god product to sell me, not a plan for a product. Right now it's all promises.
Keep in mind that the road is littered with the bloodied corpses of alleged "iPod killers", and that the iPhone is undoubtedly the chosen scion of the same clan.
However, I do welcome any competition to the space, since a competitive market benefits everyone. Right now the competition is a wee bit on the pathetic side.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
from your description it sounds like the iphone is a fairly limited piece of kit.
well if you actually asked an owner what their experience was, then it might be said that its an overpriced media player, crippled by restrictions placed upon developers. truth is that although it may have some nice eyecandy going on - that soon wears thin. it would be nicer if it was powerful enough for the flash plugin (iphone 2?) the thing other early adopter say to me is its too bulky, especially when you consider it doesn't have a proper keyboard. its another nice apple toy with a lovely screen, but even with complete openness, its fairly unlikely that any number of developers can turn this into a viable work tool, and i'm already looking at the n96.
you can buy consumer hardware and run android on it today.. there's a good summary of what has been done at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4262102607.html
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!
Taking a page from the history books, the Linux phone space is currently where MSDOS computers were in the pre-IBM compatable days. Before IBM came along and made a standardised platform, MSDOS programs were very clunky and typically not portable between different MSDOS machines. What made the difference was when IBM made their PC and people started cloning it. That is what really kick started the whole PC era.
Having one big player can really help to make a standardised effort.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Oh wait, now I've posted that it will succeed, nullifying your attempt to make it succeed by posting failure.. so It will fail..
but wait...
(post canceled due to slashdot psychic loop)
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
How does it feel when your product is totally pwnt before it's even released? Hundred thousand downloads of iPhone SDK within 4 days is A LOT of downloads. By June we should see some serious appage showing up, running on a real device, with a business model, brand and strong distribution channel behind it. Stakes are high, so GOOG can't throw in the towel now, but one core mistake that companies often make is they assume their competitors will stand still while they catch up. And that's just not the way it works.
This game is looking pretty cool: parallel kingdom They're pouring money on the problem of lack of applications (10 million for developers isn't enough? - The tiered payout scheme should encourage polish on the finalists) I can't imagine that Google, which is developing all of these easy to use online apps, would screw up on the software on this thing. The company has done wonders where everyone else has fallen on their face over the years (at least they have enough money to sustain things until they have a chance). I would think that people developing these applications would consider branching out into other mobile markets after having developed their applications to try to get a larger user base if they are going to be in the mobile market anyways. Yes, I know that the platforms are very diversified and not cross compatible, but if someone is going to spend money developing applications they'll probably have the incentive to spread it to various platforms. I don't know how things would be hard to install, it shouldn't be any different than installing anything else, except that the it's actually a developer friendly environment - unlike the iphone has done so far and yet you still see people spending hours there to get things working there
No, I think you're largely right. I've watched so many "for sure" predictions become patently false on this site I've begun doing the exact opposite most of the time.
Example 1:
"OGG is the new hotness and will rule the compressed music formats."
How's that market domination working out for you? I'm glad I didn't invest my personal collection heavily in that format. Does it have a use? Absolutely. Will it ever come anywhere near matching the ubiquitous MP3 format? Nope.
Example 2:
"This is the year of Linux on the desktop!"
Mind you, this was said in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001...and so on. Are there players? Sure. Microsoft's missteps with the delays of and eventual bad user experiences with Vista and their stopping sales of XP opens a door for companies like Ubuntu, but no one's quite gotten their foot in despite your personal experiences to the contrary. Apple's been the real winner there, doubling their market share in the last few years while Linux has remained constant.
My take on Android versus iPhone (disclaimer: I'm a very happy unjailbroken iPhone user) is that they're not meant to compete with each other, at least not directly. Google offered a platform that depends on vendors to customize. Lots of potential? Sure. Lots of potential for suckage? Absolutely. Look at some of the stark differences between different Symbian and Windows Mobile devices and then tell me that Android is going to win hands-down. Hell no. Some company might be able to make phone with an interface and functionality to match the iPhone, but saying that it's better just because it's open is ridiculous. Better for who? Better for the consumer? Or better for you?
Apple offered not just a platform, but an "experience" where everything, if you'll pardon the over-used expression, just works. 99% of iPhone users aren't going to care less that software isn't GPLv3'd and you can't do whatever you want with your phone, and the sales they've racked up so far pretty much indicate that.
By the end of 2008, Slashdotters may find that they have 10 million so-called "pretentious hipsters" to deal with while they're still bitching about how bad the iPhone is. Yeah, that's me all right, a pretentious hipster. Windows/Exchange admin posting on Slashdot.
First off, there is no such thing as an iPod, what you got is everything from the iPod shuffle to the latest iPod touch and what a LOT of people forget is that it is the lower end models that sell best.
This makes the iPods of which Apple sells most very simple single purpose devices. Play music.
Now ask yourselve just how many people actually use iTunes to BUY music and not justas a way to put music they already have on it on to the iPod as nothing more then a extremely bloated uploader.
By definition almost the iPhone is NOT just a phone. If you JUST wanted a phone, you can get far cheaper devices.
The idea is that mobile phones will become the PC's of the future, well ask yourselve this. If this is true, which one is the IBM PC and which one the Apple?
Cast aside the hatred of MS for a moment and remember WHY it was WinTel didn't just win the race but left overbody else standing. No, the reason isn't that Bill Gates produced a superior product, the reason was that he simply didn't do everything he could to ruin his own project. MS didn't win because they made the right decisions, they won because everyone else made far worse decisions. Atari, IBM and yes Apple, they ALL screwed up.
Now look at the iPhone again, for that matter, look at Apple itself, has it really learned from past mistakes? Remember, there was a time when APPLE led the field, but lost it. Is the iPhone not about to make the same mistakes as before, too much control when all people want is to use the device as they want?
Didn't we just have a story about Atari in which multiple posters pointed out how Atari never had proper documentation on how to develop for its systems so people just went to the IBM instead and went to work with the PC? Hell, that I can use PC as a synonym for an x86 bases cpu running MS software says it all really.
Apple may have sold a lot of devices, but they also sold a lot of Apples in the beginning, and then the PC happened and expanded the market to extents few could have imagined.
The iPod is a simple music player that for an awfull lot of people works PURELY as an MP3 player. Is the iPhone a simple mobile phone with a few added apps OR is it an attempt at the fabled mobile computing we heard so much about?
I personally haven't bought a single phone in recent years that did NOT allow me to install any java app that I wanted on it. (Europe is different regarding telcom control then the US), why should I NOT allow my carrier to decide what I run on my mobile computing phone, but give Apple total control?
In my eyes Android will have to launch on a sexy phone to get the same headlines, but if it truly introdudes an open PC like platform on which I can run what I want, how I want, then it is the clear winner for every user who runs non-apple or non-ms software on their computer.
It all depends on wether people buy their phones as single use gadgets or buy into the mobile computing hype.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Honestly, who cares about multitasking? As a developer, I do. As a user, I really don't care. Since I've had my iPhone, I've been pleased with the user experience. It is intuitive and stable. It makes my life easier.
Have you tried android? I've downloaded the SDK. I thought I could use the emulator to demonstrate some of our mobile apps. I was really disappointed with the experience. It is clearly not polished yet. I have no doubt they will succeed. I believe their successful model will be inexpensive mobile devices, subsidized through advertising. That will be a model that Apple will not compete, at least for the next few years.
Android hardware will suck if it won't even support WVGA.
Personally I'm just hoping Android will allow users to merge the innate genius and usability of the current iPhone with the freedom of OSS software creation. My only gripe about the iPhone is that the applications released for the thing are all under the totalitarian control of Apple (making my dreams of an easy to use SNES or NES emulator attached to my phone/music player/organizer/Internet appliance almost impossible).
Of course, if it also lives up to the expectations that the rest of Slashdot seems to have for the platform (heals the lame/blind, resurrects the dead, fellatio on demand, etc) that would be an excellent bonus.
The standard MSDOS interface was completely useless for dealing with hardware (eg. the screen and keyboard), so you'd have to bypass MSDOS and access hardware directly. That worked, but was not portable across machines. Some machines also came with special BIOS and BIOS extensions which also were not portable. IBM made the difference and stopped this fragmentation.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It seems like when you say "the iPhone is nothing but another phone" every Apple apologist in the world jumps all over you telling you that the iPhone is actually a full blown computer.
."
But as soon as you want to do something crazy like, say, run more than one program at once, you hear "Well, the iPhone is first and foremost a phone. .
So which is it? If I want to quit an application I imagine I am completely capable of doing so, and the iPhone runs OS X which these same people tell me is the most advanced OS around, and it ought to be perfectly capable of not giving a program in the background a lot of resources. Why is security on an iPhone suddenly such a huge deal, if its really a computer?
I guess I just don't get it.
*Gets ready to be modded -9999 Troll*
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
"Access your contacts while on a call on the iPhone? Put the call on hold. Add a contact while you're on a call? Nope. That is one of many examples. I just returned the iPhone for a Blackberry Curve."
.. you can also use other iPhone applications (just press the round button with the square).
You can do all of that on the iPhone
If they want to win the market, they'll make sure that Android is super easy to port to existing phones. They'll immediately have market saturation at no expense to the end user. Doing this will require a really close relationship with the FOSS community with all the necessary tools and code available. I'd put Android on my crap Q9c in a heartbeat. Once this is done, it becomes a defacto standard and people naturally lean toward buying new phones with Android installed.
The iPhone is slickly marketed, does a few things well, and sacrifices a lot of features to get that multi-touch display and maintain a $400-500 price tag.
Any serious phone addict could care less about the admittedly nice intuitive interface and awesome browser. They want PC-level features, and that means HSxPA, a-GPS, BUTTONS, both free AND commercial applications, and (travelers want) removable batteries whether Apple admits it or not.
Business users will still prefer their god-awful blackberries, E-series Nokias, and single-touch + full keyboard WinMo Pro handsets, simply because they are better at fulfilling the need of the user, and already have every app that anybody would want available for download.
Personal/individual users either want a phone that their carrier will subsidize 100%, or at least only make them pay $100 or less for a phone that would be $400-500 if it was unlocked. They still have N-series Nokias, SE walkman, and LG phones to compete at the iPhone price point, not to mention the Samsungs, Motorolas, and Nokias that are at the "a whole helluvalot cheaper" price point, minus the multi-touchscreen and desktop-level browser.
Apple, if anything, shows that you CAN catch up quickly to the competition... if you just aggressively market your sole device and make sure the news reporters catch your employees high-fiving the poor schmucks who coughed up >=$400 for a phone that plays music and video and has a browser, but lets you touch it in more than one place at a time... a kinky phone, in other words. Yes, I'm rooting for Android to lay the smack-down - but not to Apple - to MS, Symbian, Palm, and RIM.
Apple isn't the competition.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
The iPhone is a great phone, and IMHO without peer in the US. But being the best cellphone in the US is like being the valedictorian of summer school.
My prediction is that the iPhone will always be more stable and have a more consistent interface and user experience. It will always be a great phone. But Apple is about giving you the core features you need and knowing what to leave out. That leaving out bit burns we basement dwelling robot building slashdotters. But Apple's brilliance is giving you a great user experience, and I don't see that ever changing. To apple the iPhone will always be a closed platform (sure you can put some apps on it, but don't try to fundamentally change it). It will always be a phone or/and ipod, not a computer.
The Android is whatever people think it should be. So it's a phone, a computer, a bottle opener. etc. It will have lots of uses in lots of arenas that apple doesn't want to play in. It will allow other countries phones to really kick ass. It will also be much less consistent as lots of people code for it. To a lot of people, this is insanely exciting, and provides the first glimpse of a unified geek tool in your pocket (are you glad to see me?).
Android being free will be super attractive to phone makers, and to consumers. It will gobble up marketshare in many markets. And I suspect that Apple is just fine with that. Apple is in a great place taking the top portion of the markets they play in.
Sheldon
CPU on smart phone/PDA has capped at 600MHz for the past 6 years. This is quite sad. This has been 4 gens of Moore's Law and nothing has improved. Resolution has gone to VGA, but has dropped to QVGA. Until the smart phone processors go > 1GHz, smartphones just won't achieve the promise of the convergent device.
What it really comes down to is how polished the developer tools are. I've written professional apps for about 5 different mobile operating systems so far, and I can tell you that it's not so much in the languages and OS that it uses, but in how refined the tools are.
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.
iPhone developers are not allowed ask each other for help on the SDK
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Cocoa-dev/2008/Mar/msg00567.html
Meanwhile, Android developers are free to give each other advice
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers
The only thing that this NDA is protecting is Google's ability to get more functional apps to market sooner.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Will we revisit the days of non-preemptive multitasking in the iphone.
The finder asking for my attention so that apps in the background can have their turn of execution.
Ufff, i'm already sweating!
I can't find the numbers handy, but I seem to remember that when you looked at *laptops* apple shoots up a bit in the rankings, may have been what the GP meant
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
At the gym when I'm on an elliptical or AMT machine all of the TVs are muted and broadcasted in different FM stations. If you want to listen to the TV you need an FM radio. I have an iPhone and think an FM Radio would be a great feature considering that many cheaper MP3 players have it no problem.
All your base are belong to Wii.
It's interesting to look at the history of PalmOS and see where they ended up. Sure PalmOS was a fairly open platform, however applications were essentially unable create OS level threads (due to kernel licensing restrictions) and the only way to do 'background' processing was through various awful event driven kludges and hacks. Imho this killed the OS as a useful platform for really serious application development in it's later years. Once CPU power/screen resolution/colour depth and memory was no longer a real issue, the inability to create decent, consistently well behaved multi-threaded apps meant PalmOS stagnated while competitors like Windows Mobile over took them. This is also why I believe Symbian (and it's awful cooperative multi-tasking Active Object scheme) is doomed in the long term. Hard to believe Apple think limiting their iPhone in the same way is a good idea...
It's also the binary specs. Most phones are ARM and the ARM binary stuff is only recently settling down. There are tens of different models of Linux phones. Sure, you could run console apps on these but GUI ones are far from standardised. That measn no "write once, run anywhere".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yeah, that sucks. I was hoping to run SETI on my phone. Thankfully Android will let me continue the search for ET while I'm on the go, even while talking with Aunt Gracie in Connecticut. You can't do that with the iPhone. Apple sucks!
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
yeah - but they are not the *phone*. you need to test your apps on target hardware, if you can't it is a real problem as each handset has it's own capabilities. also, i am interested in building applications that utilize the on board camera but i cannot do that until there is hardware. so... now that apple actually has an SDK (and private frameworks that i now nearly have legitimate access too) i can do all that i'm after. w00t.
First, are .NET apps slow?
And second, does the typical Android app have to be fast?
I hate Java as much as the next guy, but come on -- do you really expect the bytecode engine itself to make them "crappy" in some way? Yes, the bytecode engine -- there are several scripting languages for the Java engine, and while this one is different, I'm sure we'll see languages other than Java supported.
Yeah, like how Myspace has failed -- oh wait.
And who says social apps need to be only single-platform?
While true, there isn't a 100Mil prize pool.
Let me repeat that: there is no 100 mil prize pool for the iPhone. What they are after are investments, which are different than prizes. I'd much rather have a prize than an investment.
And just where did you pull that out of?
But you know what? It doesn't matter, because you see, unlike the iPhone, Android won't try to tell you what kind of apps you may write, and what kind you may not. Maybe I'll write a package manager. Maybe I'll skin it to look like the iPhone App Store.
Compare that to the iPhone -- if it's hard to install iPhone apps, that's too bad, and there's nothing you can do about it other than whine to Apple.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It may take awhile, and it will take a Jailbreak of some sort...
But someone will port Android to the iPhone.
That's my prediction, anyway. I also predict that when it happens, hardware will become irrelevant -- although Apple may well win on hardware, I'm not sure they'll be able to compete as effectively on software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Apple needs to have control over what runs on the iPhone as well as over the hardware. It's simple really. How could a serious hardware and OS vendor support and maintain a platform that consists of bit of code here and there, and apps over which they have no control and zero insight? I think many of us don't want another Windows hell. The open source model works well in some areas, but Apple is a consumer electronics company and NOT a venue for hobbyists and NOT a development lab. The iPhone is supposed to actually WORK when the customer out there in Userland boots it up. Most people won't buy the iPhone because they need a new toy that may or may not work, but because they need all the functionality and usefulness the iPhone provides. Do you see what I mean?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
It's been 10 years since I picked up a Mandrake CD. Lots of places sell pre-bundled Linux machines now, but I'm still waiting for the Linux desktop market share to rise above miniscule. In the meantime Apple has resurrected from the dead, brought out more innovation and consumer friendly services from behind established players than MSFT+RMAA+Hollywood+Mobile industry combined, and proved that Michael Dell is just a bottom feeder.
A quick Google of 'Gphone games' returned 1 major game - Wifi Army. A quick search for the source code for Wifi Army returned nill. So you think Android developers are just bathing in communal love and sharing really worthy code? Even as they are developing their entries to try to win the $100K top prize in the Android Challenge? Sure... Lots of Macphiles are going ahead with knowledge sharing, NDA or non-NDA. I just learned how to hack the SDK to make it work on a PPC intead of the supposedly required Intel Mac. And tons of open blogs and new forums are forming. And if you've never coded obj-C before, picking up a book is probably a good idea. Online help for any language is spotty and disjointed at best.
How will Google make money in this? Will they get revenue through some deal with the handset manufacturers or some Wifi deals? Ads? On my 19-in monitor I can ignore the crappy site design in 99% of the Web today so I can benefit from 'free' apps like Google Docs. I sure do not want any unwanted ads cluttering up my handheld screen.
The Android emulator sucks. On my PC w/ 2GB RAM it takes 5 minutes for a simple Hello World message to show up. At the same time all other desktop apps responds likes sleeping snail. Hello? Multi-threading? And the other famous sample app - Notepad - sure looks great compared to the other iPhones apps I can gleam around the Web right now. Yeah.
Many people are not so religiously into Us vs. Them. I look forward to checking out a real Gphone and maybe even buy one - people can have more than one toy - if Sun doesn't decide to sue Google and delay a release this year. But before that I'm gonna get an iPhone when the App Store is released, and load some sweet games on it and have fun, and enjoy surfing the web on an open source based (WebKit) browser without the f**king annoying Flash. When I'm done maybe I'll go back to my spare box with the ever changing Linux distro and attempt some more FOSS package compiling.
I keep wondering has Google gone dumb? If their future resides in 'Cloud Comuting' anyway, why bother with an OS? Shouldn't they invest heavily instead into WebKit or Mozilla or their own open browser development to make them into amazing OS-agnostic platforms that will do so much more than today? If CISCO/Sun/Oracle/Novell/VMWare are even half right, the Network will become the Mothership. And looks like Mark Andressen's prediction then may come true too - the Browser will become the Desktop.
Ultimately I don't think iPHone or Gphone need to compete with each other. Just like their desktop counterparts they will always have fans, and people will still buy the iPhone just like they ignore non-iPods. The real challenge will come when Chinese and Tawanese made Linux phones come knocking. That's the great thing about Linux. Somebody else could very well build a better & more solid OS than Android. While a Gphone may sell for 1/3 of an iPhone when it comes out, but if you can get another openly hackable phone for even cheaper and still use Google Apps, Android will just be another distro. /d
One does wonder why the /. crowd lost interest in that phone in favor of another that doesn't exist yet.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
I have compact flash wireless card which works just fine - I can surf over wifi.
There are compact flash GSM modems which do voice and data - I have the audiovox one which is tri-band, there's one from Enfora which is quad-band... the audiovox one has been shown to work fine, and I imagine the Enfora one is just as easy... they are basically serial devices usign extended Hayes commands.
What about the BlackBerry? I do BlackBerry training and I think the BlackBerry is by far the most superior device on the market today for business professionals. I have also had several different mobile devices and again the BlackBerry comes up on top. Is this geared more towards the non Business professionals? Hats off to Google though. They are an incredible company and changing the face of technology with every new product.
Using my many years of reading Slashdot as a gauge, the enthusiasm for the Android handsets, and lack thereof for the iPhone,
Interestingly, I see the complete opposite. I'm seeing far more support for the Iphone, and far less criticism for it - and just consider how we get millions of Iphone stories, but rarely on any other phone model. And even though this is a story about Google, we still get all the people claiming how the Iphone is better, and criticising that Google haven't released their product (what about when the Iphone hadn't been released?).
I've noted that it isn't quite so extreme with the Iphone as with other Apple products (where anything critical to Apple gets modded down - with the Iphone, a few critical comments can get modded up). But overall, the slant is towards praising the Iphone above and beyond every other phone out there.
So if market trends defy the common wisdom on this site, I would expect the Iphone to flop.
One does wonder why the /. crowd lost interest in that phone in favor of another that doesn't exist yet.
They have? How does having an article on a product under development mean the "crowd" has lost interest? We have articles on all sorts of unreleased products - including above all others, Apple's.
This is an article on Google, but everyone keeps bringing up the Iphone - that doesn't sound like lost interest to me. I have a Motorola phone, shall I bring that up instead?
By the end of 2008, Slashdotters may find that they have 10 million so-called "pretentious hipsters" to deal with while they're still bitching about how bad the iPhone is.
I must be reading a different Slashdot to you. All I see is people on Slashdot always mentioning the Iphone as being some kind of special phone, whilst out in the real world people are happily using (including listening to music, browsing the web etc) on all sorts of ordinary phones.
Sorry, you don't get to play the "help we're such a minority nobody likes this product" for a product that gets as widespread coverage and support (both in terms of number of stories posted, and comments) as the Iphone! Maybe if you were plugging something like poor old BeOS, you might have a point.
99% of iPhone users aren't going to care less that software isn't GPLv3'd
Who said anything about that? The criticisms I've seen are things that ordinary users want - MMS, video, copy/paste, running standard apps (i.e., Java).
And my phone works too. But I can say more positive things about it than that it simply works!
It's an observation, not a law.
But all things remaining equal, more transistors and more MHz means more power required. Batteries are only improving incrementally. With a desktop, it doesn't matter - just stick a bigger PSU in, and glue a larger heatsink on it. You can't do this with a mobile device.
Mobile processors are only going to improve incrementally until a new, disruptive technology not based on CMOS is practical due to the need to keep power consumption down and heat emission down.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The "that phone" he refers to is Openmoko (which is a platform, not a phone). I presume he *really* means the Neo FreeRunner.
Here's an edited copy of an earlier post I put up about the Neo FreeRunner:
FIC produces a totally open phone. The firmware for the GSM is closed, but I believe that's a legal requirement in most areas.
The Neo 1973 & Neo FreeRunner are linux ARM computers with full GPS, bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, USB (client & unpowered host) and 480 x 640 touchscreens. The FreeRunner also has two accelerometers and wi-fi. You can buy the Neo 1973 now (<-- no longer accurate; you can only buy used 1973s while FIC is gearing up to produce FreeRunner), and the FreeRunner is expected in March or April.
You can (of course) play video, music, and run PDA apps on the devices. You can also view PDFs and the web, use bluetooth keyboards (or bluetooth anything else, for that matter), or do anything that you or someone else cares to port from the desktop, assuming the hardware resources are sufficient.
I've been playing with my Neo 1973 (currently recommended only for people willing to debug, and tolerate alpha level software) for a few weeks, and I'm having a great time with it.
Not only the software is open - you can get CAD files for the case, and schematics as well. There are also i2c, etc. bus standards used so adding new hardware is easy as well, if you're so inclined. Obviously the real market there is for a cottage industry distributing neos with extra hardware built-in, but the hobbyist can experiment at home, too.
Check out the Openmoko wiki for much more information about Openmoko and the Neo phones.
Wasn't there a /. reference recently to the fact that Moore's law applies quite differently to mobile devices than PCs? For a PC, more transitors per cm2 means more power: for a mobile device, this means the same number of transistors in a smaller package.
So they stay the same (adequate) speed and get a lot smaller. I think you're forgetting just how hilariously huge early 3g phones were.
I'm sure your prediction (it is one) will be just as accurate as the rest here.
I haven't had time to read all the responses (so this is probably 'redundant') but it seems to me that Apple has one huge drawback: they can only ship to ONE carrier in the U.S. (ATT) for quite a while. Android is going to be able to hit all the carriers and a variety of manufacturers, which is going to give them much more potential market penetration. I'm a Verizon Wireless user, and I know quite a few other VZ customers who would have purchased an iPhone if they could have stayed with VZ. The Voyager, an inferior competitor to the iPhone IMO, sells so well that VZ has trouble keeping them in stock.
That being said, Apple and Google are the two best large companies in tech these days, and I'm looking forward to the battle - should be lots of great stuff for all of us.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
If we geeks truly had any say, then http://openmoko.org/ would be the winning solution and not these products that get all the press because they have big corporate names and lots of advertising dollars behind them. :)
One of the problems with the iphone is that you operate 90% of the capabilities without having to read any sort of manual. When you want to do the other 10% of things (like adding a contact during a call, for instance) you might need to read the iPhone User's Guide. I know when I first got my phone, I had to look up how to turn it off. Everything else, is super easy and super intuitive.
Just because a user can figure out 90% of the stuff, doesn't mean that the other 10% are limitations.
1. No there will be a zillion apps for Android, but most will be minor variations of one another. Pretty much like all the things that come with a Linux distro. Or worse, like all the "apps" from any widget scene. How many freaking version of a weather widget, UPS tracking, or gmail checker does one need? Just because one develops one for oneself as a learning tool does not mean it needs to be published. Some would claim that competition is good - but the plethora of availability will just be confusion. 2. After people install tons of apps and have them all multitasking that is a very good possibility. 3. Hmm - no disagreement there. 4. Only linux geeks will hang out in these. How many of those are on /.?
5. That is still a high number - I do not think that this is a deterrent.
6. No harder than current linux apps.
I like the idea of Android. But I beleive in the end only IT professionals will end up finding good use for this platform. Would I get one? Sure. I currently use an iPod touch, and a dedicated separate phone. Maybe when my phone contract is up ( almost 2 years) there will be some clarity in the market as to Androids capabilities, and some stability on this platform.
In the mean time we will be developing apps of the touch for internal business use. My main developer has become to appreciate the Apple SDK for both OS X and now the touch platform.
I still am stuck in Delphi development, trying to pick up python. My hope is that Apple will develop a python interpreter and library to interface with the API, but I won't be devastated if they do not.
We will also check out the Android platform when it comes out, and it may turn out to be useful as well. But until we see the hardware and development environments it obviously won't impact us. I do suspect that a lower price than the iphone/touch may provide a corporate incentive for some internal development.
Uh..that's because battery technology hasn't kept up. Higher CPU speed and higher display require more battery power to keep running. I have a N82, with a dual core ARM 333 MHz CPU and dedicated OpenGL graphics, Wifi, 5 mp camera with flash, and assisted GPS, running on a 1050 mAh Li-Ion battery that lasts for about 2 days of heavy use before requiring a recharge.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Well, my Dell xv50 from 2004, with 624MHz ARM, wi-fi, assisted GPS, CF slot, SD slot, etc has everything you listed except for the camera, which can be offset with the VGA display vs your QVGA. Mine lasts ~2 days with heavy use too.
So, how much is it better?
It has been at least 3 yrs between your model and mine and where is the improvement? It's 2 Moore cycles
Moore's Law may be an observation, but has held true for the semiconductor industry when there is competition. Since Intel held a monopoly in the ARM market, it has not improved the tech. Much as how Moore's Law slowed down for desktop and notebook in late 90's until AMD gave Intel a thrashing. The main difference from desktop to mobile device is that there is much less competition because all the distributers are monopolies that just want to race to the bottom
Apps demand the processing power, but with limited selection of CPU, apps have to bend over backwards to limit itself. Portable devices need an AMD to do something to kickstart the competition.
So, my original statement stands, mobile convergent devices will still be crap until we at LEAST break the GHz barrier.