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Running Google Android On iPhone Clones
wooby writes "With the release of Android's source code, we may see iPhone and Nokia clone phones of Chinese origin capable of running Google Android. These phones, often available for less than $200 without a contract, are available on DealExtreme and elsewhere. But the software running on them is universally awful. Is the clone phone market a vast, nascent install-base for Android, and part of Google's end game? According to Google's Dave Bort, 'One of our goals would be, just to get Android all over the place' [YouTube link]."
I for one welcome our new cheap, Google-powered, android overlords.
It worked for MS-DOS. Just ask Microsoft. ;)
My blog
The problem comes when you want to call certain countries, like Italy. Google is working with the nefarious Italians to make their fiefdom a virtual black hole for wireless service. This allows Italians to manufacture their nefarious ices in slave labor camps for cell phone users like you and me. The italians must be stopped and Google must allow us to visit the shoe-shaped Asian country! I have a modems.
Google would like to get your personal information all over the place.
Can it drive my car like james bond's phone? Or better yet, Dr. Horrible's?
In days of old, when cell phones made calls,
and contracts deprived all of gold,
there came a metal man who lived in a mobile,
he promised free ring tones, no contracts, and
a platform by, of, and for the people,
but alas the sticker said "Made in China",
and it filled their hearts with lead... I mean, dread. Yeah.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
because i really hate the iphone os.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
No, my son is also named Bort.
the CECT P168C has a feature I cant fin in any other phone. Dual SIM cars support. I could have my work phone sim and my personal phone sim in one phone and reduce pocket clutter. I wold KILL for this feature but the morosn that make most american phones refuse to deliver this feature.
Hell the few Nokia's that did support it were Europe/asia only.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1) Submit "story" to Slashdot with affiliate sales link cleverly embedded inside.
2) Profit!
When my contract expires (early next year), I'll be in the market for a new phone and plan. This time around, the prepaid plans I've been seeing might actually be a better deal than what I've been paying.
The trouble is, prepaid phones seem pretty crappy on average. I have a Motorola Razr which I'd likely keep, but sadly it's CDMA (Verizon) so I can't stick a prepaid SIM into it. At the same time, I wouldn't mind ditching my separate mp3 player and having a phone capable of using the wifi I have available in many places. That all points to "smartphones", which can be really expensive without a 2 year plan.
Buying an unlocked phone with a decent OS for $200 and buying some cheap flash might be a good solution. Or, if the hardware sucks and the OS is poorly adapted to it, it might be a frustrating experience. Time will tell, but I'm not anxious to become an early adopter here.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Where is the news? Android is also available on the commercially available phones running Windows Mobile, eg HTC Kaiser.
I think Google is unfortunately in a precarious position with Android if it's primary niche becomes crapware-filled knockoff phones or installed on very uninspired and underpowered hardware. They are in the same boat as MS, where a large majority of criticism of the platform from the average consumer is due to OEM modification, pre-loading, and crappy hardware support (via 3rd party drivers).
Linux thrived in a hobbist environment eventually to the point of corprate adoption, which takes both time, a community, and a willingness to run at a loss for a long time. The real key to success is developers whose goal was a OS that was secure, stable and efficent on legacy hardware, and somewhat "peer reviewed". For Android, the average developer is going to produce $3-$5 applets on their own for consumers who have no sense of style or consistency (UI standard). I cringe; personally when I see applications for my iPhone that have no forethought and look like bastard stepchildren compared to my other apps who follow the UI standards. For a consumer good, it needs to be "excellent" (or "better" than the competition) and not only that, downright "sexy" before it hits the masses or it is going be DOA or lackluster at best.
I fear the same methodology that made Linux "proper" great, will make Andriod a cheap OS for cheap phones developed on by bad developers for companies trying to squeeze every last cent of profit out of a "consumer good" like a toaster or DVR. That being said, I hope I am wrong.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
But the software running on them is universally awful. Is the clone phone market a vast, nascent install-base for Android, and part of Google's end game?
What, a parallel to the PC/PC-compatible watershed? God, I hope so. The next step is getting them to change the billing rates for wireless, they're killing us.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Basically, you're saying that with Android, a manufacturer wouldn't really even need the support of a big brand of cellphones - since the big brands use China for fabrication, but then pocket some of the money.
So Chinese fabs could just hire a couple of engineers to quickly make clones of devices designed by experts, and there would be a ready-made, free software for those devices. I like it! But it must be a scary thought for companies like Nokia, Motorola, RIM and Apple. Maybe it will drive some hesitation about the use of Android, because everyone will know that knockoffs will work pretty much identically to an Android phone.
Potentially, the big winners here could be the carriers, who could just brand the cheaper hardware.
an army of clones running android, rather than an army of android clones!
Begun, the Clone War has.
For what it's worth, the DealExtreme link in the summary includes an embedded affiliate code. I appreciate informative links as much as the next guy, but this looks like an attempt to cash in on a /. post.
I submit that this is 80's PC history repeating itself (ok, maybe it's just rhyming). Again, with Apple pushing a proprietary, tightly controlled hardware/software package and another pushing only the software side (this time it's Google, not MS).
If history is any indication, the open standard will win... these "clones" are an indication of that. Their initial quality will be awful, but if there's a market, quality will improve.
Of course, there are differences and nothing is guaranteed, but the similarities are too striking to ignore.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
...then why the hell did you buy one? iPhone isn't made for people who want to tinker, its made for my mom and dad. This is like buying a minivan and then bemoaning that you can't start supercharge it to 400hp.
the problem with an iphone clone is there's no keyboard. and theres no software keyboard in android yet. once thats added, I'm sure this will happen
are there actually tools available to put android on these phones or is this just a site pimp?
lose != loose
Most of these phones have a 30 - 60Mhz ARM core with 4-8megs of RAM. No Nucleus based phone is going to run Android anytime soon. The ones that run Windows Mobile might, but they're far from what I'd call cheap.
...and on November 29th, 2008, Android became self-aware...
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
~1982
With Microsoft's freedom to licence MS-DOS, we may soon see IBM-PC clones of Texas origin capable of running MS-DOS...
Yeah, that aside, this could definitely be relevant. In general, the whole genre of surprisingly cheap offbrand stuff from China offers decent hardware quality(in many cases the same as the expensive branded stuff, since it is the same); but abysmal software and support, buggy firmware, anonymous driver disks that support 50-odd products(not including the one you bought), untranslated or poorly translated interfaces, etc. For me, this has generally meant that such hardware is a good deal for things that have standardized drivers(USB HID, Mass Storage Class, etc.) or things like USB-serial adapters where there are only a few chipsets, all supported by linux. Such hardware has historically been a poor deal in situations where standard drivers aren't available. If Android can be made to be a solid OS for clonephones, that will make them markedly more attractive to me.
I doubt that joe user will ever get into buying clonephones and loading Android himself, given that joe user considers his phone to be an appliance, and would be nervous about reloading Windows; but it isn't hard to imagine the business opportunities for someone with the tech skill to import OEM clonephones by the crate, slap a pulled-together Android distro on them, and maybe supply some documentation, not unlike the small; but very much alive, niche of *nix based computer sellers.
Everyone knows once they get past 30 or 40% market penetration they will flip the "Take over and destroy the world" switch causing our phones to form skynet.
Thank you! It's nice to be recognized!
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Where is our ad supported g phone? Give me free 3G access, and I will be standing in line.
Submitted from my Mozilla browser with Ad Block set to kill...
I would like to see it on Netbooks, its probably more appropriate than a full desktop OS for such a specialised bit of hardware....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Regardless of which uber phone/OS device you chose, it'll still cost you an arm and a leg for the monthly data service rate.
Hope google make android work with htc diamond. Release me from my pain :)
I hope that Google's "end game" (really just a beginning, natch) is to force open access to wireless carrier networks. "Roaming" charges and other lockins that bundle the physical network with the data, its servers, and (in the US) even the client HW are entirely against the openness of networks that has made them extremely valuable for everyone. Until networks were opened and unbundled, they were not so much engines for growth as they were accessories. Telcos and other network operators long ago stopped innovating in any area other than lobbying, lawsuits and restrictive licensing. All the growth in value comes from people competing to offer services on open networks.
Google is one of those innovative competitors. I hope they can force Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and the few other wireless carriers to join the 21st Century's openness and growth.
--
make install -not war
The biggest thing keeping me from buying an iPhone/iTouch is that dimwitted virtual keyboard that covers half the screen. Do you cover half your screen with an indicator bar or other utility on your desktop? No. You set things up so that you can see more than two lines of type at a time in your app. So why should I want such a thing on my mobile?
My broader point is that this leverages perhaps the most offensive thing about the iPhone, the Apple-controlled app store, which has shown that they will refuse to sell anything that they, in their imperial wisdom, decide overlaps with an Apple-provided or even Apple-blessed app.
Personally, I would prefer a tablet device about one inch bigger than the iPhone in both width and length but in truth, give me a device with good hardware and the ability to actually write stuff and I'm there.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
If the chineese are smart they can make Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and go away fairly soon. If every cheap chineese phone comes with Android the applications catalogue will make them interesting all by itself. They are dumb if they dont travel down this road.
HTTP/1.1 400
[Asus' phone] will roll out sometime in the first half of 2009 (we're guessing late first half),
why wouldn't the Chinese knockoff manufacturers just sell their phones with Android installed on them in the first place? they have no real attachment to a shittier OS (unlike carrier-rebranded phones), and they'd save on both development costs and also move more product.
so it'll likely only be people using AT&T/Cingular-branded phones, or perhaps even the iPhone, who actually have to install Android on their own.
Worse case, is that if the Freerunner port comes out, I can see a bigger vendor than FIC turn out Neo-like phones for $50 with EDGE. If that happens, then the clones now have a platform to shoot for--which is what DOS did for PCs.
If people gladly replaced iPhone's simple Objective C interfaces to run Goog's insanely complex Java implementations instead, that would be something about human nature.
Than, not For (it changes the meaning)
Netbooks are used appliance-style, few applications are installed and the principle usages are PIM-style apps, web apps, surfing, media replay (classic smartphone usages)
Furthermore, the OS on a netbook is ideally tailored to run of low-powered hardware, optimised for small screens and long battery life, has to support various input methods (keyboard, mouse, stylus, touchscreen) and various communications/networking technologies - again these are the classic necessities of a Smartphone OS
Also remember that several of the presentday Smartphone OS's (Symbian, PalmOS, Windows Mobile) are directly descended from PDA operating systems. In my idealised example, a Smartphone OS migrates the other way, for the same reasons.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Interesting common heritage for both phones/platforms... http://8cproject.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/space-technology-now-appearing-in-a-pocket-near-you/
These phones do not meet regulatory standards in any country. Not to mention violation any number of patent, copyright and trademarks. Most of them are running counterfeit copies of the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 OS or some varient.
What was unsettling to me was that terrorists apparently use them because the IMEI's are fake and therefor untraceable.
It's not taking over the whole world if you don't include China. China's part of the world, too. :-/
"We need more Bort license plates in the gift shop. I repeat, we are sold out of Bort license plates."
So if you really like the hardware better - why not Jailbreak it? Then you have all the flexibility you want.
If you are really interested, go shanzhaiji.cn
The so call ShanZhaiERs were not high tech manufacturers. They depend on others to provide the necessary technology.
They are smart, willing to adapt to new tech, they are creative also.
So, if the condition are well, that will sure happen.
The kernel source is open. The are funding an open source compiler and an open-source printing system...
More evidence of the commoditisation of the handset market:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/digital-life/smart-phone/google-phone-here-by-xmas/2008/10/30/1224956198293.html
Oh please let it be so...
The China will later clone Android and finally Google itslef!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Truth hurts huh?
I love that I can air your dirty laundry then KNOW a post from you is coming to defend yourself.
It's fun to wind your loser ass up then watch you dance. Thanks for being too stupid to realize you're proving me right.
Dance for me again bitch, your mental illness won't let you stop replying, even though you'e confirming everything I said.
How does it feel to know that ANYTIME I LIKE (prior post is proof) I can make you respond?
It must suck for you to know you're my bitch.
But holy shit do I enjoy the laugh your pathetic denials give me. I mean a "cunt"? Really? Do you have anything else, cause you've overused that one.
Why don't you try something that ISN'T your generic response to people who prove you wrong?
God I love owning you, and I can't wait to see your moronic attempt to show otherwise that instead proves me right.
Post. You can't stop, so don't try.
"You say something stupid and I slap you down..."
I'll keep an eye out for that, let me know when you finally get it done.
Now dance puppet.
By the way, what kind of pathetic loser responds IN LESS THAN TEN MINUTES to say he's not obsessed with responding?
And I want to "have sex with you"? That's the worst attempt to pick me up I've ever seen, but that's no surprise, people with social skills don't post thirty times a day (like you) or respond IN LESS THAN TEN MINUTES.
God damn, you make it easy.