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Ten Features To Love About Android 1.5
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Google officially announced the Android 1.5 update, dubbed 'cupcake.' The new software is apparently ready to roll out to Android-powered devices beginning tomorrow. Make no mistake, Android 1.5 is a major upgrade — they could have called it 2.0. The software brings a host of new capabilities, some of which can't be found on rival mobile platforms, including video recording and sharing."
Insightful? LOL. There was a time when there were more applications for Macintosh. From 1986 until 1990, Windows was irrelevant. Mac was the future.... Then Windows 3.x happened. History is repeating itself in front of our very eyes.
Flash forward to now. Apple has met it's match. And unlike with windows where Apple faced an cheaper, inferior product that was just barely good enough (Windows 3.x), Apple is facing a product that is it's equal in Android (yes, it's that good). As Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and others bring more Android hardware to market and Verizon, Sprint and other carriers offer Android to theri customers, the tide will turn quickly on software development as well.
-- $G
The parent makes some good points
I own an HTC Dream (called TMobile G1 in the US). My first phone bill after I bought the phone was $200 more than usual. It is now dropped because I changed my plan to allow for more mobile data, but buying the phone to start with, I had no idea that when I first turned it on it would start downloading a crap load of my gmail. It took me a little bit to figure out how to get the data usage down.
I really like the phone, but I wish there was clearer pre-sales on how much data it was going to use and how to make it cheaper to operate. I also would like a "turn data off - just be a phone" mode. Also the fact that it's advertised as having bluetooth but still - even with cupcake - can't do bluetooth file transfer is just stupid.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Not only is the application structure and lifecycle unique and structured around a unique UI flow, Android has unique UI classes in an otherwise mostly standard Java runtime, it uses binder for inter-process communication, it has a unique graphics stack relative to most other Linux systems, and it makes it difficult to put programs other than those written to the Android programming model on the screen, among other differences relative to most Linux-based systems.
But it has already overtaken the Nokia 8xx Web pads, which use Hildon, in user acceptance. Google gambled on establishing an entirely different application layer in the userland for Android and appears to have succeeded.
Android answers the question: "What if Linux had a userland based on a managed language runtime and every application used the same UI classes (and what if a company with sufficient resourced to do it right did it)?"
If Android perplexes you, try this:
http://www.amazon.com/Android-Application-Development-Programming-Google/dp/0596521472
I wrote parts of this stuff
Actually, nothing prevents you from writing applications with native code.
In fact, parts of the SDK explicitly allow this.
However, it's generally bad idea because Android runs on a variety of hardware platforms, making native code "fun" to deal with in the future. I just hope they add proper JIT at some point, so Android's performance isn't fucking atrocious like it is now.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
There is no native code (C/C++) SDK for it last time I've checked, that was about a half year ago. That is a show stopper for lot of people.
I'm not sure who, since on Android devices the code produced is highly performant.
You can do games on Android after all... and as we see with the update real time video recording and encoding. I mean, just what is holding people back here?
The only people who this bothers are those still scared of Java 1.1 and Applets. Java moved past that point long, long ago.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley