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."

Comments

Re:and a million things to hate about it

[Zigurd]

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

Re:and a million things to hate about it

[binarylarry]

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.