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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."
And people think admitting that installing "Jaunty Jackalope" is embarrasing. Cupcake.
There were (and still are) plenty of apps for the Palm devices, but ultimately its limitations did it in. In many ways it had fewer limitations that the current iPhone does as well. The iPhone has better marketing though.
I really like Android as concept. Unfortunately, in the USA the number of devices are not very appealing (the ones that are available). My carrier doesn't even have android phones. Strange, because the whole point of Android I figured was to allow manufacturers to focus on innovative cell phone designs. Maybe manufacturers will eventually make more phones with Android, but right now they are kinda lousy IMHO.
Until better hardware, the future is Palm Pre or iPhone
android and everything google does, sucks.
i hate google, gmail, youtube, etc. fuck'em
A most compelling argument, I am convinced!!
You just got troll'd!
Balmer .. is that you?
You speak London? I speak London very best.
I find it difficult to program for the Android platform, but only because it's a *very* different programming paradigm. Rather than a single entry point, as with a standard computer program, there are half a dozen entry points. This isn't really a bad thing - having a single entry point would just mean you'd have to figure out which task needs to be done at the beginning of the program.
In other words, the OS does the hard part for you.
You might hate that style of programming, but it doesn't make it bad - and it certainly doesn't mean there are a million things to hate about the Android platform.
(There may, in fact, actually be a million things to hate about Android. I don't have an Android-based device, so I wouldn't know; I've only fiddled with the emulator in the SDK. My point is simply that the programming paradigm needed to write software for the Android platform isn't one of the things you should be hating.)
Funny you mention that -- Android includes an embedded OpenGL implementation.
I upgraded from a first-gen iPhone to an Android dev unit, and am generally quite pleased. It's unfortunate that support for the Bluetooth RFCOMM profile isn't exposed to application level yet -- but one of the things about Android is that it's reasonably straightforward to build a custom version of the firmware with the "hidden" flag turned off for those classes; on the iPhone, I'd just be waiting for 3.0, and then hoping they wouldn't require any device I want to make a serial connection to from my phone to be licensed as an iPhone accessory.
Except the iPhone is the same price or cheaper than other similar phones. Every carrier charges the same for data
Really? I paid $179.00 for my G1, and my unlimited data plan is $24.95. So I don't know where you're getting your pricing information.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
http://xkcd.com/178/
Apple has met it's match... As Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and others bring more Android hardware to market and Verizon, Sprint and other carriers offer Android to their customers, the tide will turn quickly on software development as well.
People have been saying this since before the G1 came out, but the market numbers just aren't meeting these predictions yet. When are all these amazing phones going to arrive at my carrier (Verizon)? And how open is this Android thing really going to be? Google has already demonstrated that it is willing to pull certain apps that T-mobile doesn't like.
Verizon is one of the big players in the industry and last I heard, it was backing away from Android. But think of the carnage Verizon would wreak on an open-source platform. (We both know they would lock it down so hard you couldn't do anything useful with it anyway.)
AT&T is the other big player and they have a conflict of interest with their iPhone, for now at least.
Currently, Android seems a lot like Linux. It's theoretically open source, but it has limited industry support and is only available on (extremely) limited hardware. But the key difference is that the cell phone industry is dominated by the carriers, who don't seem fully sold on it yet and it's not like we can just go ahead and replace our phone's OS without voiding all sorts of warranties and support.
I do hope this changes with time though. And for what it's worth, I have emailed Verizon and urged them to adopt the OS, but I am not holding my breath.
The G-1 has all the "killer apps" I need at the moment - Accuweather, Google Maps with GPS, an IP Cam viewer so I can monitor my security cams at home and at my datacenter, SSH client, voice recorder, handy tools like data conversions, a level, a ruler and of course the Magic 8-ball. The browser works for the kind of things I need every day - my MRTG graphs, logging into my switches, routers, and remote-reboot controllers. It doesn't do SlashDot for shit though...someone needs to work on that.
Seriously, anyone judging a smart phone based solely on the camera, eye-candy, and "gaming experience" is probably 12 years old. Mine is a tool to help me earn a living first, and a toy second.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
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
Just because something has a feature the Jesusphone doesn't, doesn't mean it is mindblowing and revolutionary...
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!
parent is false....
Only Webkit, and its direct connectors run native, the wrapper around the browser runs in the DVM.
This is more due to Webkit itself not based on Java, and allows for performance.
most other apps, including the dialer do NOT use native code.
Of course, some libraries use native Code too (like the DB, etc) but you have access to the same libraries via the same API.
Have a nice day!