Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Where Android Beats the iPhone

Posted by timothy on from the but-that's-not-how-jobs-wants-it dept.

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner provides a developer's comparison of Android and the iPhone and finds Android not only competitive but in fact a better choice than the iPhone for many developers, largely due to its Java foundation. 'While iPhone developers have found that one path to success is playing to our baser instincts (until Apple shuts them down), a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket,' Wayner writes, pointing out GScript and Remote DB as two powerful tools for developers to make rough but workable custom tools for Android. But the real gem is Java: 'The pure Java foundation of Android will be one of the biggest attractions for many businesses with Java programmers on the staff. Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours. Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone — although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers.'"

2 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Use "em" not "px" when defining the UI by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 0, Redundant

    So we ended up going back and defining everything being centered and by pixels so it looked the exact same no matter if the user had a 12.1" screen or 30" LCD TV. If they had a bigger screen/higher resolution, they just got to see more of the background gradient.

    See, the problem isn't with physically bigger screens. The problem is with screens that are of the same size, but different physical resolution.

    Let me give an example. My desktop has 24" display with 1920x1200 native resolution. My Thinkpad has the same exact resolution, but in a 15" display. Correspondingly, any elements sized in physical pixels are 1.6 times smaller on the Thinkpad. For text at 9px or so, depending on the font, that can actually mean the difference between "perfectly legible" and "borderline unreadable".

    Then, of course, there are all those new smartphones with 480x640 and 480x800 3.5" screens. That's 240dpi! Imagine how miniscule that 9px text would look on them...

  2. Re:Windows Mobile by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Then according to his logic, Windows Mobile is better than Android and iPhone combined, because not only can it run Java apps, but you can author software for it in practically any mainstream programming language.

    I wouldn't be surprised if WinMo is actually the best platform, strictly from developer's perspective.