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Sprint Unveils HTC Evo 4G Super Phone
adeelarshad82 writes "Sprint dropped a bombshell on the CTIA Wireless trade show by unveiling the most powerful Google Android smartphone ever seen in the USA, the WiMAX-powered Evo 4G. The phone runs Android 2.1 on a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8650 chipset along with a helpful 1GB of built-in memory and 512MB of RAM, which is assisted by a MicroSD slot supporting up to 32GB cards. It swaps between EVDO Rev. A, WiMAX and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g on demand. The phone is dominated by a 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 65,000-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel unit on the front. The camera also records 720p, high-def video, which it can play through an HDMI out jack on the bottom. The Evo 4G weighs 170g and measures 120.5 mm by 67 mm by 13 mm. It's expected to hit the market in the summer."
Also, their marketing director said "philosophically, we've been very aggressive about mobile broadband." Besides being "philosophically aggressive"... will it be able to make coffee as well?
Mostly harmless.
"It swaps between EVDO Rev. A, WiMAX and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g on demand"
Does this apply to calls as well as data? If so it is even more awesome than I originally thought.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A phone that records 720p video and plays it out via an HDMI jack? WHY?
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Looks really cool and feature packed, but I wonder if it will last a resonable amount of time on a single charge? If you ask me only in the last year or so have 3G radios become efficient enough to be usefull daylong in something like a phone. If WiMax/"4G" is like early 3G headsets it will likely last an unreasonably short amount of time on a charge. But hey if I'm wrong sign me up!
4G only means it will not work at all on the majority of the existing network.
Still neat if you are on a part of the network that will support the video calls/wave of the future.
Estimated battery life: The amount of time it takes YouTube to load that shiny new HDMI video for you.
How bout battery life? It's great having all that power, but if it only stays running 6 hours between charges it's just a desk brick. No mention of multi-touch/tasking? itards will be whining for that if you're trying to horn into the apple market.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
That should read "1 GB of storage built-in and 512MB of RAM", shouldn't it?
Caveat Utilitor
I, for one, welcome our new HD Video Recording, 720p over HDMI, kick stand in the back, 4+" screen, snapdragon processor having, 4G blazing, media center staple overlords.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
From the article - "The Evo 4G will swap between 3G and WiMAX for data depending on what's available; it will make all voice calls over Sprint's CDMA 1X network."
The expected battery life is 20 minutes of standby or 5 minutes of talk. A replacement high-capacity battery adds 104g to the weight of the unit, 20mm to the depth, and extends standby time to 68 minutes and talk time to over 10 minutes.
to put it simply, it's a game changer for Sprint.
Sorry, this is an advertisement. You may like said advertisement, but that doesn't mean it isn't one.
Sent from your iPad.
1. What is the battery life.
2. What is the price.
I'm slightly concerned that this will be like those Japanese or European phones that have a huge laundry list of features, but skimp out on basic usability and essentials like good radio paths and battery life; plus half of the features don't work properly (camera has a lot of pixels, but a worthless lens; screen is dim or difficult to read; interface requires 15 button presses to do anything; front camera can't be used for teleconferencing because the carrier disabled that feature, etc...). There's a definite concern that this will be priced at the "enthusiast" level as well, meaning almost nobody can afford it or the plan required to drive it.
The ball is in your court Sprint. What are you going to do with it?
I read the internet for the articles.
In many confidence games, the 'con man' will use 'shills' or assistants who pretend to be independently interested in the swindle or scam. In modern marketing, it is fairly common for companies to identify natural leaders and people with influence, and offer to pay them to fake spontaneous endorsement of the product. Given those facts, any news or commentary relating to commercially available products must be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
and conversely, just because you don't like the news article about a gadget doesn't make it an advertisement.
Everybody questioning about its battery life in here, listen, we have provided a mobile battery charger just keep shaking it will charge.
FTA:
"It works as a Wi-Fi hotspot, supporting up to 8 devices;"
Wow! That's insane, considering that laptop wireless sharing is only now just becoming mainstream.
How many people will buy this phone, and ditch dsl, cable, etc? Smaller than any dsl or cable box, uses less power too I'd bet.
Perhaps you'll find more utility in the tools that you purchase if you stop thinking about them in terms of what a marketer told you and what its potential actually is.
Too bad there's no hardware keyboard on this beast. I can't stand using touchscreen keyboards. Hopefully this isn't becoming the norm.
Plenty of geeks have no interest in gadgets or uninteresting webcomics.
No it's not. If you'd like a mobile telephone I suggest a less capable model such as any of the cheaper motorola models, such as the i776. If you are looking for a PDA or mobile media center which happens to also have cellphone capabilities then this is probably for you.
Slower than a Cray. Less storage than a ZFS SAN. Lame.
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That's true, but regardless of whether or not this is meant as advertising, the introduction of a phone like this into the US market is also certainly newsworthy. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
silly, no one talks on the phone anymore. you use a telephone to read email, twitter, facebook and the rest of the internets
We aren't calling Dell's latest machines "super computers" either, so there's really no need to name new phones with up-to-date specs "super phones". It's technology. New devices with faster hardware and more features are going to come out. Every new phone will be a "super phone", because that's how the market works. This phone will be deprecated in a year or so, just like every other IT toy.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Let me clarify the situation for you: every single story on slashdot can be qualified as advertisement. Every. Single. One. That story about WoW reaching 10M+ players? Advertisement for Blizzard. That story about some guy building a bender robot? Advertising for said guy. That story about a fork in the Linux kernel? Advertising for Linux.
Pointing out that something getting front-page billing on Slashdot is good advertisement for said something is like pointing out the Sun is shining on the Earth: true, but not really useful information. Now, if you would have evidence that Sprint paid CmdrTaco to run this story, this would be an entirely different proposition. However, until you do, you're little more than a blowhard who likes playing Captain Obvious.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
this is a telephone. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate verbal communication
Not any more. These devices are largely small(ish) wireless computers with touch-screen interfaces. I don't have an iLeash, but my friends who do appear to use them as 'computers' much more than they use them for verbal communications. Sure, they allow for verbal comms, but it's only one of many features.
Its ancestors were phones. This thing is more evolved.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I've got a Nexus One that has half the app ram size of this phone and I've installed dozens of apps and only used a fraction of the available space. Yes, the iPhone ships with "local storage" but then you are limited to only that storage. Want more space? GET A NEW PHONE! Fuck that. As for their "nice SDK", it's only "nice" if you own a Mac and are happy with their arbitrary and unfair approval process. Come up with an app that even remotely threatens Apple's bottom line in any way, and you are out on your ass. Fuck Apple, and fuck the iPhone.
Sounds like every geeks wet dream. And yet I can't help but think to myself ... this is a telephone. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate verbal communication.
That's where you're wrong. None of these smart phones are telephones anymore. They are computers (handheld and less powerful computers than our desktops, but computers nonetheless) that HAPPEN to make telephone calls. Honestly, phone calls are the thing I do the least on my Droid. I'm on travel quite a bit and being able to get to my e-mails, have a GPS to help me find the locations of my hotels and meetings, and also be able to enjoy some entertainment on flights has been awesome.
So, my advice (not that you asked for it) is to think about the phone as another integration into an "always on, always connected" world. Things are going to keep moving in that direction. For example, I am looking forward to my refrigerator being connected to the internet, being able to look at a list of items that I want to keep in stock, noticing when I'm running out of those items, and then sending a message to my local grocery store which will bring by the groceries for me and then bill it automatically. Years down the road, but that type of convenience would be awesome.
Then, exactly, just what are those people doing driving around with the phones plastered to their ears? Using their earlobes to keyboard? Taking pictures of their ear rings for some twisted facebook site? Twittering the voices inside their skulls?
It's pretty scary in my universe. God help me to stay away from yours....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sir, that hasn't been the primary purpose of these machines for years.
T-Mobile released the HTC HD2 today.
Here is a superficial comparison of the Evo to the HD2.
For Windows Mobile fans like me who are not happy with the the direction Microsoft is going with WF7, the HD2 seems to be the last Hurrah for Windows Mobile 6.x series before we are forced to walk the plank and jump to another platform.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
At the least, the Instinct HD should have been Android-based. Thankfully, I'm eligible for a new phone in October, the HTC Evo is at the top of my list.
Yes, someone at Sprint finally woke up and realized they have a range full of boring-ass phones, and even the Palm Pre couldn't save them. Glad to see Sprint has finally joined the 21st century with this phone. I'll still never switch back to them though :P
moox. for a new generation.
Who cares? This is awesome hardware! I mean large high resolution screen while still pocketeable, WiMAX, HDMI video out, microUSB, MicroSD, two cameras and Android! It's fantastic. This is IMO more major news than the iPad. No wonder Apple is suing HTC. Their current hardware cannot compete!
I heard that many of the new android based phones last less than couple hours. I am curious how much time you can use/keep it in stand by keeping in mind that has a nicer cpu/screen.
I chuckled when I saw someone had added that tag. That was my reaction too.
And I never said it wasn't newsworthy in it's own right. Personally, I couldn't care less about this phone or mobile connectivity in general. But I understand this new phone will give some geeks a stiffy, and that's fine too. If you enjoy that sort of thing you and your fellow enthusiasts can circle-jerk over this techno-fetish item all you like. But the fellow next to you, bubbling and gushing his hot man-phone love all over your ears, may in fact be a paid professional. Which may make it all the hotter for you, I'm not really sure how these things work.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate verbal communication.
Which reminds me -- why don't we have picturephones yet? We were supposed to have them in 2001, weren't we? Every sci-fi flic from the original Star Trek to Blade Runner to Total Recall has them. The technology is here; you can use a computer as a picture phone, but you can't use a phone as a picture phone, even though a phone has a vidio screen and a camera. Why?
Free Martian Whores!
The phone runs Android 2.1 on a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8650 chipset along with a helpful 1GB of built-in memory and 512MB of RAM, which is assisted by a MicroSD slot supporting up to 32GB cards.
OK, so this phone has more jam then my wife's and I's two celeron laptops, and is just about as powerful as my Sempron desktop. Why have a computer?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
How are Android apps crippled?
What the summary DOESN'T tell you is that on the internal battery talk time is 12 minutes. There is an optional extended battery available from the third parties, such as Optima, Diehard, EverStart, Autolite, etc. ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It is nice to see phones that are adding front cameras. Asian phones have had this for years allowing for video chatting with the handset.
Sorry, but it's not. At least not to a lot of us. Maybe it is to you, but then why would you even care about this device enough to post your derision at the enhanced features?
I carry a Blackberry. I do use it for phone calls. Very, very rarely. I probably make about 3-4 calls a week on it, and it's my only telephone.
I also use it for emails, Gmail, calendar, text messaging, instant messenger, contact manager, surfing the web, reading news on RSS, listening to music, taking photos and videos, Geocaching, driving directions, checking traffic, making small edits to Word and Excel documents, tethering my laptop to it for production support issues, recording voice notes, a flashlight, and probably a few other things that aren't coming to mind at the moment. If it had a pair of pliers and a good blade, I could consolidate to one thing on my belt.
It's not a telephone, it's a smartphone. It's primary purpose is no longer verbal communication. That is one of its functions. For me, frankly, voice is not one of the more important features on my smartphone. But it is useful to have a phone from time to time.
I do understand that there is a significant segment of the population that just wants a phone without all the gadgets. Great! Buy one.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I tried that, but then Apple said I could only use it the way they marketed it and I wasn't allowed to consider the potential.
He is a known iphone fanboi. Just ignore.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of wireless in this country. The iPhone 3G was the phone to own. Then the other guy came out with the HTC Hero. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the iPhone 3Gs. That's 3G speeds and a fucking compass. For orienteering. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to 4G. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling the 3G and a fucking compass. Orienteering or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to 5G.
They talk about up to 12 Mb/sec download?!? That is not 4G speed, it's 3G. Here is a test of a real 4G network in Stockholm. They get download speeds of 90 Mb/sec. And yes you can buy your 4G modem today.
More info: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idg.se%2F2.1085%2F1.305135%2Fforsta-testet-telia-4g
Says the twit who's never even seen the object in person. But then you're probably just the kind of clueless fanboi who'd carry a backpack with a car battery in it to power this thing!
If you don't care about mobile connectivity, fine. No problem. However, there are those of us who are very interested in the topic. As Slashdot is a site promoting "News For Nerds," chances are that there are quite a number of people who are interested in many different types of technology, including mobile and micro technologies.
Just because you don't enjoy it, or appreciate it, doesn't mean you need to come in here just to troll.
I can't fathom what must be going through your head that would even cause you to post something like this. Seriously.
Install a video messaging app on this thing and it is a picture phone. It's got a front facing camera specifically for that.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Because, usually, the camera is on the opposite side of the phone from the screen. This is one of the few devices we'll have gotten over here that has both regular camera and front facing camera. I remember one old phone that had a camera that you could rotate back and forth (maybe some old samsung?), and then there was the unlocked GSM Touch Pro that had a front facing camera, but it's definitely not a COMMON feature over here yet.
Sounds like every geeks wet dream. And yet I can't help but think to myself ... this is a <i>telephone</i>. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate <i>verbal communication</i>.</p></quote>
You must be new here. - Tim
Unlike me, who can't even edit the quote tags correctly. - Tim
Android would be a lot better if Google hadn't crippled the app capability so you are forced to do everything online
How are Android apps crippled?
The previous poster is talking about the inability of Android to run apps stored anywhere but the internal memory, significantly limiting devices like this one, with significant storage capacity, because that capacity cannot be easily used to store applications, just data. Some game makers, for example, have said they cannot port to most android phones because their games are larger than the internal storage.
Hopefully Google will be able to resolve this issue going forward and some app developers are already working around it by installing data packages for their apps to Flash and referencing them from within their application. It's not a good solution, but it helps some.
Will it support 3G bands or just 4G?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
The prices that is, on other phones. But they are typically very very very slow to do that. I doubt the Google phones they have now will come down in price for a year.
I'd assume that the extra low-res camera on the front of the phone is intended to make this sort of use possible. Why else have it?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
"All you read and wear or see and hear on [the internet] is a product begging for your fatass dirty dollar" -- Tool
Here is the coverage info for their 4G service.
http://www.nextel.com/en/stores/popups/4G_coverage_popup.shtml
Thankfully I live near Baltimore.
720p30 or 720p60?
(or 720p 30/1.001 720p 60/1.001 ? :)
i still get headache from using any mobile phone, news would be when a phone can use light instead of radiowaves!!
every single story on slashdot can be qualified as advertisement. Every. Single. One.
So by that logic, a story about a congressional hearing is an advertisement for that hearing? A story about someone's rights being violated or a major patent lawsuit is an advertisement? Wiktionary says that an advertisement is "A commercial solicitation designed to sell some commodity, service or similar." That sounds a lot like this story, but nothing at all like a quote from Torvalds or a move by the FCC, which is the kind of info /. made it's name on.
That said, you are actually more and more right every day, in the sense that slashdot has become a big target for viral marketing, which is probably how this story got posted. If one thinks of slashdot as a bulletin board, one forgets that there are editors. If one looks at it as a news aggregator, one gets a little closer to the truth, but since news in general becomes more and more viral every day, it's even hard to say that much. Basically its a sounding board for whatever the editors think is cool. Apparently they think this phone is cool. I think they are spending too much time on this kind of crap and ignoring other, more important stories. But that's just my opinion...
Uh, we do? My last two phones have supported video calling. It costs the same as a voice call on the same network, but 50p/minute for other networks. I've never actually used it, because it's a terrible idea. It removes the portable aspect of your phone, by forcing you to look at the phone while you use it. That's not a problem while you're at home, but in that case just use any of the videoconferencing apps that are available; most modern IM platforms support it out of the box.
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Almost every 3G phone has a front-facing camera. At least Nokia and Sony-Ericsson seem to do that. In fact it's hard to think of a phone that doesn't have video call capabilities over the past 3-4 years, except for phones made by or for Americans.
So by that logic, a story about a congressional hearing is an advertisement for that hearing?
Of course.
A story about someone's rights being violated or a major patent lawsuit is an advertisement?
It's an ad for the person who claims their rights were violated, or an ad for a specific side of the lawsuit, or for whatever news site first broke the story.
Everything can be interpreted as an ad. Which is why I requested some information as for the commercial aspect of the transaction, which is of course missing. Which means that this "advertisement" scream is nothing but conjecture, and utterly pointless.
That sounds a lot like this story, but nothing at all like a quote from Torvalds or a move by the FCC, which is the kind of info /. made it's name on.
Really? You must be new here. Slashdot built its reputation on being a news aggregator focused on nerdy interests - lego, 3D accelerators, game releases, weird mods, linux releases... notice a trend here? Yeah, it's all advertising a product, a service, or something cool. If cool 4G phones would have been out 10 years ago, you could bet your ass it would have been on slashdot at some point (maybe even twice).
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There is money connected to everything, and your comments apply to everything that has ever interested anyone.
is a laser pico projector http://microvision.com/
... imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Bandwidth, form factory, and battery life.
This phone has 4G AND a front facing camera. That has solved two of the three challanges. Depending on the efficiency of the 4G chipset they may have solved all three. We won't know until this summer.
I believe you would be very directly referring to The Submarine. Always a good article to read when this subject comes up.
Absolutely, and so skepticism is advised in everything. Zapotec's response to Em Emalb's original comment indicates a lack of familiarity with this concept.
Honestly, it sounds like a nice phone with some amazing features, but sometimes, I just can't resist trolling techno-fetishists.
Oh, and your favorite band sucks, too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Oh, and your favorite band sucks, too.
Everything I like sucks, that's why I like it. And that's why I use Microsoft Office (TM)!
*goes looking for his paycheque*
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
...any reason to get a Pre anymore?
Sounds like every geeks wet dream. And yet I can't help but think to myself ... this is a telephone. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate verbal communication.
today I had a 50 minute journey home. The first 20 involve standing on a train.
The mobile device I carry allowed me to listen to music, read two emails, send one, then play a little game.
I then got a seat, continued listening to music, checked a new email, updated my calendar, then started to read /.
After 40 minutes, the music paused, and the screen I was looking at told me my wife was ringing. I answered the phone, no need to remove headphones, then went back to slashdot to write this reply.
Smart phones, with a decent sized screen, and a real webbrowser, are first and formost ultra portable computers. The phone is an addon. Most mornings I break out the laptop and vim or eclipse to do some serious work, but to combine an mp3 player, phone, and javascript capable web browser, takes the device way beyond phone. I hardly use a phone, email and web though...
You've got to remember that not all advertising is bad.
There is a hypothetical space for advertising to teach us about a decent product we would already have bought, had we known about it.
Not that that's normally the case. I'm just saying, it's a possibility.
You took him serious when he said no one uses a phone for talking?
I am fairly certain he was being humorous. It is called a joke :)
Your universe does indeed sound scary.
I just went through the whole compare carriers, phones, coverage, plans, etc. and ended up buying a Moment. Now you have to come out with this, when I'm 2 years away from being eligible for a new contract (and a subsidized phone).
Unless I win the lottery (or sell a few houses to somebody who did) there's no way I'm going to be able to afford paying cash for this sucker.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Yes, it's just a phone..
But it is a very capable one, that could offer a LOT of households (especially by end of year) a way to reduce their bills for internet (via the mifi) if they are already a Sprint consumer in a large market.
Beyond that it really is a nice piece of tech worthy of some praise.. not only does it take the antiquated sprint market to the forefront for current us phone tech (for now), but it is running Android, offers a front facing cam (first for a flagship mainstream phone in our market), and HD every which way..
This is supposed to be a geek site, this is a geek's dream... when the hell did you all get so damn jaded?
At least it's an actual product announcement, and not based on rumour or a blog post, like we get for one particular company.
And one article isn't an advertisement. It's advertising when we get stories every blimmin day about it - like a certain phone...
Actually the OP was talking about Google services not Android, if you want to use Google services you need to have most things online as only a few Google programs have an off-line cache (Gmail). You have a choice on whether you want to use Google services or not on Android, the same as you have a choice about everything on Android (Don't like Browser, there's Dolphin and Opera, don't like the standard email client, get a new one, don't like the telco/manufacturer OS, use a community ROM).
Now internal storage is only required for the executable, libraries, data files, art assets and many other things can all be stored on the SD card, NESoid and other emulators run ROM's from the SD card. There is no problem with porting games to Android, you just have to do it properly rather then balling everything up and putting a "supports Android" sticker on the box. This IMHO is a good thing as it helps to prevent the Marketplace being flooded by bad ports of barely functional Iphone software.
Besides this, give it time 1) Android phones are steadily increasing internal Flash (my Dream had 256M, my Milestone has 512M, this phone has 1GB) and 2) Apps to SD programs are available for rooted phones and are integrated into many community ROM's so it's only a matter of time before this functionality is stable enough to make it into the official AOSP code.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Actually the OP was talking about Google services not Android...
They may have alluded to that, but the title was about only having 5 apps, a common oversimplification of the complaint with regard to the memory issue.
There is no problem with porting games to Android, you just have to do it properly rather then balling everything up and putting a "supports Android" sticker on the box.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem. As I said, the issue is not insurmountable, but it's piss poor engineering to scatter bits of your application across multiple volumes and being forced to do so truly sucks. Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
Note, I'm impartial here, I don't own either or really care. I was just trying to help people understand the topic.
Odd, I could say the same thing about your comment.
So enforcing uniform standards is a bad thing? Every OS and it's dog has a recommended way of doing things which always scatters things across the file system. Windows recommends most files go into %SystemDrive%\Program Files\ while user files go into %userProfiles%\Dcuments\my but certain types of files (.dll comes to mind) must be stored in certain locations like %SystemDrive%\Windows\System32. Whilst MS don't enforce most of this outside any MS sponsored development program (Games For Windows (not GFW Live), MS ISV partners) it is highly recommended. Linux and OSX have similar systems.
/SDCard/ /etc/ are on the same drive despite being different physical volumes, it's the OS that handles that.
With Android, they've built a minimum specification, if you expect your program to work on any android phone you develop for this specification. If anything, this seems like good engineering for a highly scalable solution, a program could work on any phone from the HTC Dream to the Nexus One or Samsung Galaxy (8 GB of internal storage). You aren't forced to follow the Android specification or use /SDCard/ to store your large datasets but it will affect the popularity and usability of your program.
Remember that Android is based on Linux, from the programs perspective
This I think is where you misunderstood me. You can distribute as a single package but what you should be doing is creating a proper install for Android rather then just dumping it wherever (I.E. putting your large art assets into /SDCard/YourGame). This has several critical advantages as it prevents crud from gathering in odd places in the OS taking up room when the application is uninstalled, making it easier for the OS to manage application files and stopping bad applications from replacing important file or interfering with another applications files.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
are you also implying PCmag features nothing but advertisements?
I wish there were a way to mod parent up to some sort of sticky / FAQ status.
Yes, of course any sort of geek news is going to be filled with notices of high tech product releases, etc.. It shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it did.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem.
Odd, I could say the same thing about your comment.
You seem emotionally invested in this discussion. Your comment doesn't even make any sense. I didn't make excuses for any engineering flaw in anything because I was not defending any engineering, just pointing out a well known problem.
So enforcing uniform standards is a bad thing?
This is a straw man argument.
Every OS and it's dog has a recommended way of doing things which always scatters things across the file system.
That is the case with legacy OS's and versions of some OS's but it is not good engineering. OS X, for example, stores entire apps in a single, special folder. The only thing outside that folder are shared frameworks and config files (which are cascading and needed for upgrading and remote applications. One of the hardest parts of using SE Linux is that Linux application in general don't have a simple location all the time, so allowing them to modify their own files but not anything else can take significant expertise.
What Google has done in this case is introduce a limitation that exacerbates that problem even more.
Linux and OSX have similar systems.
You clearly aren't familiar with OS X and some Linux variants that have been more recently engineered to have more sane practices.
Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
This I think is where you misunderstood me. You can distribute as a single package but what you should be doing is creating a proper install for Android rather then just dumping it wherever (I.E. putting your large art assets into /SDCard/YourGame).
Applications should be distributed as single bundles and stored as single bundles. This makes it much much easier to transfer applications, run applications remotely, install and uninstall applications cleanly, upgrade applications cleanly, restrict applications for security purposes, and backup applications. Android not only did not provide a cleaner and more compact installation that the average Linux distro, but actually made the install messier with limitations on where apps can be run from, resulting in applications being spread out more. Now you can have applications fail to run if either of two storage types fails.
It's a flaw and Google knows it's a flaw and people are working on fixing the flaw. I don't see how anyone can rationally conclude otherwise.
They've had front-facing cameras and video conferencing technology in Japan for years, but it just never took off like the wireless companies thought it would. Instead, to their complete surprise, texting became the next big thing.
Geez, have a chip on your shoulder much? Just because you're the janitor at some high tech place and can't afford any gadgets, doesn't mean that those of us with disposable income can't have a wide range of interests. Considering we're on /. it's hardly surprising that many people are interested in this phone.
Personally, I am not right now, but I do think that it looks like a great device for someone that needs a portable computer with phone capabilities. I'm not going to get all whiny and accuse everyone else of sexual fetishism just because I'm jealous.
Well, nobody wants to talk to a live streaming video of their friend's ear wax.
Trolled, days later. Awesome.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Same here, which is why I returned it within 30 days and waited for the Droid to come out. Been perfectly happy with that since.