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Android Ported To iPhone
anethema writes "iPhone hacker planetbeing, from the iPhone Dev Team, has successfully ported the Android OS over to the iPhone. He is doing it on a first-generation iPhone, but others may be possible. The port is pretty functional, with data, voice, and many apps working, although it is running a bit sluggish and buggy at the moment. There appears to be much work left."
I can't believe it. Someone's answered my dreams!
A phone that is expensive, sucks, *and* pretentious. I thought I was going to have to go with a lame old Android phone, but man, there's hope for poseurs like me yet!
So Steve Jobs was wrong, you CAN get porn on your iPhone ;)
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
.. There's an app for thet !
rule #35. If no porn is found of it, it will ...
and finally, a Jobs-approved way to get pron on your iPhone.
(He *did* say to get Android !)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Apple's low-cost hardware with its wide range of options and standard interfaces teamed up with Android's consistent, carefully designed user interface experience, dazzling speed and frugal memory use.
Truly a marriage made in heaven.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Apple does more flashy useless bullshit on less but more expensive hardware.
FTFY.
The 3GS has 256Mb, but the 2G and 3G do only have 128Mb.
This will be nice even if only for google's turn by turn app. I love my iPhone, but I don;t love TomTom's ludicrous price for their app.
Note that the iPhone has more than just a "processor [that] can run arbitrary code" -- it has a CPU, memory, a general user interface, and could, in the absence of deliberate software restrictions on the part of Apple, be used as a small mobile computer (which happens to have the ability to connect to a cell phone network). This is not as extreme as running NetBSD on a toaster, or repurposing a car's microcontrollers for some other task -- the iPhone has all the hardware needed to be used for general consumer-grade computing, albeit in a pocket sized form factor.
Palm trees and 8
I honestly do not understand why you would not call a device that has every hardware feature my laptop has a "computer" -- the only difference is the form factor and the advertised use. What if I installed software on your laptop that railroaded you into using it in a specific way, would I have suddenly transformed your laptop into something other than a "computer?"
I guess one of the primary differences for me is the ease of executing arbitrary code.
My laptop has a keyboard that I can use to type in commands/code/whatever. It also has an optical drive that I can use to load software. It has USB ports that I can use to load software off a USB key, or connect another CD-ROM or floppy drive or whatever.
The iPhone has a touchscreen and little else. If I want to load software on it I have to go through their official channels, or jailbreak my phone. If I want to write my own software for it, it requires a second device to do the programming and then upload it to the phone.
Similarly, the PLCs that control the heating and air conditioning in my building are most certainly computers in the technical sense. They're fully functional and can be programmed to do pretty much anything I want them to. But I have to connect external devices to them in order to do that... I have to plug in a laptop with a serial cable if I want to actually do anything to them.
My Cisco routers are also pretty much computers in the technical sense. And they've got USB ports I can use to store/load software. But again I have to connect another machine if I want to do anything with them. Otherwise they just do their job, day in and day out, like any other appliance.
I guess I'm not really debating the functionality of the iPhone. It certainly is a computer in any technical sense of the word. But there are connotations to the word "computer" that just don't match an iPhone.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
For all of their "think different" ads, Apple is a very traditional vertically-integrated engineering firm... like the old "big iron" unixes: Cray, SGI, SUN, IBM, where they sold the entire platform: hardware, software, custom interfaces, etc.
For all the Microsoft-bashing we do around here, they were really the ones that separated hardware from software on the PC (and then Linux came around and offered the even more of the same).
But now we have vertically integrated smartphones again. And for all the Google vs. Microsoft that we do, Android is pretty much Google's effort at doing to the smartphone what Microsoft did to the PC.
So don't take your freedom of hardware abstraction for granted! But in the end, we pretty much know how this dance should turn out.... just look at what Cray, SGI, SUN, IBM are doing now :-P
Apple will probably always be Apple (at least as long as Steve Jobs is around). Because he doesn't make products for us geeks, but for the rest of the people. He know his market well. And it is not us. So get over it and let the people have their stripped-down straightjacket internet devices.
Well, maybe they just want the brakes to work.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Oh god, are we still at this stage?
I thought we'd got past the "OMG ITS USING RAM!!!111111" whines after that completely wrong and setup article drama about Windows RAM usage where multiple people pointed out that applications using RAM is better than RAM going unused.
Yes you're right that Android phones generally have more RAM, but they also often tend to have faster processors, more pixels on their screen and so forth too, but it doesn't mean it's a requirement of Android, it's just the benefit of the rapid evolution of Android phones vs. the once per year refresh of the iPhone. The iPhone is always behind on hardware apart from right at the start of each refresh, it's just the way Apple tend to do things.
RAM usage is not a bad thing, it's a good thing when used properly, as it is with the JVM and Dalvik- RAM usage is optimised so that RAM isn't just sat there unused and is actually being used for what it's there for.
Can we finally put to bed this ancient idea that RAM usage is inherently bad and that developers should ensure their applications use as little RAM as possible which would in fact make things worse because it'd generally mean more work is being done to keep RAM usage down, such as higher levels of paging from disk or use of compression and so forth?
RAM is cheap now, we can afford plenty of it, and we can afford to use it, the idea that having less RAM and having as much of it as possible sat unused meaning there's more paging from disk and more CPU cycles being used on data compression is ludicrous. It's not like the bad developers argument holds much weight nowadays even, RAM is cheap, it's better to use as much of that as possible than it is to try and shrink your RAM footprint at the expense of more expensive processor cycles.
There are Android devices with only 128MB of RAM that to this day work very well. A great example is the Droid Eris from Verizon. I just upgraded a friends to the leaked 2.1 update and it actually runs smoother than it did on the 1.5 release. Does Google Naz and more just fine with Sense UI running.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck