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Google Outlines Feature Set For Android 2.2
evdotorrey writes "Google announced new features and improvements for Android 2.2. New features include Flash and HTML 5 support, faster browser performance using the V8 engine, Microsoft Exchange support, a Portable Hotspot feature that makes your phone a Wi-Fi hotspot, and many more exciting features." An anonymous reader adds some more on the new release, codenamed Froyo: "Google claims the operating system will be from two to five times faster thanks to advances made in the compilers and the Dalvik virtual machine it uses, and how it is ported to new processors and platforms. On the enterprise front the new operating system comes with full support for Microsoft Exchange, including access to the global address book and the ability to translate native security features to mobile handsets. APIs have also been added to allow controls such as the automatic wiping of missing handsets and other remote management features. Google is also making its voice translation and search APIs open to developers, and showed off an application developed for the handset that allowed real time translation from English to French."
Even though I've seen these features a hundred times, I can't help but take another peek at what the future without apple in my pocket may hold.
I love everything about Android except one thing: Vendor/carrier OS upgrades.
As someone who wants to switch from iPhone to the HTC Evo 4G in June, I have one message to Sprint/HTC/whoever is responsible: Please make Android 2.2 available as soon as a stable build is out. If it takes months after stable 2.2 is released, I'm gonna be a very vocally dissatisfied customer.
So please vendors / carriers, do us this courtesy and we'll all love you and happily part with obscene quantities of money for quality service.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I wonder what will be the effects of millions of people carrying wifi hotspots.
If I put my happy optimistic hat, I can imagine a next generation that forgets about ownership of connection and creates a giant web of constant wifi access to the web.
A world where every little gadget can access the web as you approach, by using your phone.
Have we audited the Android code enough to know that it's not phoning the mothership sending god-knows-what? Do we know there is no other "oops we didn't mean to"? It's one thing to have gov't spooks snooping on you, wholly another to have a private corporation piling dossier on you.
Paranoid? Pretty damn well justified when we are talking about Google, I say. Ask them about their data collection policy.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
No DRM. Not having root access in stock Android carrier/HTC will sufficiently prevent casual copying of paid apps to another device. After market ROMs or a ROOT access package will most certainly have this restriction lifted. You are not DRM-locked into not being able to copy/backup your paid apps, but you will void your warranty to do so.
If there is, it will be rather easily removed with superuser permissions.
By far the best feature of Android is the thriving community of after-market OS builds. It's like upgrading your phone for free. I'm not affiliated, but right now feel obliged to shameless endorse CyanogenMod's G1/G2/Nexus One custom ROMs http://www.cyanogenmod.com./
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
First, I read the comments. There were three. I modded them all up, because they all seemed useful within the confines of Slashdot's moderation parameters. I frequently have mod points, apparently because people think my moderation is fair. However, by posting this (I refuse to jump through hoops to post as AC), those moderations were undone. Sorry.
The reason is simple: After moderating, I read TFA. Therein, I see that about every third sentence ends with an exclamation point! This artificial excitement really annoying!
For instance:
See what I mean! It's a very loud article!
It's like there aren't any there any others to pick from!
That said, I might be qualified to be an Android fanboi! For instance, today at work, I used my phone to help me align and plumb two antenna systems! The day before that, it helped me cook a stew! And on Monday of this week, it even walked my dog!
But this quantity of exclamatory remarks is unsettling! Please, timothy, given your lineage here, I expect better editing!
Sincerely!
adolf!
Kid-proof tablet..
I've just switched from iPhone to Android. I'd jailbroken my phone to add the features Apple didn't seem to want to give me, I'd call myself a power user of the iPHone (if there is such a thing) and I just got tired of fighting Apple. Every update they push, arbitrary app restrictions (google voice?) - in the end it was an Engadget podcast that persuaded me to switch. Do I want a future of everything coming thru Apple and iTunes (with Apple nickle-and-diming me to death on each transaction), or do I want a connected handset produced by a vendor who has a vested interest in it integrating nicely with as many third-party services (twitter/facebook/flickr etc) as possible? When Apple bought the mobile advertising network it was the last straw.
I now have 2.1 on an HTC Desire and couldn't be happier. All of a sudden you're not treated like an evil hacker for wanting apps that "think different" - it's encouraged.
Case in point: forgot to copy a new album over to my phone. I realised I could wirelessly connect to my LAN, browse the content, copy an album over to my handset. Job done.
Strictly speaking AMOLED...is TFT; "TFT LCD" in the latter case would be more precise. ;)
People forget that such choice is (or was...(*)) mostly about answering the question "do I want a screan looking great inside but weak in sunlight (OLED) or do I want a high chance of a screen which is merely good inside and...good in sunlight? (if that's transfelctive LCD)".
(*) Admittedly, in recent times various types of touchscreens, often put on top, and neglecting transflective LCDs make it even more murky
One that hath name thou can not otter
Okay, sure, Google cuts some deal with Adobe to suck up the Adobe Flash Player code and bake it into builds of Chrome. Or Chromium (whichever one is their proprietary version of the browser).
But why would they describe that support as existing in Android? I thought that Android was Google's FOSS-licensed, linux-kernel-based OS.
When Google, HTC, and other people release a phone running Android, they invariably pile all kinds of proprietary stuff on top. Other options would be nice, but they don't seem too interested in that.
Maybe it's just this particular news site being imprecise, but I'm concerned that Google is trying to peg Flash support via this browser to all Android phones. I mean, it's great for people who want to run the software, but it's shifting Android away from a FOSS project to Yet Another Proprietary Stack.
C'mon Google, you're chock full of smart engineers who want an open web, so please make sure that Android stays an open stack.
coding is life
I'm still waiting for 2.0 for my G1. Why should I care about 2.2?
Yes I know I can root my phone and shoehorn a modded OS on there. I really don't want to hear about your 1337 hax. I want a supported update.
I won't badger you about aftermarket ROMs and how awesome I think they are (because I do), but I will say some major mods are actually well supported with frequent updates. Carefully done , you can back up your stock rom, test drive the aftermarket ROM and if need be roll back to the stock software. I also understand that re-flashing the official firmware is sufficient to retain your warranty should you need to make a claim.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I just switched from iPhone to Android and I find that Android devices are just too wide, too big for me. The iPhone was slim. Smoooooth. Shiny. I could place it upright on a chair and just sit on it.
But what of the Androids? They're ridiculously fat and require a concoction of KY Jelly and Preparation H to "work for me." They're so rough and unrefined -- they're the "lumberjack bears" of portable phones. Rough, I like. But I still have to go out and be able to sit down without wincing. The roughness of the operating system is fine, I'll deal with that...but please, please make something that fits in my ass! Work with me, ladies!
My HTC desire fits in my iPhone silicone skin. It's almost exactly the same size down to the last mm. YMMV.
I guess you could say that the new compiler arrived... just in time?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There's just not enough room in the flash rom. Sorry.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Well great,
the new android is almost on the shelves, but nowhere i read if they are gonna support setting
a proxy for WiFi. Up until now you are unable to make use of a proxy. As far as i can tell this feature
was there in 1.x (with or without the use of 3th-party apps) , but in 2.x it is not possible to set a proxy for
WiFi.
Despite the 344-and-growing comments on http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1273 ,
in which the feature was first reported missing on Nov. 12 2008 (Two thousand and eight!!!, we're in 2010 now)
They have failed to respond or shed some light on this. And looking at:
Status: New
Owner: ----
Type-Enhancement
Priority-Medium
Component-Device
Subcomponent-Wifi
It doens't give me a lot of convidence that they are really looking into it.
Don't get me wrong, WiFi thetering is great and all but compared to making use of a proxy for WiFi,
if you are dependend on a (corporate) proxy due to missing signal from your provider, slow connections
(3G or even G),are at the whim of corporate policy or you have to pay extra for data per mb to you provider,
it's pretty insignificant to have WiFi thetering if you are unable to use the internet on droid at all...
So my 2ct's are first things first, you can't not support proxy for WiFi and push your OS as someting that
can be used in an corporate enviroment...
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
The official Android developers blog post is probably more interesting than blogspam
You can, if you install a generic Android.
Not on Motorola Milestone (the european version of Droid). Motorola has locked its bootloader so you can't install a generic Android image, unless you sign it with Motorola's keys.
There's an online petition about that issue:
http://www.petitiononline.com/freeblms/petition.html
Coming from nowhere, reaching the 3rd spot in a few years isn't something I would call bad by any means, especially when you're selling your phones at a premium, compared to some of other companies' offerings.
My guess is that the Android user base will be larger than that of the iPhone/iPad/iwhatever in the near future, in part due to the larger number of available devices and the variety that brings. However, I think iPhoneOS will remain popular, and a larger part of Android's growth will come from other smarphone operating systems...
The iPhone integrates with third party services quite nicely - twitter, facebook, flikr, etc, and the new advertising service is *optional*. It doesn't do anything that the app store doesn't have already, it just means that if an app developer wants an easy way to include advertising, they can no do so - with the bulk of the heavy lifting (ad serving and ad selection) handled by Apple (for a cut). You can still produce free apps, or roll your own ad distribution like apps in the store already have (like Shazam lite for one).
For all the crying about how Apple limit developers, you think that a new feature that makes development easier if you were going to use ads in the first place might at least be *understood* by slashdot, if not praised. (it is an ad service after all).
So Apple are "nickel and diming you to death" - compared to Android? The apps on the Android marketplace cost money too. Why is it different on there? There are free apps on both platforms, and ad-suppoted apps on both platforms. Why is it "nickel and diming" on iPhone and not on Android?
I don;t think you're far off. Android has the benefit of being available on multiple platforms and manufacturers - that is going to increase the installed base. It is also its weakness (although not a crippling one) in that you have a varied handset base that you need to manage. The benefit of the iPhone is the very small set of hardware that iPhone OS runs on. Advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but that's just how it is.
Android is clearly doing extremely well, and good for it - if there is one thing that is going to drive iPhone development, it's a serious competitor (and vice versa). Everyone is going to be better off.
Apple's iPhone base is something like 100 million phones - I think it has well and truly "arrived" enough to always be a big player now, the same as Android - neither one is going to kill the other, they'll just both keep improving.
2.1 for the hero came out yesterday. Its on HTC website...now the eternal wait for 2.2 begins.
Umh yeah
on Google's giant hairy man-breasted teat. To quote from TFA:
>> Android 2.2 will be the first mobile operating system that will have native flash support.
Excuse me, you mean that Android will finally get Flash, following in the footsteps of the non-corporate bastardized Maemo for Nokia N900 smart phone which has had native flash support for months, if not a year. Obviously this Google fanboi didn't want to pass the word along. After all, somebody might go out and buy a phone you can get flash on TODAY. Instead of in some indefinite time in the future, for a phone that's locked down to the bastards at Sprint. Ehhhh.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
I sure hope it outperforms Safari on iPad seeing as it's not remotely near the WebKit nightly that's been in development for nearly a year.
That's not Androids fault, that's the vendors.
Android is the OS, which is quite open indeed.
What vendors do with the firmware on their own phones, is entirely up to them.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Apple aren't interested in integration: they want you consuming your media through them, they want you to use their services (Mobile Me? Yeah, that was *great*, wasn't it?) whereas Google have a vested interest in users being ultra-connected to any and all third party services.
Let me ask you: do you think we'll see a) a decrease or b) an increase in the number of ads on iPhone now there's a central mechanism for delivering them, and Apple take a cut?
App prices are one thing, but to use the iPhone I need iTunes. I need an iTunes account. If I want accessories that work I need Apple ones (put an ID chip in the video out cable? So that instead of a simple $5 cable I now need a $40 Apple version?). If I rent a movie, it expires if I've not watched it for a bit.
Apple's vision of the future is you slumped on the couch consuming music, tv and video on your iPad, and paying a small premium every single time.
When Apple bought the mobile advertising network it was the last straw.
wait, so apple got an ad firm and that's your excuse to go to GOOGLE of all companies? I don't think you thought that one through...
today is spelling optional day.
Consider how consumers react to ads - if you unnecessarily include ads, you annoy your customers, they leave. You lose out.
If you were already using ads, all you have done is change suppliers - transparent to the consumer.
If you have a paid add and you also include ads, people are going to moan that they are being double dipped.
It's AOL in the UK all over again back in the early days of the internet - used to cost £10 per month for service, but local calls here are not free so you were paying twice for the service and the call. As soon as the freephone numbers (supported by ads) came along, people went for it like flies on shit. They also went for the free service, but subsidised by the local call cost (and no adverts). You very rarely get something for nothing. It's all about perceived value though - adverts already exist on the app store, and are pretty "self regulating". The addition of Apple's ad system just makes it easier for developers to do what they are already doing.
In other countries the iPhone is already on multiple carriers - here in the UK you can get it on Orange, O2 and Vodafone.