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Fragmentation vs. Obsolescence In the Android Ecosphere
whisper_jeff writes "Engadget has an interesting article up discussing whether or not Android is fragmenting. While the article discusses the concept that it may be more about handsets becoming obsolete at a dramatic pace rather than the OS fragmenting, it also begins by noting that there are currently five different versions of Android on the market, which implies there is a notable degree of fragmentation. Regardless of it being fragmentation or handsets becoming obsolete to new feature sets in a terribly short period of time, I believe this development cycle could turn casual consumers away and hurt Android's chances for long-term mainstream success."
As an iPhone developer who would love to make the jump to include android I am very scared about the large mishmash of versions and hardware. Talk about a testing nightmare. Simulator testing is great but as we all know nothing beats the real thing. I don't feel like buying enough handsets to cover my desk.
I wouldn't be able to keep all the chargers straight anyway.
These "growing pains" need to be worked out, but app developers will quickly learn to check versions at runtime to make sure most of their features will work in older (or newer) versions of Android.
... it will just take a little time.
Apple took care very well from the start, but they've had lots of consumer software experience. Goole & Android will get their act together
The flash runtime has experienced the same problems as it was a developing platform. Flash 8,9 and 10 are all still in use today and have different feature sets and programming models. I realize the analog is slightly different as android is an OS and not a runtime, but the fact remains that progress requires this. We as geeks bemoan long development cycles and slow progress. Well the way to get around slow progress is quick iterations, and that gets to you to fragmentation. Adobe has realized this and their rate of development has slowed as they have stabilized on where they want the platform to go. Give android a year or so, and once Google realizes where it wants android to go, the iterations should slow down dramatically, and fragmentation will be a thing of the past.
je suis parce que j'aime
I think if handset makers and carriers can do this, getting Android 2.2 as a baseline onto all devices might be what the doctor ordered for this.
The main reason is not just JIT compiling, nor the ability to run apps on the SD card (which is important for older phones). Instead, Android 2.2 offers a lot more modular upgrade path, where before devices in previous versions would have to be completely reflashed just to support one item.
Time will tell if 2.2 gets adopted, or if we still have the version fragmentation issue in the future.
I remember a time when people complained about desktop computers becoming obsolete too quickly. I also work at a local PC repair shop where I see and fix computers daily that have slower processors and less RAM than the Droid Incredible, sometimes some that are lower spec'ed than the Droid Eris. I'll believe in handsets becoming obsolete when I see Android fail without any other explanation. (and I thought I heard somewhere that Android is doing very well for itself (http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/05/10/195251/Android-Sales-Surpass-iPhone-Sales?art_pos=11))
With apologies to... Henry Spencer:
"Those who fail to understand apt-get are condemned to re-invent it, poorly."
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Arguably, there are two broad classes of users/applications for Android: the ones that need a cheap phone OS that sucks less than your average "dumbphone" or "featurephone" OS(both in terms of general usability, and in terms of the dev team's ease of getting things going) and the ones who want an "Android smartphone", and wish to run "Android applications" on it, and so forth.
You would expect the former group to be heavily fragmented; but for that fragmentation not to matter very much. For any device where Android is simply being used as a cheaper or easier alternative to a dumbphone/featurephone OS, or even to some other embedded operating system(as with a cheap digital photoframe or GPS or something), the version, and most likely the applications, the device ships with will be the ones it dies with. Fragmentation will be inevitable; but also won't matter much(upgrades will generally not be expected, outside of a few tinkering geek who can roll their own, device developers will use the Android version of their choice when developing. No big deal.)
The trickier case is the part of the market that directly competes with iPhones. Here, updates are generally expected, adding applications and having things work is a prerequisite for success, and fragmentation is a bad thing. Google's own blessed handsets seem to be avoiding this reasonably well(within the limits of hardware advance. The G1 is starting to show its age; but so is the gen-1 iPhone); but some of the tier-2 carrier stuff is looking a little more doubtful.
Personally, I suspect that the critical thing will be whether or not expectations are correctly matched to devices. Having more or less fixed-spec "featurephones" being based on Android isn't bad for Android unless those phones are then sold to unwitting buyers as being equivalent to the high-end, frequently updated, fully app-compatible "Android Phones". If they are just sold as featurephones with decent browsers and mail clients, no harm, no foul. If they are (essentially dishonestly) sold as cheaper-but-equivalent alternatives to the properly updated Android devices, there will be a lot of unhappy customers stuck with outdated firmware.
My Droid Eris was on Android 1.5 for the last several months and I noticed very few differences between it and my father's Droid with 2.0. Yea he had voice nav, and he got live wallpapers when the 2.1 rolled out, but the core features that made me love the OS were largely identical (push gmail, widgets, great web browsing experience, etc.).
The only people to be hurt by the 'fragmentation/obsolescence' issue is developers. I don't want to downplay the developer issue, but as far as consumers are concerned , most of the big-time apps have no trouble supporting multiple iterations of the platform.
...But is phone manufacturer. If you make the phone and it just runs a vanilla Android OS, then you can theoretically push the update out without too much pain. The problem comes from the phone manufacturers who are trying to "improve" the OS by adding things like Sense UI and Motoblur. Yeah, some of these improvements are better, but others aren't any better than what comes in vanilla, and even more are worse. The fact that the modding community can turn on OS around in a few weeks and push it back out to the device is testament to how easy it is to put these newer versions of software on the phone, and it just the manufacturers trying to add their own crap back on that is the issue.
By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.
The biggest new challenge with "iphone 4g" is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.
To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, and the vast majority actually works with 1.5. With the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".
Android is also more developer friendly, e.g. the new feature introduced just before the 2.2 release - at least my N1 got a "report this crash button" before I upgraded to 2.2. (I don't want to speculate on the developer friendlyness of Apple, but recent news haven't been very good.
"Andy's point was simple. Older Android devices that can't be upgraded to newer versions of the OS or run newer apps are no different than an iPhone from 2007 not being updated to OS 4."
Rubin obfuscates the problem by trying to simplify things, which is working. The issues:
* my android device can't be upgraded
* my android app don't work on x version of android
* my android app doesn't work on y version of hardware
iPhone 4.0 is irrelevant, since it doesn't exist yet. And it is not like iPhone 3Gs not moving to iPhone 4. It's more like an app on an iPhone 3G with iPhone OS 2.0 can't run iPhone OS 3.0 because (a) the device itself can't be upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0, and/or (2) because iPhone OS 3.0 isn't backwards-compatible with iPhone OS 2.0.
I have plenty of iPhone apps that were first-generation that still work. That sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world. I also have apps that work on all versions of OS and hardware. I have a few that require specific features (GPS) that don't exist on 1.0 hardware...so obviously don't work on newer devices. I had a few apps (WiFi scanners) that died under OS 3.0 that used to work.
It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect.
Nice.
OMG!!! You're 'scared'!!!
What a fucking idiot. You won't be missed dipshit.
100,000 phones a day now for Android - 36 million phones a year.
Marketshare doubling every quarter.
2nd place in marketshare already.
50,000 apps already written for the platform.
Every major cellphone maker standardizing on the platform.
But oh noes!!! some fucking iPhone developer is spewing bullshit about his iPhone Fart App being developed on Android.
Recently, Google announced Android 2.2, the next version of their Linux-based mobile operating system targeted at phones and PDAs, at Google I/O 2010. Developers praised the update, calling it and its features a welcome addition to the platform.
Android 2.2 will bring the phone operating system closer to parity with its competitors. With 2.2r4 out now and a projected final release date of Summer '10, Android 2.2 is coming fast.
But stepping back from all of the commotion, what exactly is Google offering with this update? What are these new features and who will benefit from them? There are plenty of questions about Android 2.2and here are the answers.
Five Alive
Probably the most important update for Android for its end-users is HTML5. This changes very little about the platform itself, but it shows that Google is investing in the technology. It also means that users will have a seamless Web experience.
These two things are important for the future success of Android as a viable mobile platform, though Google's implementation might prove problematic.
On live devices, users will have to install Android 2.2 in its entirety to gain HTML5 support. An entire operating system upgrade for a browser? Get real and update the browser on its owndon't make your users go through the trouble of updating and installing a fundamental update just for some HTML5 support, Google. If this is how you run your phone operating system, I'd hate to see what you expect of Chrome OS users.
And there's also the fact that HTML5 is not novel. Every other industry player has already been including HTML5 support; Apple has long been a proponent of this, including HTML5 support in the developmental Webkit as well Safari since 2007. You're welcome to the party, Google, but don't announce it like you're the one throwing it. You can make catchup, but it's still catchup.
Flash Forward
Oh, Flash. Google and Adobe are performing a very calculated industry sixty-nine because both Apple and Google want the mobile-cum-portable market and Adobe wants the video portion of both.
Apple is pushing the open HTML5 standard; Adobe is pissed at Apple. Google, with the old the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend tactic, sees an opportunity and hooks up with Adobe. Sadly, revenge sex only seems clever at first.
The reality is that HTML5, being open and supported by hundreds of companies and standard bodies, will win in the end. Google and Adobe will look like assholes having lapped at such a bloated, poorly-coded, closed video platform that everyone else will zoom past using their browsers sans crashy plugin.
Who wins in the end? The entire industry, sharing in the HTML5 platform, and users, whose browsers don't crash or chew up excess cycles and memory. Sadly, though, not Android users, who are unwitting Adobe consumers.
Hotspotting et al
Android will also support hotspotting, or wifi sharing funneled into its 3G or 4G network, of up to eight other devices. I'm not sure if you've done any serious work on 3G yet, but it's slow.
The prospect of using one 3G account to support other Internet-hungry devices is like expecting a pygmy to carry weightlifters: backbreaking at best and otherwise i
I am choosing between the new iPhone HD or android. Outdated software is the deciding factor for me. I certainly do like the hardware of the incredible. But if I can't load the latest OS myself, forget it. Sounds like a bigger pain in the ass then dealing with apple. (I currently own iPhone 3g and 3gs and would love an excuse to get android.)
Of the '5' versions, only 3 have anything resembling significant usage in the wild (1.5, 1.6 and 2.1). Multiple phones have had 2.1 upgrades released for them since the statistics were gathered, thus throwing even those statistics out of whack. Once all the handsets that are capable of running 2.2 are upgraded, I think that will be a pretty stable platform for quite some time - most everything that people have been clamoring for in Android is either in or supported by, that version (Flash, App2SD, bluetooth voice calling, JIT, etc). Many of the handsets that are older and 1.5/1.6-based might not perform all that well with these new features (if at all) due to constrained physical resources (slower CPU, less RAM, etc).
Coming out with new hardware now with anything less than 2.1 should be a crime, though. I'm glad they've said the EVO 4G will have a 2.2 upgrade in July. *whew*
The fascinating thing about "fragmentation" is that it's a problem we just made up. Apple's Mac line, let alone the Windows world, have more hardware and software diversity in one minute than Android has all year. Yet no one goes around suggesting that "fragmentation will hurt the PC market's long term chances of success."
This feels like a FUD bullet point created by an Apple astroturfing firm, whether it actually is or not. The whole "fragmentation" line of thinking presumes a world we have never had, and which I doubt anyone would willingly choose: one where a single manufacturer rules, producing a few nearly perfect products in a graceful, gradual schedule.
The funniest part is that this meme is useful for identifying people with no Android developer experience. After having used both the Apple SDK and the Android SDK pretty extensively, you can see why Android will win in the marketplace, and win so quickly. Never has there been such a beautifully organized, transparent, open, easy zero-to-development experience. In a world where most platforms don't even think about API versioning until it's too late, Android builds in an elegant management system from the beginning. "All 5" API revisions are accessible via a pullout menu. You default to the lowest, so that your app is compatible with all devices. Easy done.
And if you need something that a newer OS revision offers, everything about it makes it easy to target the minimum revision required.
The documentation is organized and straightforward. Running and debugging your app is a keystroke away, with a hardware-level emulator that's trivially configured to match whichever devices you prefer to test on - or all of them.
It's ironic, really. Hardly anyone has ever done such a good job of managing fragmentation, yet all this refinement for a platform that has less diversity (especially at this early point in its life) than almost any open platform I've seen that's this widely used.
In short, LOL.
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Dear Hardware providers and cell carriers: Please give us our devices already rooted. The community can easily port new versions of Android to your phones so phones like the Motorola Backflip and Cliq can have decent versions of Android already.
I mean, seriously? What do they have to lose for giving us pre-rooted phones?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I would have to agree, though I wouldn't have stated it so aggressively.
Yes, the competition is the one spearheading this talking point. I wrote in an earlier post that it might be justified to fire the editor for ruining the career of the journalist by allowing this sort of article to be published. Maybe the journalists that are serious about their careers should look harder before agreeing to write such crap.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
To me Android has the right mix of hegemony and diversity. Hardware manufactures and carriers are free to have their own custom versions of an OS without having to make it completely incompatible with all the other software out there. Come on people this is what open source is all about. Yes its a little harder on the developer but so what. If you don't like it, go buy a mac to run the iPhone SDK. Pay the registration fee for the App Store and submit to Apple.
I personally don't see this as fragmentation, just maturing. These last couple of updates are just finally getting around to the features that users really wanted from the beginning. FULL exchange support, tethering, hotspot, multitouch, etc. These are all features that users wanted from experiences with other phones but Android didn't have full support for.
The problem will be when you can't upgrade the OS because of hardware related reasons within 6 months. Someone who signs a 2 year contract expects that phone to last 1.5-2 years. You can't just go in and upgrade your phone and get the deal price because you haven't completed your contract. Some vendors let you trade in early. Or, if you purchase the phone outright for $500 with no contract, having to shell out another $500 6 months later to get features that should already be there would really suck. Fortunately, the hardware specs on the majority of these newer devices should last at least 2 years IMO.
Having one single unified Android market which adds terrific value to your handset, is going to ensure any fragmentation doesn't get too bad. This is the basis of why I dismiss these fears out of hand. I'd only worry if the market itself fragmented.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Apple zealots are getting nervous about Android so this story seeks to reassure them that the rapid improvement of Android is a bad thing.
yay!!
you are my hero!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Silly question I know, but reading your post just makes its title look all the more ironic.
Hardware and legacy-OS "fragmentation" exists today in the iPhone ecosystem - nearly half of iPod Touches are running older systems, and there are already iPhone owners who will never be able to upgrade to OS 4 (even the beta). It's obviously greater in Android due to the larger choice of hardware and more rapid OS releases. Some may prefer a slower-moving target, but the monolithic, our-way-or-the-highway approach that's required to achieve this has too many well-documented disadvantages to be suitable for everyone.
[Backwards compatibility] sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world
That's just plain uninformed. No APIs have been revoked or broken; the only 1.0 apps that don't work today are the ones that did naughty, undocumented things - like any other platform. In fact, Android's VM model, excellent API version management and Marketplace manifest model make it easy to allow apps to run on any version of Android they can manage, or to target the app at whatever specific set of hardware features are required, making forward compatibility far less of an issue that for e.g. Linux or Windows (can't speak for iPhone OS personally). And Rubin points this out.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I believe this development cycle could turn casual consumers away and hurt Android's chances at long term mainstream success.
Sounds like the submitter is suggesting we artificially slow the rate of innovation. Hey, maybe we should just not release new devices with new features at all. That way no one will feel left out!
This is going on for years on Symbian scene and J2ME (Java Micro), same thing being said over and over and unfortunately some developers seem to actually believe it.
I will give one single title: Opera. Opera Mobile runs on ANY Symbian S60 and Opera Mini runs on ANY J2ME client. There is no "Opera Mobile for Nokia E71", the drop down menus on some download may confuse you. It is just, some developers, especially the ones directly selling (no trial) apps want to make sure the application will run instead of living hassle to give money back or bad feedback. Another thing is, root certs which devices have. Some have Verisign, some hove Thawte or both. They want to make sure (especially with J2ME) that application won't be treated as "unsigned", especially network aware apps.
Of course, if you see something like "S60 V3 FP2", it may confuse you. It just says "Devices with compass built in", much like iPhone 3G vs 3GS and I don't see anyone talking about fragmentation on iPhone scene.
So J2ME is really "write once,run anywhere" and Symbian is really device independent. Of course, the Developer makes the difference.
IMHO idiots like these manage to trick developers causing millions of dollars in potential revenue especially with independent developers.
You don't need to jump the ship, keep shipping for iPhone and add Android, Symbian and even Windows Mobile to your platforms. Ignore what those "blog writers" and fanatics (including some devs) say, see yourself...
Let me give a 2 applications as example: Nimbuzz and Fring. OK, they get great venture capital these days but it is likely 10 guys coding. They ship to any mobile platform available to buy, Fring guys even released a J2ME client. Do you believe these guys have some kind of insane setup like 1000 different handsets to debug on? Of course not. They just do simple things like seperating the core and ui, listening to vendor/os developer recommendations, using the free tools (Nokia even has actual hardware simulators with webcams) and don't go to deep level hacks area which will create problem on anything.
For example I am not a fan of Android but when I see something like "fragmentation" and "engadget", I directly ignore it. I'd listen to actual software developers instead and look at the products shipped.
These guys are trolling via blogs and counting their ad-click money, their BS really costs some developers and users, that makes me mad.
Who knows if Apple guys hunt him down and reject his next update nitpicking on some minor issue since he said "he wants to jump the ship" ?
Having an actual risk like that is worse than fragmentation, I bet even 8 bit era ASM coders didn't have such a risk.
You know the real interesting thing which is fortunate for some companies is: People ignoring numbers like 24 million, in first 6 months of 2010. That is Symbian, supposed to be "fragmented" while single sisx file installs to almost anything.
You know what could drive all of them to real panic? If Nokia gets the neat idea of shipping a fully supported (and of course, working) Qt SDK for Android.
While on it, a device very similar to Android sold 19 million too... Blackberry... If you add them, it makes 43 million devices. That is the market a developer misses when he/she listens to these idiot blogs.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11548_More_stats_in_Symbian_sales_wa.php
App developer should realize that there is a world outside the US [and Europe], where:
1. Phones are sold unlocked more as a rule than an exception.
2. Enthusiasts change phones frequently
3. There is a big market for cheaper and second hand/older gen. 'smart' phones.
Android fits in well for these market. This is also the exact reason for the abysmal sale of iPhone 3G/3GS in India and China.
7-8-9-10-0
There are DOZENS of different cars available! Even with a single car maker there can be half a dozen or more choices! Oh no, the car market is fragmenting!
How is it that choice can be so good for some things in the minds of most people but when you go to devices and computer stuff OH CRAP WE HAVE TO ONLY HAVE ONE SINGLE CHOICE OR IT'S BAD?
C API totally closed
only 27% of Android handsets run v2.1
no easy path to port iPhone apps, desktop apps, or console games
whole missing categories of apps
malware
piracy
When iPhone had this many handsets, it had 4 times the apps, and they were a much broader selection, including many 3D games and content creation apps, and was drawing developers in from other platforms like flies because it was another full computer platform with native C apps and Apple made it easy to monetize your app. With Android, you have phone-style baby Java apps, it's not at all the same thing.
Let's face it--all you Android fanbois aren't facing up to reality. Android is a a moving target that makes it difficult to develop anything more than the most rudimentary apps, the hardware market is hopelessly fragmented and it's application store is a joke. The only thing it's got going for it is that it's free, which is what accounts for it's current jump in sales figures. Give it another year, though, and Apple is going to wipe the floor with it.
What would it take to update older phones?
A cable.
A file
And a cell phone company who actually gave a rats buttocks, of course.
Simply put, most phones running older versions of Android could be updated to current.
And why aren't they?
Because the cell phone companies are cheap, inconsiderate pricks.
Once they get you to agree to the 3 year contract their job is done.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
I was helping a friend set up an Android phone a few days ago. It came with a manufacturer home page theme. The market was full of the standard apps, they installed, and I didn't even notice that it was a 1.6 phone.
For the vast majority of apps, the differences between versions don't seem to matter.
It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect.
Most Android apps work fine on all major Android versions. The ones that don't work fine usually use some capability that doesn't exist in the old version. They can usually fall back gracefully.
This is no different from what Apple is doing with iPhone, iPad, and iPod hardware, and it is no different with forward incompatibilities between iPhone OS versions.
Most people who are heavy users of their phones get a new one every 1-2 years, and when these new phones come out they are likely to have whatever is the current version of android...
Very few people ever upgrade their existing phones, they just replace them when their contract expires.
That said, given the open source nature of android obsolete handsets could easily be opened up to third party development once the original vendor loses interest (if it doesn't happen already - some handsets aren't locked),
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Remember Windows and Linux? Both ran on such a wide variety of hardware it was nearly impossible to ensure that the user had the right stuff. Most didn't have cameras, many didn't have joysticks. You had trackballs, mice, variations in screen resolution, aspect ratio, color depths. 3D capabilities varied 100-fold. It was so bad, they had to print "Minimum requirements" on the side of the box, and everyone had to know their processor speed, RAM, hard drive space, etc.
Linux was especially bad. There were dozens of Linux distributions, with varying applications, libraries, browsers... even the shell was totally different between releases.
Yet... those are the 2 best markets to release for, with the most software. Every time I see these stories I wonder what environment the developers write for before Android came around. Unless they were dedicated XBOX developers, there is no stable hardware - almost everything today is a a heterogenous environment. Even the illustrious Apple. Would they rather that each of these phones have a different operating system, like it was 5-10 years ago? That would fix their problem, and give them 1/10th the audience they have now.
I've been developing on Android for well over a year now. At Google I/O the Android team dismissed the idea of fragmentation, saying they prefer the term "progress". Is fragmentation a problem? Yes. Is it such a big problem that it should prevent someone interested in the platform from developing on it? No.
The Android engineers are only considering fragmentation in the context of having a range of older and newer firmware versions. There is the horizontal fragmentation of hardware (i.e., a number of different devices running the same OS version), but there is also the overlooked horizontal fragmentation of the firmware. Just about every manufacturer has modified Android in some way, usually by creating their own custom UI to "sit on top" of Android. But sometimes this ends up affecting deeper functionality than just the top layer of interaction. E.g., HTC has the Sense UI, Motorola has Motoblur, and Samsung has TouchWiz, which are all their own custom modifications of Android. So in reality there might not just be one version of 2.1. In addition to stock, there might also be Sense 2.1, Motoblur 2.1, and TouchWiz 2.1. And this isn't even considering custom ROMS. I've run into (albeit rare) cases of exceptions occurring on 2.1 Sense that don't occur on 2.1 stock.
I have 6 phones for testing: G1, Eris, Tattoo, Droid, Nexus, and now the Evo (thanks to Google I/O). Four of those were gifted either from Google or the manufacturer, so if you put in the hard work to make reasonably successful apps, you will get support as an indie dev.
Do you need that many phones? Probably not, the simpler your apps are (which should be the case if you're new to the platform). If you're developing games, especially ones using input other than the touchscreen (e.g. accelerometer), you will probably want to invest in at least 3 devices.
So fragmentation is a very real problem, but it's not a very big one, and honestly I'd take the freedom and ease of development and deployment on Android over the iPhone any day. And FYI, as an indie I'm currently generating a good salary from Android development alone.
the few people who went ahead with google's nexus one experiment, and those that didn't, are now seeing what it was really about. it wasn't about having the absolutely most shiny phone. it was about getting timely bug and feature updates. it's about a phone that gets better and better over time.
apple knows this secret. it's why there are people with 2-year old iphone 3g's that are still very happy with their hardware. it's why apple users don't mind paying a premium price for apple hardware. it's why they come back and buy more apple hardware.
nobody is going to force all android device manufacturers to operate like this. hopefully consumers with think beyond the initial shiny-ness of their phones on the day they open the box, and consider how their carrier and device manufacturer are going to support that device over it's lifetime.
personally, i'm sticking with whatever android "reference" device google blesses until the carriers and other manufacturers start to pull it together.
5800 does count and in fact, besides being touch screen (which I hate), it is a real powerful device especially with extras like accelerated J2ME. It has a huge developer support behind it.
BTW, 26 million is just quarter, 3 months period. Sorry for confusing it with half year.
Symbian devices and J2ME devices have a huge set of queries built in, you just query screen size, available API, device chars and output based on it. Obviously, a company like Gameloft does have simulation/emulation setups but it doesn't change the fact that it is actually the same executable. They even implement kind of DRM on top of executable against piracy.
Maybe the journalists that are serious about their careers should look harder before agreeing to write such crap.
Quite like whores, there are 2 kinds of journalists - cheap and classy. While only the classy ones reach the pinnacle of their careers, but many classy whores/journalists get lost in their classiness and reach nowhere. Whereas being a cheap journalist/whore is a low-risk way of reaching medium success with some hardwork and a lot less conscience, and zero self-respect. So I wouldn't totally agree with the career advice you gave.
So, writing controversy causing crap might be a reasonably good risk-adjusted move for a journalist.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.