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Details of Android 3.0, SIP, Video Chat
dkd903 was one of several folks to note that a bunch of details about Google's Android 3.0 are
beginning to leak out. The platform is codenamed Gingerbread; it includes video chat to compete with the iPhone, and a graphical overhaul to try to make it look a bit better compared to its rivals.
Everyone who was smart enough to get a Nexus One rather than locked down Motorola garbage.
How about video chat that works with the iPhone as well?
I hope so too, but I fear that there's a penis size contest about to begin here. :-(
I'm afraid Google would feel that following the FaceTime standard would risk giving away users to Apple.
How the fuck is FaceTime a standard? It was first mentioned on June 7, 2010. I've been using Skype to video chat on my N900 for about a year. And people in Europe have been video chatting using some other Nokia thingamajig for a year or two before that. May have been using Gizmo or something.
Really. Apple didn't do anything impressive with FaceTime. Just use the Google Voice or Skype apps to video chat. They've been around long enough to be mentioned as a standard without people laughing in your face.
bitblit operations and other 2D graphical effects are nearly free in terms of CPU and battery life.
or should be, at any rate.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Just use the Google Voice or Skype apps to video chat. They've been around long enough to be mentioned as a standard without people laughing in your face.
Presumably you mean Google Talk, which uses the Jabber/XMPP messaging standard. The Skype protocol is spooky and mysterious, but I guess it's a defacto standard. FaceTime on the other hand is such a non-standard that it doesn't even work on Macs yet.
Android UI Utilities, it is no interface builder but good for prototyping before building the XML UIs
> The real issue is a lack of a "Interface builer" so we can build beautiful apps with no extra effort.
> Combine a really good "interface builder", "default layout settings" or whatever it might be with
> Android's customization and we got a clear winner in the UI and UX space.
Try Google App Inventor, an official tool from Google itself
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
Seriously: the difference between those 2 words is abysmal. And about 80%...
When a colon introduces two or more sentences, or when it introduces speech in dialogue or an extract, the first word following it is capitalized.
-Chicago Manual of StyleThe problem is Samsung in this case. Most if not all HTC and Motorola high-end phones have 2.2 already and have no GPS issues.
I agree with a lot of the Android criticism but those issues you listed are specific to Samsung.
Galaxy S GPS-Gate: http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/17/samsung-galaxy-s-gps-gate-two-problems-not-one-and-what-to-do/
Wikipedia entry(under Issues): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_i9000_Galaxy_S
YouTube(dozens, if not hundreds of videos): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmIx6SR9lXo
The EPIC issue: http://www.gadgetvenue.com/galaxy-gps-problems-fixed-samsung-epic-4g-08190515/
I could paste links till my 6gb ram is full but just google "Galaxy S GPS problems"
Oh yes, plenty of "A fix in september" rumors" but the originator was from a samsung forum post on Samsung India website. No official statement to date.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Presumably you mean Google Talk, which uses the Jabber/XMPP messaging standard.
Specifically, it uses Jingle for voice and video. Jingle originated at Google, but they published it as a standard (actually, a family of standards), in the form of a set of XEPs. In contrast, Steve Jobs said that FaceTime would be published as a standard, but I have yet to see any documentation of the protocol from Apple.
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So it's not like people are picking between Droid and iPhone so it's apples to apples... it's more like iPhone 4 vs Crappy $50 Android Phone. Those aren't technically direct competitors.
If you're an app developer and your app isn't CPU or GPU intensive, the "crappy" $50 Android phone is just as much another potential customer as someone with an Evo or Epic or Droid is.
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Android has an All/Some/None setting to turn off UI animations, in Settings/Display/Animation, so once again it gives people the choice.
It's been there since 1.6 at least.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I don't think they're playing catchup. They've already described some of the upcoming features like C2MD (cloud to mobile device) and there are a lot of things in iOS land that don't exist in Android land. For example bluetooth file transfers are enabled in 2.x androids while iOS doesn't have it. Similarly Android still has a lot of design that hasn't been copied by iOS (yet) like fully replaceable components such as keyboards and clients (SMS, email, etc). Multitasking still makes more sense in Android from a dev viewpoint and the notification bar actually is useful as it prevents a lot of unnecessary popups that steal attention or focus.
There's only a few areas that I think are actually important/useful in iOS that Android is still lacking: hardware graphics acceleration (by default), screenshots, a certain missing UI widgets (for developers).
That doesn't mean there are things I wish android had. One of them is bluetooth HID in the stock firmware for connecting keyboards and other input devices. But will iOS ever support this? If Jobs had his way, it wouldn't ever support that because that would mean random company or business making crap hardware for his products without paying royalties or being blessed by Apple first.
Here's some other things that android has that iOS still doesn't have:
Apple showed the list of protocols in FaceTime during the keynote.
They said they want it to be an open standard. It's not an encrypted protocol.
You don't normally have to do anything to write an arbitrary app for an Andriod phone that happens to have Sense. You just write your app using the regular Android SDK and don't worry about it. Sense and other skins are just not relevant factors for almost any app you would want to write.
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