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First Alpha of Qt For Android Released
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of Nokia's announcement that it will be cheerfully throwing its existing developer community under a bus by not offering Qt for Windows Phone, a project to implement Qt on Android has announced its initial alpha release. Necessitas project lead Bogdan Vatra writes, 'I had a dream that one day, I'll be able to deploy existing Qt software on any Android platform. I had a dream that one day, all Qt applications will use system wide shared Qt libraries. I had a dream that one day, all Qt applications once compiled and deployed to one android platform, will run on any other newer android platform and will last for years without any recompilation. I had a dream that one day, I'll be able to create, manage, compile debug and deploy Qt apps using a first class citizen IDE. Now, those dreams become reality.' The Necessitas wiki offers some documentation on Qt for Android. A demo video of Qt for Android in action is also available."
I saw nip at 1:15.
Long live Qt
Does it really take anyone over a minute to read the intro? Got bored, went away.
So, how long will take google to trash the java stuff and absorb Qt as the primary toolkit/sdk ecosystem? With or without it how will they fight the Nokia patent pool brought in court by their puppet master?
With Nokia becoming an MS hardware OEM, QT isn't going to be the default, native, library set for any platform with notable share; but I see it cropping up(subtly, you usually have to take a look at the stuff an installer does to notice it) in all sorts of cross-platform commercial software with quite broad distribution. Then you have KDE, which is a fairly heavy QT user, albeit not one with a huge install base.
I'd say that the odds of world domination look slim; but I don't see why QT couldn't continue doing what it did before the Nokia acquisition(even if Nokia has no further interest, they paid good money for Trolltech, so they'd be stupid to destroy them internally, rather than spin them off again and take what they can get...)
For nudity or sexual content?
This is worse than having sex with your sister!
QT isn't big enough to compete. The other juggernauts have the momentum and QT will fail. it is not because it is a bad technology - it just doesn't have the traction.
It's a framework, not a platform. Whether or not anybody else uses it is totally irrelevant to whether you can write an app with it and have it run on any Android phone. Or anything else they port the library to.
And if it works well and allows you to easily write portable software then plenty of people will use it, because there is no barrier (and significant advantages) to being an early adopter.
Well it seems to me that in order to compete you need apps and visibility. KDE and Nokia do provide the visibility but the apps will only come if there is an ROI on the part of developers. If deelopers are going to spend the time and effort making the app then there needs to be demand for this platform.
Qt is that sexy - wow
So some asshole flagged the QT video on youtube and now there is no way to report it as incorrectly flagged. A new low for fanboys..
This is incredible. It's hard to believe how stupid are some companies. Nokia had some awesome assets. How could they not see it?
- You are the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones
- You own one of the best development frameworks in the world, a framework that is 100% cross platform, and totally Unix friendly
- The world is changing. Windows is decaying on desktops. Unix runs most servers, many desktops (combining Apple + GNU/Linux + other free Unix-like systems), and is the biggest mobile player (33% Android + 16% Apple)
- You have an awesome linux-based mobile platform (meego).
- Microsoft has consistently failed on the mobile market, and is irrelevant
- Every organization that has ever partnered with microsoft has lost, big time
So, the logical step is to throw away everything you have, ignore the market trend, and move to windows?
What. The. Fuck.
Partnering with Google, porting QT to Android, merging all cool meego functionality into Android, and cleaning up your product line didn't ever cross your mind, Nokia?
But you can see their main mistake was hiring Stephen Elop. Since he left Macromedia he couldn't hold a job for more than a year. Nothing screams failure like a CEO that roams through 3 companies in 2 years. And he got to Nokia from Microsoft. Really Nokia, just WTF.
Regardless, it doesn't seem to be the only company that doesn't get it. Most technology companies nowdays just plain don't get it. This morning I broke my samsung phone (android 1.6), so I bought a new one (Galaxy, 2.1 Eclair). It came with a shitload of crappy samsung apps, an awful theme, gmail replaced for some stupid mail app, and Yahoo as the search engine (can't be changed). I just rooted it, and installed Froyo. Looks awesome now. Why are technology companies boycotting themselves so badly lately? I just don't get it. /rant
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
They make it impossible for anyone to find a way to file a complaint about their policies and some of their pages have threats of deleting your account if you ask the wrong question in the wrong place. What a bunch of first class a-holes.
Is is really that hard to have a feedback form? Do they really have to go around threatening to ban people for complaining in the wrong place?
Why do people like Android so much? People might call Apple arrogant but at least they have feedback forms and they don't threaten to ban people for asking questions.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
http://blip.tv/file/4790125
There's something non-stupid about this entire evolution to you? Do share.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd say that the odds of world domination look slim; but I don't see why QT couldn't continue doing what it did before the Nokia acquisition(even if Nokia has no further interest, they paid good money for Trolltech, so they'd be stupid to destroy them internally, rather than spin them off again and take what they can get...)
Nokia (or more specifically the MS guy who got into CEO position) essentially threw its entire 5 year "linux phone" development under the bus. Trolltech purchase is pennies in comparison.
Here's the video. There is "sexual" content in that his background isn't SFW. You have been warned if you really care about it.
http://blip.tv/file/4790125 [NSFW]
Seems like RAM (and mtd/flash storage) would go through the roof by adding Qt to Android. And the Android market has no dep resolution capability yet. So you'd have to pull all of Qt in for every project that needs to use it. Bad idea... Also you will have to manually create bindings to all of Android's core APIs to do anything useful, and you'd always be playing catch-up (or maybe you would have to just limit yourself to the ones that come in the NDK).
Nokia (or more specifically the MS guy who got into CEO position) essentially threw its entire 5 year "linux phone" development under the bus. Trolltech purchase is pennies in comparison.
The funny thing is they spent all the money on Meego, which still exists, and now they aren't using it. But now some other company, maybe one with a strong Intel partnership, can come along, scoop it up and run with it if they decide their existing OS is dying a slow death. Especially if the existing OS is already Linux-based and they could reuse some of their existing code. (Hello HP?)
Using the other links people have posted its safe after 5 seconds in, just watched it at work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6g1HsD5Roo (When youtube finishes processing)
Oh no! My mind has once again been scarred by a one second glimpse of the female breast! Thank you gentle stewards of YouTube for protecting the others from reliving the Janet Jackson superbowl horror.
Finally Time to start porting desktop stuff to Android....
This is a golden opportunity to kick Oracle in the nuts. If this is played right this will be the first cross over netbook - mobile device.
Sigh...
- You own one of the best development frameworks in the world, a framework that is 100% cross platform, and totally Unix friendly
A lot of people would argue .Net is a much better development environment than Qt. I can't understand why someone would willingly use C++ to develop user applications ( not systems dev ) in 2011. Even Android promotes Java for this.
- The world is changing. Windows is decaying on desktops. Unix runs most servers, many desktops (combining Apple + GNU/Linux + other free Unix-like systems), and is the biggest mobile player (33% Android + 16% Apple)
How is windows 'decaying'? Is that your emotional way of saying that it's losing marketshare? If so, why should Nokia care?
- You have an awesome linux-based mobile platform (meego).
Yes, unfortunately, only nerds care about that. And in case you missed Elop's many interviews, the board was focused on delivering more than just an operating system. Microsoft brings, XBox, office productivity, Bing and many other very large franchises.
- Microsoft has consistently failed on the mobile market, and is irrelevant
Many of the innovative features found on Android and IPhone today came from Microsoft and RIM. They ran the market for at least a decade before they faltered. WP7 has been out for only 3 months and has already gained 1-3% ( depends on who you ask ). That's without Nokia.
- Every organization that has ever partnered with microsoft has lost, big time
HTC made all its money before a year or two ago from Microsoft. That tiny company would never have been able to produce its own OS. Sony did the same. Dell and HP have both grown for decades using Microsoft software.
how come nobody else has noticed that the YouTube video has been removed for "nudity or sexual content?" Is someone playing dirty tricks, or has the editor just not bothered to check the links???
Nokia is one of the few companies that has really good wireless baseband technology. In fact, their baseband phone chipsets are second only to Qualcomm's. They have lots of very good and probably very well-paid wireless engineers who do all this stuff. Mr. Steven Elop probably doesn't give a damn about baseband, if he even knows what it is. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that he will sack the entire wireless engineering division and start using chips from Qualcomm or someone else. Actually, he'll probably go for a 2nd or 3rd tier vendor for the baseband. After all, it is all about the OS and apps, right? That is all he knows.
Within a couple of years, Nokia will be another pure OEM that simply assembles phones in China based on 100% sourced components. Mr. Elop and his Wall Street buddies will enjoy a couple of years of profit because of all the cost savings due to the sacked engineers, during which his bonus will be large enough to let a couple of generations of his family live in luxury. After that, Nokia will slide down to be part with the Chinese OEMs, and Elop will go on to rape the next company.
n/t
Do you HONESTLY believe Meego had a snowball's chance in hell? Really? Because you might want to go to Endgadget and read their actual hands on review and not just the fawning press releases. There you will find lovely quotes such as "not even alpha quality", "Under the top shine there is nothing substantial" "Very little functionality" and "would need at least a year to be where the others are now" which of course by then would be even farther behind as nobody else will be standing still.
It is pretty sad that /. has become Boycott Novell with all the "ZOMG M$!" so thick that people would completely ignore reality just to throw in another M$ conspiracy. Do you think they hired a new CEO just because it was Tuesday? The facts are thus: Nokia is bleeding share like there is no tomorrow, dumbphones are going the way of 8-tracks and that was the only market Nokia had real share in, their smartphone OS was frankly a joke compared to iOS, and they simply didn't have the luxury to throw another year at development of yet another Linux based OS that may or may not sell.
Now considering if they would have went Android all they would have gotten is a thank you letter from Brin and Page while leaping into a market that is already beyond saturated, both HP and Apple won't sell them WebOS and iOS respectfully, and MSFT was willing to shell out billions to make Nokia the hardware arm for WinPhone 7. Considering their choices you'd have to be a Boycott Novell level of "ZOMG M$! ZOMG!!" conspiracy theorist to honestly think they had another option here. What did you expect them to do, just close up shop and return the money to the shareholders?
I'm sure there are those here that would honestly rather see a company close down and thousands go out of work rather than seeing MSFT get anything, but those of us that can just look at the numbers without being blinded by nerd rage can see the writing on the wall: They had no real smartphone presence, their OS they did have was seriously behind and would take time they didn't have to catch up, and the only other OS they could get their hands on is so over saturated you'd have to be nuts to want to use it ATM. They made the best call with what they had to work with, and only time will tell if it was a good one or not, but I fail to see how they had much of a choice here. It wasn't like the company was all hearts and flowers before the big bad MSFT came along.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think WYSIWYG editors for UI have failed miserably. XML, HTML or even QML are one solution, simple native libraries another. It seems that the UI implementation tools are twenty years old and suitable for designing fill in forms for PC. None of the platforms really support the programmers ability innovate with the UI and everything "cool" or fluid has to be custom coded at fairly low level. Qt is/was supposed to solve this, but I'm not seeing it.
Not soon enough I am afraid, it would finally make android a first class device.
Got Code?
Does that mean that some day Qt will support system wide "make install"? I've tried installing Qt on my desktop PC, and the install instructions says that this is not supported, just set some environment variable to point to the build directory.
This is all great news, but really, what's with the "I had a dream" speech ?! This is actually rather embarrassing. It's just a darn software library!
Um- perhaps it never occurred to him? Because, you know, a lot of Europeans wouldn't even notice.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
QT isn't big enough to compete. The other juggernauts have the momentum and QT will fail. it is not because it is a bad technology - it just doesn't have the traction.
I think QT has a place on Android. Think of all those useful Linux apps you'd like to see on your tablet for example. Then there are apps migrating from Nokia's platform which could find it useful.
What I would like to see on Android is a proper alternative to the Dalvik framework. There is the NDK but it would be nice to see a proper LLVM like environment where you can write C++ code but it is turned to an intermediate bitcode and isn't tied to one platform or architecture.
Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting. Why go with Meego when you can get a supported and actively developed OS instead?
Every now and then someone rants about division between desktop Linux distributions being the cause of lack of adoption. In mobile Linux "distributions" there is one large player and porting to and from the various alternatives is much more complex.
Perhaps it's just better in the long run to rally around Android and do our best to make it as open as possible, Meego doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And I'm saying this as a happy N900/Maemo user.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Anyone else notice that the youtube demo video has been taken down for "violation of youtube's policy on nudity of sexual content" ?
Or is it just me ? Mirror, anyone ?
But MeeGo is intel's 100th attempt to get some embedded OS (or distro) like this off the ground. Everyone always abandons the platform, before it gets very far. Always. Always the same reason : intel's chips just aren't cost-competitive for small electronics, and intel (understandably) refuses to develop for anything else.
But for example OMAP3530 can play quite complex games, maybe even better ones than intel's power-efficient atoms with the built-in chipset and are a third of the cost per chip, and at least equally efficient.
The sad fact is that this is despite the obvious intel advantages : their fab facilities are second to none, not in quantity, nor in quality. Logic would seem to indicate that therefore their chips should be the cheapest, but they never seem to be.
The only reason anyone buys intel chips (other than their really cool SSD disks) seems to be that windows refuses to run on anything else, and therefore one only finds intel chips in (cost-efficient) server hardware.
They have distributors.
Deleted
A very impressive demo - and nice eye candy right at the start!!
My only problem with this is the sheer SIZE of required QT Libraries.
During the demo, the author downloaded over 25MB of QT Libraries to run some simple applications. 25MB is just too much.
My HTC Desire 2.2 hovers around the 25MB-30MB free space due to having only about 150MB internal memory to play with (the rest of the 256MB is taken up with bloat that came with the phone and cannot be removed).
I guess this will become far more relevant as the next gen phones hit the scene (these typically have >>> 512MB memory).
Still, very very very impressive.
http://markets.ft.com/tearsheets/performance.asp?s=fi:nok1v
"new 52-week low during today's trading session when it reached 6.41"
Frankly, the download time for the libraries is unacceptable - it should be packaged along with the application itself. If it's so large (25Mb is much more than most apps), then something is seriously wrong. When I get an app from the marketplace, I'm happy for it to be added to the system download queue and wait until I get a notification that it's ready to use. If that app then required focus whilst spending another 10 minutes downloading stuff, I'd just quit it and uninstall. I'd never get to find out how great the app might be.
Yes, it's down for me with that message as well. Guess QT is hawt stuff...
OMG 5 seconds of naked breasts. This monster who ever posted the video should be stoned to death. What if a child sees it? It will be scared for live and probably became a sexist rapist and a murderer.
What ever is wrong with American people? Why you are so scared of nudity, shouldn't you be so proud living in "the most free country in the world" with the first amendment and so?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Unfortunately, and I say this with more than 30 years experience to back me up, there isn't actually a lot of connection between social progressiveness and engineering skills. Your own "having a hard time" is itself stereotypical - Richard Feynmann was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, but his attitudes to women were mixed up and sent some very bad messages. I'd suggest that for someone to want to do the work you describe yourself as doing, you might yourself have some background problems. I imagine most people without serious sexual hangups would find fetishism and so on incomprehensible and boring.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What happened to the demo video?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Just do the about face and tell all those Qt developers they employ to make Qt run on WP7
How will Qt run on WP7 if standard C++ doesn't even run on WP7 due to not being verifiably type-safe? The excuse for C++ found on WP7 has different, incompatible syntax for pointers and arrays. Even if they rewrite Qt line-by-line for C#, applications for such a Qt on WP7 won't be portable to anything else.
Elop knew only Microsoft so when faced with all that Qt Linux type stuff he decided to screw the company he was meant to be working for in return for something he at least understood a little.
He is a Microsoft agent out to support Microsoft at the expense of Nokia. It's obvious to anyone with eyes to see and a brain to understand.
Is anybody buying Windows phones anymore anyway? It looks like it's all iPhone and Android from here served with a side of BlackBerry. I bet they don't port QT to FreeDOS, Haiku or Syllable either!
...that one day, all God's androids will join hands and sing, in the words of the old Nokia spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we're free at last!"
Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting.
Sure, but isn't that why Nokia didn't? They didn't want to be one of a thousand other Android distributors?
Although it does bring an interesting point: Android is Linux too. Can anybody just mix and match code from Android and Meego and make something that e.g. runs Android apps and has the good bits from Meego, or is there some kind of licensing mess?
Mobile development is slowly but surely standardizing on html + css + javascript for the presentation layer. Qt on Android is about as relevant as a C64 emulator on Android - a cool hobby project for a few enthusiasts.
I really want to be able to use Remote X On my Android phone, that is the one feature I really want that I do not currently have. Hopefully this will allow me to do that sometime in the future.
Sigh... uhuhuh..... eh wtf?
Kervin you dont know very much of what you are writing, but thats ok, you are definitely a windows user and I think thats a MUST for being one.
The point is that WM7 sucks and it will represent the end of a long term company, and wrong turns can make you crash.
Mediocre programmers forget core ideas, uses crappy frameworks (.net) and produces crappy results.
Its ok, I will keep this thread and re-read it in less than 24 month
Would've been an interesting set of points, if you didn't invoke end"foxnews looks professional compared to us when we talk about nokia"gadget.
They still have the article where they compared N8's camera to the slap on-crap that IP4 has and concluded that IP4 camera is better. They even sited their own pics which showed autumn London blooming with colors like beach in Bahamas on massively overprossed IP4's camera (which when you actually delve into the pics is done to hide the atrocious general detail quality even for 5mp camera) and conclude that IP4 is better.
Just because the other phone has five magical letters on it. And I'm not talking about apple.
Iirc (correct me if I'm wrong) but most of the android applications aren't linux applications. They're java that runs on a virtual machine. Linux is just the underlying embedded OS that runs the VM. That being one of the biggest reasons for remarkably horrible energy efficiency of the OS.
Maemo/Meego on the other hand is an actual linux on a phone. It runs native linux software by default, rather then through a virtual machine.
There is however the fact that people got android working on n900, and maemo/meego working on some of android phones, so they should be interchangeable to a point hardware-wise.
"'I had a dream that one day, I'll be able to deploy existing Qt software on any Android platform. I had a dream that one day, all Qt applications will use system wide shared Qt libraries. I had a dream that one day, all Qt applications once compiled and deployed to one android platform, will run on any other newer android platform and will last for years without any recompilation. I had a dream that one day, I'll be able to create, manage, compile debug and deploy Qt apps using a first class citizen IDE.'
Wow. He just described Java and its ecosystem... and wasn't Qt and it's C++ followers 100% against Java back in the day (before JambaQt). Wouldn't it be easier to just fix AWT/Swing/SWT?
Right, so what I'm saying is, take the Linux kernel with whatever drivers someone has written for your device, and then install the Android VM and whatever else is required to get Android apps working on Maemo/MeeGo. Then you have a "Linux phone" which runs Android apps and any other part of Android you like, but can also run native apps and for that matter the whole GNU userland. Without really writing a huge amount of new code.
Getting the UI to be seamless would obviously take some work, but at first you could just do something like have an Android button in MeeGo that switches to the Android UI and vice versa.
I think QT has a place on Android. Think of all those useful Linux apps you'd like to see on your tablet for example.
Not to mention a UI without the CPU overhead of Java bytecode interpretting or Jitting. Incidentally, there is really only one target architecture for smart phones these days: ARM, with pretty much identical instruction sets. Hardware differences appear mostly at the chipset level, in other words, this is the concern of libraries not the compiler.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I brought up Engadget simply because they are one of the few that actually got a hands on instead of simply regurgitating the press releases. but I'm sure there are others that got a hands on, feel free to look them up as well. What you will find is the same thing that I found when looking up MeeGo, which was an Intel making excuses and saying "it'll be better in the future, promise" while showing code that frankly didn't work as well as Android 1.5 on CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) which simply won't cut it when faced with WebOS and WinPhone 7, much less the juggernaut that is iOS.
So please, look it up yourself. If you look at actual reviews and not just press releases you'll find the same thing I did, an OS that wasn't alpha quality and was nowhere near shipping ready. Since iOS and WebOS aren't for sale that left Nokia with Symbian, Android, or WinPhone 7. The Droid is beyond saturated, Symbian just wasn't up to the job of competing with whats out there which is why companies dropped it for Droid, so that just leaves WinPhone 7.
I just don't see how anybody looking at the data could conclude that Nokia had anywhere else to go. They simply don't have another year or two to coast on dumbphones while they sink money they can't afford into R&D for MeeGo in the hopes it'll shape up in time, and without a real product in the smartphone category they are bleeding share like there is no tomorrow. Despite the FUD being spread about 2012 at the earliest I'd lay my money on a Sept release of the first round of WinPhone 7, probably with a nice tie in and low bundle price for anyone that picks up an X360 with a Nokia WinPhone, since MSFT is spending big money to get Windows 7, X360, and WinPhone 7 to all play nice together.
When you look at the numbers Nokia just couldn't afford to stay the course as they don't have a practical monopoly to ride like Intel does. I think in the end the CEO will be given credit for making the best call he could with what he had to work with, especially if MeeGo isn't even at beta stage this time next year which from reviews is what they are looking at.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This phone already exists. It's called nokia n900. The main problem is weak and unoptimized hardware, so android applications won't run nearly as fast as they would have to be usable. But it already exists, and nokia has announced that n900 will have a meego successor coming out some time this year (along with similar lack of real support like n900, essentially ending up the same kind of a hacker's/programmer's phone).
So keep your fingers crossed that all the meego hate and Elop's actions haven't buried it enough to be bad on release.
They simply don't have another year or two to coast on dumbphones while they sink money they can't afford into R&D for MeeGo in the hopes it'll shape up in time, and without a real product in the smartphone category they are bleeding share like there is no tomorrow.
Actually, no. This is the image you get from endgadget and co. Reality is, even in last quarter their symbian sales grew. They didn't grow fast enough to keep market share on a market that's exploding, but they grew. And outside USA, specifically in markets that will matter in long term (BRIC + EU i.e. no crushing personal debt issues, no middle massively shrinking middle class), pretty much any measure shows that nokia phones are still occupy majority of top10 phones sold AND top10 phones used. By a large and wide margin. They're also reporting profits every quarter, which means that they're not even posting losses yet - and their last quarterly shows 10 billion in cash, which means that they could afford to take losses for a while - something that Elop clearly wants to capitalize on.
So yes, they could coast on their phones for at least two years more EASILY. So long as they just ignore the "rape the customer, make the phones for operator" US market. When Elop said that "microsoft phone will be the most operator friendly phone on the market", pretty much everyone who stuck with nokia because they liked their phones in spite of dated OS UI, knew that it was game over.
That is in process of killing nokia. Not the market share bleed, while still growing every quarter in both smartphone and dumbphone market globally.
Actually if YOU have been looking at what is going on in the BRIC you'd see that homegrown companies are putting out smartphones for that market already which while not up to the level of a Droid or iOS phone is already head and shoulders above what Nokia is offering for dumbphones.
Like it or not there is a reason why everyone is calling for the death of the dumbphone, because like the VCR the time is simply up. Just as the VCR didn't disappear overnight when DVD showed up so too will the dumbphone not instantly disappear, but anyone actually investing money in that market would have to be insane. It is pretty clear that what the third world and second world like the BRIC is gonna do is simply skip the PC revolution completely and just go straight to mobile, since it gives the power of a connected world without the need for the power generation and infrastructure required for the traditional desktop.
Like it or not Symbian is over, it is an outdated OS that simply wasn't up to the task, no different than PalmOS which like Nokia would have done if followed your advice they would have hung onto until they simply had NO market anymore. All that money for R&D (which frankly would have been MASSIVE in the case of MeeGo because like it or not it simply isn't anywhere near iOS level of quality or integration) had to come from somewhere and the market for dumbphones is razor thin margins at best.
The simple fact is we already saw the strategy your are advocating from Palm and we all saw how well THAT turned out, didn't we? By the time they got WebOS ready for primetime they simply had no money for marketing or incentives and simply bled out. That is EXACTLY what would have happened to Nokia if they would have stayed the course, That left Symbian,Droid, and WinPhone. Now I'm sure even you would agree that pushing out yet more Droids in a market this flooded would have been suicide, and while Symbian had a few fans like WinMo 6.5 more hated it than loved it.
Frankly I just don't see how you are able to say that giving up the smartphone market for 2 years while trying to survive on a rapidly dying razor thin dumbphone market would have been a wise move. it was simply a path with more chances to fail than to succeed and by going with MSFT they get billions in marketing as well as access to MSFT's WinPhone engineers and the ability to tie their hardware to the X360 and Win 7 desktop, both of which are doing quite well and are already in millions of homes. It seems to me given the options available to them the MSFT one was the safest and least likely to leave the company DOA.
It was just a smart business move and time will tell if it gives them a win. I personally believe if MSFT makes tie in to the X360 and Win 7 smooth and seamless that while they won't unseat iOS they could take a solid second and if they manage to appeal to X360 owners may even give Google a run for their money. Anyway time will tell and personally the more choices I have the better.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That said, I think it is retrograde to compile to any native instruction set, even ARM. There are differences between ARM chipsets (e.g thumb instructions), and who's to say it wouldn't make more sense to use MIPS or x86 or some other chipset some other day? LLVM exists precisely so devs don't have to care too much about the hardware, compilation can be deferred until the app is installed on a device. Ship the app as bitcode and only compile to native when the thing is installed or first executed. Android has recently introduced Renderscript which does support LLVM support but its being used in a way more analogous to CUDA / OpenCL than regular C++. I would like to see the LLVM extended to support regular C++ apps.
Dalkvik doesn't interpret Java bytecode. It's register based which makes it more analogous to a virtual CPU than a JVM.
Bafflegab. Respectfully, please do not lecture me on interpreter design ;-)
Performance isn't too bad with it
Nonsense. There is no way you can make an interpreter of any description run at more than a fraction of the speed of native code. Note that conclusions derived from false premises are likely also to be false.
That said, I think it is retrograde to compile to any native instruction set, even ARM.
You may think that but the battery in your phone will disagree.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?