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Nexus Prime, And Ice Cream Sandwich, Go For a Video Tour
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Examiner.com, citing a report at gagdet.ro, about Samsung's upcoming high-end Nexus Prime, the first phone to be delivered with Ice Cream Sandwich. "This version of the Nexus Series (Google's Android flag bearer) runs the next version of Android: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This version is meant to combine Honycomb (Android 3.0) with Gingerbread(Android 2.3) into one OS, that will run on all devices. In addition to the merger of the two OS's, it also changes the Android UI a bit. One major change, is that the icons and the UI is a lot more sophisticated and clean, making even iOS look old and clunky. Also, it removes the requirement for Android phones to have hard/soft-hard mixed buttons, in favor of allowing manufacturers to use whichever type of button they wish. Also, it adds a soft button on the lock screen, to go straight to the camera app."
The one thing i don't really like about my Nexus One is the semi-soft buttons, The back/menu/home/search buttons along the bottom are touch based but they _seem_ to be separate from the main touchscreen. However they are right next to the touchscreen and there is no divider. So often when trying to hit one of the bottom row of buttons i'll accidentally hit one of the four menu type buttons instead. This is especially problematic on the rare occasions when the touchscreen wigs out and detects my finger offset slightly from where it actually is. (I've seen this problem on more than one phone, so i'm not sure if it's a problem with the current version of Android or just a problem with multiple hardware sets.)
So encouraging full software buttons seems like a mistake to me in that respect. But in addition i really wish there were more physical hardware buttons. When listening to music or audiobooks i really with there were a physical set of buttons i could use without having to turn the screen back out. Rewind, play, pause and fast-forward would be the most obvious and useful ones. The volume rocker already works perfectly well has a hardware button that performs its function while the screen is off and there's plenty of room along the right side of the phone for more buttons.
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Only an apple fan can argue that higher performance, more specialization, and a larger feature set are actually a step in the wrong direction, and a one-size-fits-all approach to manufacturing is the right choice.
You do realize phones have had dedicated camera buttons for years?
Where's the sandwich? I watched the whole demo and I didn't see it. Or is it like the cake again?
Even with 4.3" about three quarters of the population won't be able to reach all points across the screen with their thumb when using the phone one-handed without balancing it on three fingers. And not many people will like a phone that NEEDS both hands to use it.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
And then have a line of three or four small buttons (on or off the screen) on the very bottom of the face and a screen that stretches 4.3 inches across to the top. Using this thing while walking and carrying something with the other hand is like eating soup with a fork.
And no, I'm not trolling here. These things are great for males with large hands or for geeks who usually sit down over anything resembling a computer anyway and would love it to have foot switches, too. But how can those companies just walk over the needs of major parts of the population and expect to be sucessful with this? I just don't get it. Or of course Google and Samsung are purposefully limiting their target group to a certain part of the population, because... yes, why would they do that? Any ideas?
Yes, these "features" appear to be rather annoying flare rather than actually increasing productivity and usefulness.
Then again, I'm still not a fan of anything touch capacitive and only marginally tolerate touch resistive displays... Even if it means getting a crappier device, I'll take physical buttons and a QWERTY keyboard on a phone any day as I just feel more productive and less error prone having them.
Yeah, Google doesn't want shitty Chinese tablets spoiling their image.
But that's the deal with open source - if you have an open source software package, people will use it for things you might not approve of.
most devices I can think of (proper ones, not your crappy tmobile comet that launched with android 1.5 or w/e) have had 2 upgrades. eg. Evo 4G. 2.1 > 2.2 > 2.3, Galaxy S 2.1 > 2.2 > 2.3, motorola droid X 2.1 > 2.2 > 2.3
Android doesn't seem to be "winning" in the only thing that counts for a business -- profits.
Apple also comprehensively won the "profit" war back in the day with Mac computers. Guess which platform 94% of the world isn't using today?
The current trend is looking very much like the 1990s all over again -- Apple with its superior UI getting overrun by a platform which isn't quite as nice, but is distributed amongst many manufacturers and is much cheaper for end users to purchase.
And once again, as a geek, I'm not at all concerned, as it's a lot easier to hack the Android platform than the Apple equivalent. PCs brought us Microsoft supremacy, but they also brought us linux; Android's shaping to be much the same, and as long as Google and manufacturers like Samsung openly encourage users to hack their phones, I'll keep supporting them with my dollar. The fact that I'll be paying less dollars in doing so is just an added bonus :)
(I've never really understood the "more profit" argument from a fanboi perspective -- the fact that Apple is making users pay more for their phones is hardly a reason for the end users to brag. It's a great reason if you're seeking to buy Apple shares, it's not a good reason if you're in the market for a phone ...)
It's not even a question to me whether they'll release it. To compare Honeycomb v. Ice Cream:
Honeycomb:
- Experimental. Rushed. Beta-quality. Embarrassment.
- Supports <1% of total Android devices.
- Deprecated within 1 year of release.
- No hacker community.
- No code contribution pledge. No history of open source.
Ice Cream Sandwich:
- Open source commitment made back in January/February of '11.
- Theoretically it supports most Android devices.
- All previous versions of handset OS were open source.
I only see ICS being closed if it's fundamentally broken in some way (UI design) or if it's alpha-quality crap competing with the iPhone 5. Personally I'll switch to iOS if that happens.
Second, Objective-C, despite being what you claim is a nightmare to program for, has so many top notch applications that your claim falls flat on its ass. You can program in C / C++ for Android, but you're still running everything through Goggle's ripoff virtual machine, with no performance benefit over using Java. If your iOS programming buddy tells you to first get a webview, he may just not be the most awesome programmer ever.
Er hang on. If you write C / C++ apps they're running natively. There is little if any Java / Dalvik at all aside from some glue perhaps if you want to launch some other activity or something similar. As for performance benefits, Dalvik is a register based VM, Java is a stack based VM. Completely separate things. Since 2.2 Dalvik runs the app through a JIT after which would execute at a reasonable clip, certainly nothing to be bothered about in the vast majority of apps, and if it was an issue, well C/C++ support is there too.
Ok, you can dislike Android, but you're blindly full of crap.
I do. I can make a video with it if it makes you happy, but having a phone with as much horsepower as iOS without the clutter actually makes it way smother. iOS is full of little hangs and stutters that are hidden under "cool" animations, but they're there.
Second, Android is not slow out of the box. Android on a 100$ phone might be slow out of the box, but if you're comparing a 700$ iPhone with an Android phone, at least have the decency to chose an equivalent phone. The user experience on the top-of-the line Android phones has been the same (if not better) than on iOS. So, yes, my modified Android (because I can modify it to run smoother than your iPhone) runs faster than iOS. If you missed the part where I talked about pre-caching of applications, read it again. It's actually the secret for an instantly responsive apps (that, again, any top of the line android phone will do - the ones 200$ cheaper than an iPhone).
I've programmed in Objective-C. And I never said it was impossible, and good for Apple that there's talent where there's money. But when you say that everything runs through Google's VM as if that makes everything slow, you're an idiot. They might run inside a VM, but the code is native code and it runs as is. If you're doing processor intensive stuff on your mobile phone (physics simulations, video decoding, etc) you'll benefit immensely by using c code. And google's VM is actually highly optimized and way faster than the Java VM you're complaining about.
My "buddy" is actually not the only one. Remember the researchers that found the iOS tracking? ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GynEFV4hsA0&t=10m40s ). They also seem to run from it around 10:50. And the thing about going for the webview actually shows intelligence. If you only want some menus to show some photos with music / sound / whatever, why bang your head against the wall? You don't need a ferrari to go on a groceries run.
And again, read the part where my 2yo Desire (that actually came out 3 months before the iPhone 4) does everything the other one does, but smoother. Try running iOS4 on an iPhone 3G and you'll be crying for your lack of horspower the same way a 100$ Android phone will. But if you level yourself from the top, nowadays, the top of the line Androids WILL beat your iPhone out of the park on pretty much everything.
Well, considering the source code to Gingerbread 2.3.4 (what my phone runs) is fully available as Google said it would be, and Google said Android 3.x Honeycomb would be closed as it is, why would you doubt them? Android 4.0 Ice Cream will be open source and the Cyanogen guys will be hacking it into working ROMs for every phone on the market soon after it's released.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Also, citing objective-C as a reason for better and faster apps also shows ignorance. Ignoring the fact the Objective-C is a nightmare to program to (and that it has a stupidly steep learning curve)
Look, I'm an Android/Linux fanboy and haven't bought an Apple product in over a decade, but how can you say Obj-C is difficult with a straight face? It is c with a minimal set of extra features added on. When I used to regularly program in c, I was able to pick up Obj-C in an afternoon.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
No, the reason is because the source for 3.0 is broken. Yes, it will work on tablets, but for the majority of Android devices out there it simply will not work. So instead of releasing a broken product, they are putting off releasing the code until it is in a state where it is usable.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I recently switched from an iPhone 4 to a Nexus S 4G, and my experience is exactly the opposite. The reason I switched was because I recently started working for Google and I'm doing some work on Google Wallet, so I decided I'd better get more familiar with the platform. But I expected to find that Android was less polished than iOS, and I expected to miss my iPhone (which I gave to my wife).
In fact, I think that Honeycomb (don't know about previous versions of Android) is much more polished and better thought-out than iOS from an interface and usability perspective. There are a handful of things that aren't as good; I really like the scrolling date bars in iOS and the drop-down list selection in Android is clunky, but there are far, far more ways in which my Nexus S is better.
To start with, I greatly prefer the app organization scheme in Android. I spent way too much time trying to find some way to organize apps on my iPhone so that I could quickly find the stuff I use frequently but without burying the infrequently-used stuff on one of several rarely-used app pages or in some rarely-used app folder. On the iPhone I frequently had to resort to typing the app name in the search bar for my lesser-used apps. Android's approach is much better.
I also really like the "Car Home" mode, which simplifies the UI down to six large buttons focused on stuff you're likely to want to do while driving. And what makes it especially useful is the excellent voice search capability. I use my phone constantly while driving now, but never look at the screen or type anything. I even carry on conversations via SMS while driving, but never looking at the screen or punching buttons. As long as I speak a little more slowly than normal, and enunciate clearly, it's very nearly perfect.
Another little bit of polish that really impresses me is the way Android handles competing audio tasks. I like to listen to audiobooks while driving, and so I'm often listening to a book while also using the navigation software. I tried several different navigation apps on iOS, but all of them talked right over my book, resulting in me not being able to understand either the story or the directions. On Android, the book (or music, or whatever), is automatically paused when the navigation app talks, and when the book resumes it backs up about one second, ensuring that I don't miss anything.
I much prefer Android's approach to notifications, too, and I think the mail app is much nicer. There are a lot more things I prefer about Android, but this is getting long enough.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I had an iPhone 4 for eight months, and an iPod touch for 2-3 years before that. I've only had my Nexus S for a few weeks, and I don't regret the switch in the slightest. In fact, I like the Nexus much better. To me, it feels not just more flexible, but more polished and better thought-out. And more flexible.
I'm sure that coming from a Google engineer this will be taken with a large grain of salt. But that doesn't change the fact that it's my honest opinion; and if I didn't like the Nexus better, I would say so.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And my phone is more reliable, the battery life is longer, I never run out of memory, I can view my mail and news sites in the browser, and I can use Maps. Since I don't use Market, I don't have to enter a Google email address so that those evil Googlers can track my every move.
And then there are the Android app developers. Invariably they want access to my contacts, they want to impersonate me, they want real-time access to my GPS location, even for apps as simple as Droid Flashlight.
Fuck'em.