Slashdot Mirror
Google Pulls Support For CDMA Devices
An anonymous reader writes "Google has just made some interesting changes to their developer pages. As of today, all of the documentation, source code, and firmware images pertaining to CDMA Android devices (including the Verizon Galaxy Nexus) have been removed. A statement from Google explains that the proprietary software required to make these devices fully functional got in the way of Android's open source nature, so CDMA devices are no longer supported as developer hardware. What does this mean for the Galaxy Nexus, which is only available as CDMA in the U.S.?"
How widespread is the use of CDMA in the first place?
GSM is superior and it's a shame that so much of GSM is relegated to the inferior 1600mhz band.
I guess this means Sprint, who has been pushing Android phones very aggressively for the past 3 years, is left out in the cold too?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Sounds to me like the carriers and Google butted heads on some code, and this is Google putting the pressure on the carriers to open up parts of their software, but that is purely speculation on my part. I'm just curious how this is going to play out with Sprint's rollout of the LTE Google Nexus.
As of today, all of the documentation, source code, and firmware images pertaining to CDMA Android devices (including the Verizon Galaxy Nexus) have been removed.
And so when the service providers finally return us to the IBM '60s era of dumb terminals and mainframes, it will be without promises of information integrity or retention. For when you have a few high profile customers, it matters to please them. But when you have hundreds of millions of products to hire out to advertisers, the loss of ten thousand means little. Never mind that the Internet is a peer to peer network and availability has never required centralisation: just trust in Google to only provide you the information it and its partners think suitable.
Last I looked, it is Sprint & Verizon. AT&T & T-Mobile being GSM.
But this sounds strange - Google is just handing over Verizon's & Sprint's customer bases over to Apple, Microsoft and others? Why not just work w/ Qualcomm, and put in a more restrictive OSS license, and continue to support those devices, rather than abandon a good portion of the market, one of whom is the leader in 4G in the US?
The Galaxy Nexus will continue to work just fine on CDMA. For future models, well, that's another story... Google forces the industry to either open up their firmware or move on to GSM. Good thing, IMO.
To answer the question "What does this mean for the Galaxy Nexus, which is only available as CDMA in the U.S.?". My understanding is there will still be the HSPA+ version, made for GSM networks, available in the USA, and that Google will continue to support it.
And only for some features. Consumer phones will of course still be fully supported, receive all updates etc.
AOSP builds from source have never had full telephony function for CDMA devices due to missing carrier binaries, so Google is moving to clarify this, and is no longer listing CDMA devices as fully supported for developers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In Japan, they also have W-CDMA (UMTS), but at least the phones there typically use uSIM cards, which just happen to be similar to GSM SIM cards.
I can take any unlocked phone that supports UMTS, and put in any uSIM card from any other the 3 major carriers (softbank, au, & docomo) and it will work.
However in the USA, CMDA based carriers refused to allow any type of uSIM support for their networks, since they want users to be locked down to their networks. Even if you paid the extra $$$ for an unlocked iPhone 4S, you cannot get it work on both Sprint and Verizon the networks. The iPhone unlock is only for GSM not CDMA in the USA. The same is also true for Android phones as well.
I am very happy to see Google finally stand up against the horrible CMDA situation in the USA. As previous commenters have stated, it would be nice if either CMDA went away, or they followed the example of Japan, and are required to have uSIM cards.
The goal should be to have every unlocked smart-phone unlocked and able to work with every carrier, but simply inserting a SIM/uSIM card. Personally I think it is horrible that smart-phones are not required to be unlocked, since these phones are typically not subsidized with 2-3 year contacts that covers the full cost of the phone many times over.
GSM Firmwares are closed, exactly as CDMA is, why not pull support for it too...?
The problem that I've always had w/ SIM cards is that they have only a fraction of the capabilities of one's main phone. On the phone, if you are storing the different numbers of a person, as long as you are storing it in the phone memory, you can, under his/her name, store Main#, Home#, Work#, Cell# and Pager#, However, if you wanted to save something like that on a SIM, the SIM would take it down as 5 different numbers, and looking @ them, one wouldn't have a clue.
In between, I used to notice some stores carry flash memory cards w/ a SIM form factor - think Sandisk made them. What exactly were they - could one use them as SIMs, albeit w/ memory to do the things mentioned above? I notice that they seem to have disappeared from the market.
Anyway, having a SIM that one can switch b/w phones is a good thing, but if moving the well organized phone#s will be a pain, I honestly don't see the advantage. I wonder whether the RUIMs in CDMA phones get over this limitation, or are they still hamstrung by it? If this capability was there, then CDMA would genuinely be a better alternative to GSM. I do prefer CDMA myself, since the voice quality and reception is generally better, and I typically don't use phones to access the internet, nor do I think wireless modems are an economical way of surfing the internet, as opposed to Wi-Fi.
This is a bit disappointing to me, or maybe I just don't see the point? I can't forsee the carriers opening up their network infrastructure, getting qualcomm to open up their chipsets, or a move to GSM for these major CDMA carriers any time soon. With these options not possible I don't know what the point of this is (feel free to enlighten me). In the mean time we see damage to the value of the Android platform on the two best networks for Android owners. 1) Sprint has been a major player in the Android ecosystem, one of the early adopters (right alongside T-Mobile) and having rolled out the most cutting edge hardware and largest bevy of phones ahead of the others. They are also the only partner network for Google Wallet in the US. 2) Verizon, while a much more closed network, offers the fastest and most widespread 4G LTE network. Android power users (with a little cash to burn) flock to Android phones on this network for blazing speeds on the go. A frequent techies commuter dream. On the other hand, we have T-Mobile who has been limping along with the (in comparison to the other networks) under powered variant of the GS2 and no plans for the Galaxy Nexus at this time. We also have AT&T who hasn't been doing too badly but does not roll out near as many Android devices as any of the other networks, has been rated worst in customer serivce, tends to focus on their iPhone sales, and has encountered frequent network capacity issues. Just doesn't make sense to me right now.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
Google isn't "Dropping" CDMA support. CDMA Android phones aren't going anywhere any time soon - they're just not supporting them as DEVELOPER devices. Due to issues with Custom ROMs not working as best they could (due to the proprietary components required), Google is basically saying that the CDMA Nexus phones are no better than any other non-nexus device when it comes to "official" developer support. They'll still exist, they'll still be sold, updated, etc. but they won't be classed as "Developer devices". That's it.
This isn't anything new, it was the same case with the Nexus S 4G and even the Xoom.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
shows the US should be no different than anybody else
Didn't Andy Rubin say that Android was open? Or maybe he is just a big hypocrite and Android is not only a mediocre product compared to Meego and WebOS but also not open at all?
--
Tired of the Google assholes spying on you? Switch to DuckDuckGo today!
I read in a Groklaw link y'day:
"Spark: The first free-software, Linux tablet is on its way"
"Open-source software and Linux, thanks to Android, is well represented on tablets. But, if you didnâ(TM)t want to deal with proprietary firmware and software, you were out of luck⦠until now. Aaron Seigo, one of the KDEâ(TM)s lead developers, and his team are just about ready to roll-out the first tablet based entirely on Linux and free software: The Spark.
For those of you who are a little puzzled right nowâ"âBut, isnâ(TM)t Android based on Linux??â let me start by explaining that yes, Android is Linux and open-source software. But, its implementations on various smartphones and tablets always uses some proprietary software, firmware, and/or shims to combine the code into a working device. Spark is different. - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet"
So I think if Google hates proprietary stuff on Android phones, it should remove developer support for all GSM phones that have it too. Talk of double standards.... or maybe Google is actually against Qualcomm, not CDMA?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
A few minutes of googling would probably bring me up to speed on the telecom acronyms, but I always thought AT&T and TMobile used GSM and all of the faster technologies were built on top of the GSM framework... EDGE, HSDPA and stuff like that. Similarly, I believed Sprint and Verizon use CDMA based technology and built subsequent enhancements on top of those.
Here's where my confusion comes in though. Looking at my phone, I go to "Menu" -> "Settings" -> "Wireless and network" -> "Mobile networks" -> "Network mode" and I see three options. One is GSM/WCDMA (Auto mode), another is GSM only and the last is WCDMA only. So now I'm curious about what's going on here.
I'm packing up for a road trip right now but I hope to come back here and someone who knows what they are talking about will spell it out in simple, understandable terms for me, because clearly, I don't know what I thought I knew.
Which do you think is stronger, the provider who keeps customers by locking them in or the provider who keeps customers by providing superior service? Which is the better customers, those who stay with you because they are trapped or those who stay with you because they like you?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...for an Android device that I won't be able to use for development purposes moving forward? It was supposed to be the defacto phone for Google support. If this is true, I'm a little (more than) disappointed. Feels like a bait and switch from my perspective, even if technically it may not be.
Why does this sound like the decision to allow udev to separate the loadable module from the proprietary firmware? Sound to me like Google is doing nothing more than saying, "You have to pay the license fees to include the firmware for CDMA."
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Actually, Beta was technically better than VHS. When I had to switch to VHS I noticed the quality difference. But VHS won because Sony decided to charge the movie companies a royalties. The effect was that the new movies came out on VHS, and only showed up on Beta after market experience suggested that it might be worth paying the royalties for a later Beta version. It didn't take long for consumers to notice that new releases were on VHS, and Beta lost the game entirely.
Both Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, and account for many millions of Android phone users. Does Google's move mean no more upgrades to their existing phones? And no new phones for them?
Maybe 3G and 4G aren't "CDMA" as Google defines them. Or maybe this move is a temporary restructuring. Or maybe it's Google forcing some concession from Verizon and Sprint, either in CDMA licensing or something else. Because I can't see the wisdom of Google just cutting off the majority of its US smartphone users.
--
make install -not war
There probably has been a lot of whining in back channels about custom ROM's being created which strip out carrier crap.
Additionally there is the Motorola deal... umm... Motorola is one of the LARGEST CDMA licensees....hmmmm..
Something more is afoot, and the lack of transparency , probably due to the BS NDA's etc. is just annoying.
1311393600 - Back to Black
And the cellphone analogy is that Qualcomm is the "Sony" here. Qualcomm owns all the patents related to CDMA technology and has proven to be an I.P. bully to both its customers and its competitors.
This /. article is actually about a pissing match between Google and Qualcomm.
You are aware that CDMA is technologically superiour to GSM in EVERY way.
Care to explain why/how? For those of us who aren't aware?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
3G CDMA superior? A system that can't even handle simultaneous voice and data? Yeaaaap; funny definition of superior. (Don't confuse the modulation of the radio waves and the higher level protocols.)
Oh, and everyone treats UMTS as a synonmyn for 3G GSM. Nobody actually cares that much. (And before you complain too much, the same thing happens in networking - gigabit ethernet is about as similar to ten megabit ethernet as UMTS is to GSM. Completely different on the wire, but the same high-level protocol.)
Also, CDMA was terrible for roaming. Because it was so US centric, international roaming was not a feature that CDMA network operators cared about. Outside of the USA, international roaming was *the* killer reason for GSM. But the USA is so full of itself that roaming was beyond comprehension.
I was in one of the few countries outside of the USA that had a CDMA network. We didn't get roaming.
And, yes, there is a Europe first mentality - but there is a much (MUCH) stronger USA-first mentality inside the USA. That's why after the most recent US-led Iraq invasion, various US politicans were trying to set up USA funded CDMA networks, even though roaming-with-Europe was a far, FAR, better idea for the people of Iraq.
Anyway... summary: CDMA was fine for an insular country that didn't care about anyone else. It was a stupid idea for any other country.
CDMA as a multiplexing technology is superior to TDMA.
CDMA is not superior to GSM, which happens to use TDMA.
Finally
AT&T and T-Mobile have areas where their coverage sucks, its a fact.
MAJOR UH OH!
No doubt that Google "Engineers" are feviorlishly working to remove all the "patented and copyrighted" code from their code base. Yeikes Burnhielde!
Google may become very sluggish and "search" will be not quite what it was before this fracus.
Fracus; Definition: A noisy, disorderly fight or quarrel; a brawl. See synonyms at brawl. Aka: Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Actions System.
LoL