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Microsoft To Invest In Rogue Android Startup Cyanogen
An anonymous reader writes The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft plans to be a minority investor in a roughly $70 million round of equity financing for mobile startup Cyanogen Inc. Neither company is commenting on the plan but last week during a talk in San Francisco, Cyanogen's CEO said the company's goal was to "take Android away from Google." According to Bloomberg: "The talks illustrate how Microsoft is trying to get its applications and services on rival operating systems, which has been a tenet of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella. Microsoft has in the past complained that Google Inc., which manages Android, has blocked its programs from the operating system."
Waiting for your carrier for an upgrade? One that might never come? Competition is a good thing in this case.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
What in the hell? Is Cyanogen "rogue" because they're using the Android Open-Source Project as it was designed? Because that also makes Samsung, Motorola, HTC and every other manufacturer who reskins/alters Android "rogue".
Microsoft has in the past complained that Google Inc., which manages Android, has blocked its programs from the operating system."
Haha, cry us a river Microsoft. I'm all for an open platform but this investment is just step 1 of their embrace, extend, extinguish operating procedure. What's that quote about how smaller companies should NEVER work with MS?
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
I'd like to see Cyanogen succeed because the more competition there is in the smartphone market, the more companies will be pressured to develop new, useful features.
I bought my first smartphone two years ago last month. It's a Samsung Galaxy S III. It still works great, despite some quirks. I felt like with the Galaxy S III, the smartphone was beginning to take a quantum leap forward in features. Especially for the last year, though, it seems like there isn't much to crow about except for some fingerprint functionality nobody uses. Phones are getting a bit more memory, somewhat faster CPUs, a bit better screens, and improved cameras but you would expect all of these things. In terms of new and interesting features, it seems like we're in a mature market where we've all decided upon what it means for a device to be a smartphone.
Perhaps Cyanogen will bring some excitement back. At worst, they'll come up with some new ideas that Samsung can license or copy. I'm using Samsung as an example, but I could be talking about HTC or one of the Chinese startups. I don't see a whole lot to distinguish current smartphones (except that Samsung does not permanently glue batteries inside of its products).
Is Microsoft preparing a Plan B for when they finally give up on Windows Mobile?
Why should things be any different this time?
Why is Snark Required?
Not always. Even cyanogenmod has abandoned many devices that could still be viable phones today. CM seems to focus mainly on the most popular phones for the latest releases, and in some cases, the devs for a particular make/model of device have just gone MIA, and development stagnates.
More specifically, because lots of Android's fundamental architecture was dictated by a perceived need to work on slow CPUs (as in, 400MHz ARMv6) with absurdly low-res displays (remember 240x360?). Literally NOBODY involved with Android's genesis would have believed you if you told them that 5 years after the HTC G-phone's arrival on T-mobile, a phone with 1280x800 display, 1Ghz dualcore CPU, a gig of RAM, and at least 4-8 gigs of flash would be considered uselessly ghetto and hopelessly obsolete.
Remember, the whole reason why Google made the Nexus One was its frustration with the wimpy hardware of the second-gen Android phones, and hints that the third-generation phones were only going to be another half-step better. On the day of its release, the Nexus One was literally leaps and bounds beyond any competing phone, and its popularity forced HTC and Samsung to throw away their roadmaps and race back to the drawing board to come up with the Evo4G and Galaxy S family.
Current things that make Android feel laggy:
* 30hz touchscreen drivers and screen update rates are still the norm. 1/30th of a second is long enough to be perceptible as "lag", and when you factor triple-buffering into the equation, the lag is more like 1/15 second.
* The resolution and color depths of high-end Android phones have completely outstripped the dumb-framebuffer 3Dfx-heritage architecture behind most current hardware. Most video chipsets were optimized for 16-bit color at 1280x800 (more or less), but some high-end Android phones now ship with 2560x1600 displays running at 24-bit color and can barely sustain 30fps, let alone 60fps or faster. Basically, they're optimized for (and accelerate) the wrong thing. They might have great 3D graphics for games, but those capabilities are unusable and useless at higher-res/color. That's why some Android homescreen-replacement apps use 3D acceleration, but become fuzzy during transitions... they drop the resolution and color depth down to what the chips can handle, and don't go back to full-resolution until the transition completes. You can see it for yourself... do the "rotating cube" effect (or whatever you want to use), and notice that the moment the gesture begins, the resolution gets fuzzed in half, then snaps back into focus when you stop.
* Android's primitive (compared to Java since 1.4) garbage collection, which practically forces the OS to constantly kill off apps running in the background to reclaim their RAM, coupled by the real-world problems of trying to use a phone's flash to do Linux-style virtual memory (if you aren't careful, you can literally burn through an eMMC's lifetime write count in a few months. MicroSD is even worse... more than a few guys at XDA have destroyed expensive Sandisk microSD cards with a few days of hard benchmarking and intensive swapping. That's why most Android ROMs no longer make it easy to enable swap, even though it can be a HUGE performance boost. Too many users were destroying flash cards too quickly. Cyanogen with a large swapfile that's tweaked to abstain from killing off idle tasks will nuke a brand new class-10 microSD card in about 3-8 months of normal daily use... and if you did a swapfile with the phone's INTERNAL flash, your phone would essentially get bricked once the counter tripped and the eMMC write-protected itself (because Android can't deal with booting into an environment where it literally can't write ANYTHING to disk).
the real-world problems of trying to use a phone's flash to do Linux-style virtual memory
No Android device I'm aware of uses flash for swap. There are a small handful that swap to compressed RAM, the fast majority have no swap at all; when physical memory is exhausted something has to die.
(I work for Google, on the Android OS.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
No Android device running a stock carrier ROM ever used flash for swap (that I'm aware of), but ~2-3 years ago, just about everyone running Cyanogenmod (or some other AOSP-derived ROM) had swapfiles. And yes, we really DID destroy $80+ microSD cards. It caught almost everyone by surprise, because we all blindly believed the manufacturers' assertions that the flash would last "a lifetime of normal use", failing to note that manufacturers didn't consider paging virtual memory almost nonstop to be "normal use". It was literally a use case the manufacturers never designed for, that didn't even become *viable* until overclocked class 6 and class 10 microSD became fast enough to make swapping to it faster than killing & re-spawning activities.