A significant amount of cost in a PC is dedicated to legacy compatibility. BIOS is not a cheap item on a motherboard's BOM, all so you can still run Space Quest off of a DOS boot disk.
Find me a system-on-chip suitable for a phone or tablet that has completely open drivers. Or an embeddable wireless chipset. What's that? TI won't release source to their bluetooth processor? Go ask Qualcomm for an open radio baseband, see how that goes down.
Many phones with built-in storage have a small NAND (often in package-on-package) for bootloaders and minimal OS and a larger eMMC or NAND for user storage. It's only really within the last year that SoCs in shipping products have had the ability to boot from eMMC, whereas previous chips needed NAND or NOR interface flash for at least the bootloader. When the design cycle started for the N1, the only suitable SoC options needed a NAND flash and an 8GB or 16GB eMMC with the reliability needed for fixed storage were prohibitive.
I think that storage is exactly the reason why this isn't being supported on the Nexus One. It has 256MB of NAND, which might sound like a lot. However, Android needs some amount of user writable storage on non-removeable media for user settings and applications. Even with Gingerbread, the Nexus One is already severely cramped in this respect.
Newer phones that will supposedly support ICS have embedded MMC (eMMC) which comes in much larger capacities, making this a non-issue.
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What is Croonchy Stars?
I'll take obscure breakfast cereals for $400
The most trusted name in passwords.
You could say the same thing about the Arduino vs. one of thousands of sub-$2 microcontrollers.
You can feed AC to an LED, it'll just only light up part of the time.
Cray hasn't yet figured out how to maintain coherency within the waiter's bill pad array.
No, it doesn't. Both these devices boot from emmc, and the bootloaders live in partitions writable by root in /dev/block. No hard reset needed.
It will always attempt to boot from microSD first. The boot order is hardwired on the board.
Mr. President, we must not allow a precipitation gap!
Why not Zoidberg?
Shine on you random diamond.
You mean like this? Maybe you should read the articles you cite before you use them to correct someone else.
As has been said previously, you'll find an enormous room filled with sleeping clones of yourself.
Incidentally, I flew from Austin to DFW last week, and all the gates I saw were using millimeter wave scanners.
Just like how the original book is true to the radio series before it.
Less space than a Nook Touch. Lame.
And as we all know, it's impossible to spin research to an ignorant public.
I've never seen the GEK before, but I'm not sure that their logo is open source.
At least that will solve our rare earths shortage.
Why is there a watermelon there?
His plan for driving up the price of worthless desert just became easier!
obThat's terrible.
Right.
A significant amount of cost in a PC is dedicated to legacy compatibility. BIOS is not a cheap item on a motherboard's BOM, all so you can still run Space Quest off of a DOS boot disk.
Find me a system-on-chip suitable for a phone or tablet that has completely open drivers. Or an embeddable wireless chipset. What's that? TI won't release source to their bluetooth processor? Go ask Qualcomm for an open radio baseband, see how that goes down.
Many phones with built-in storage have a small NAND (often in package-on-package) for bootloaders and minimal OS and a larger eMMC or NAND for user storage. It's only really within the last year that SoCs in shipping products have had the ability to boot from eMMC, whereas previous chips needed NAND or NOR interface flash for at least the bootloader. When the design cycle started for the N1, the only suitable SoC options needed a NAND flash and an 8GB or 16GB eMMC with the reliability needed for fixed storage were prohibitive.
Blame progress.
I think that storage is exactly the reason why this isn't being supported on the Nexus One. It has 256MB of NAND, which might sound like a lot. However, Android needs some amount of user writable storage on non-removeable media for user settings and applications. Even with Gingerbread, the Nexus One is already severely cramped in this respect.
Newer phones that will supposedly support ICS have embedded MMC (eMMC) which comes in much larger capacities, making this a non-issue.
It's a Ford, everything breaks down.