> iPhone has more applications because it has been out longer
That is total BS and it's time for Android users to stop playing the "we're too new to be successful" card.
Yes, that's obviously what the previous poster really said. Nice straw man. You and I both know that the iPhone could have an infinite number of apps, and that wouldn't make it any more "successful" than it already is.
And the same goes for when the number of apps on the android market surpasses the number of apps on the iPhone. That might be a nice marketing milestone, but that won't be the defining moment for most users. The defining moment for Android users has actually already passed. We can already get classes of applications on Android that iPhone/iPad users couldn't even dream of getting. For instance, I can hook up my phone to my high definition TV and play High Definition TV content from it already without getting a DRM error telling me I'm not allowed to do that (because I'm not purchasing the actual content from iTunes).
I can already download, purchase, share, stream, record, trim, transform, music, voice mails, HD content, from my phone from almost any freaking where I want. And as to car navigation, by default I get state-of-the-art turn-by-turn car/walking navigation plus real-time traffic information already included all for free, while the normal iPhone user has to pay TomTom the equivalent price of a standalone gps unit just to get anything equivalent.
And don't get me started on the voice recognition features, that the iPhone crudely tries to confuse the user on through their me-too commercials. Sorry Apple, Text-to-Speech is not Speech-to-Text, not even by a long shot. And by the way, I'm not even speaking of English Speech-to-Text features. For instance, I've tested my Android device on my Japanese friends, and it picks up short language phrases in Japanese very well (even thought, Google Voice can't even do that yet, although it should, technically they should be using the same infrastructure to translate as to transcribe).
And what's up with calling the iPhone -- the "iPhone 4" when the previous models were called iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. I don't think that most consumers realize that the new so-called iPhone 4 (that's not even out yet) does not/can not even support 4G yet.
With the first, you can write Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, Javascript, etc, that will translate down to Dalvyk bytecode, and with the second one, the Native Development Kit, you can write C and C++ that can bypass the Dalvyk VM entirely if you wish, starting from version 1.5 of the android development kit.
The mobile devices which will later use the mapped SSIDs and BSSIDs to calculate their own position do not see anything but the beacon frames. It is therefore entirely sufficient to capture just the beacon frames.
The map of beacons is not the territory. Today, a sample every one meter may be required. Tomorrow, your boss may be asking you for a sample taken every ten centimeters. Resolution matters.
Resolution for mobile devices may matter too. Not all mobile antennas and receivers are created equal. Some devices will detect wifi SSIDs and BSSIDs with higher resolution and some with less. And having established a good baseline of reference information may be important for that reason as well.
To whoever modded this post "informative:" it was obviously a joke. Either mod it "funny" or mod it "lame" (yes, I propose that we add "-1 Lame" to the moderation system).
Personally, I'd say the post was "insightful". After all, the Trademark system already **does** provide all the tools necessary to protect full sentences already, the only reason it's not being used more frequently is that the cost to do so for a newspaper is just too prohibitive.
But when it comes down to it, all the issues would be the same. In order to be workable, newspapers would have to find unique sentences that had never previously been published by other newspapers, and that would never be normally used commonly. The resulting headlines would be mismashes of sensationalist gobbledygook, incorrect spellings, and grammatically incorrect turns of phrases -- just to make sure they remained unique and uniquely unusable by others (otherwise, they'll lose all their value).
Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?
As a US citizen living in the US, I expect that the information I post in a private forum in the US stays private. That being said, that kid was from the UK, so that point is moot already. It doesn't matter if he had written this on facebook, or gmail, privately, or publicly, or whatever, foreigners living abroad are free game for our agencies.
Qari Yousef Ahmaid, the Taleban spokesman, denied that any of his militants were involved. "The Taleban's enemies are the Afghan Government and the foreign forces," he said. "We never kill children. Everyone knows a seven-year-old can't be a spy."
Like all manufacturers, Apple does not control the quality of sub-components. Apple can issue specifications for components and include things like MTBF for its OEM suppliers as part of said specifications. But in the end, Apple does not control it any more than Ford can control that a set of springs from a supplier didn't have a defect in it. Now if a high number of defects come from a supplier, Ford like Apple may re-evaluate their relationship with the supplier. They may work with the supplier to correct the problem or discontinue the relationship.
It sounds to me like you were dying to tell us about MTBF, that's why you said something so nonsensical about a manufacturer not being able to control the quality of its OEM-sourced sub-components.
By your logic, a factory shop floor manager from the original OEM manufacturer probably doesn't control the quality of the sub-components that are made within his shop because (1) it's largely most of the rank-and-file workers that do the work (not him), (2) it's the engineers upstairs that designed the device to begin with without taking into consideration the ease in manufacturing, and (3) it's the client's poor specs and unrealistic short deadlines that drove the quality down even more. And of course, if you ask the engineers, it's not them, it's (1)the shop manager who's an idiot and a whiner, (2)it's the line workers that are sloppy, (3)it's the clients unrealistic specs and short deadlines, and (4)it's the guys in purchasing that don't buy the best-grade materials that should be used to create those sub-components from.
In other words, since your World demands that control be binary, either you have it or you don't, instead of partial control, then that means all manufacturers have no control at all over the quality of anything they make or buy from others (since they will always have to rely on someone else anyway). And it's probably a wonder to you why they would even try.
Coffee costs a buck to a buck and a half in most restaurants.
Sure enough, but just try ordering only a cup of coffee in a restaurant and sitting there for four hours straight working on your laptop. Some restaurants will allow that, but some won't. At least with Starbucks, I know what to expect.
Forget Picasa, I have a Windows machine, and I don't even use it. I do everything on PicasaWeb. PicasaWeb also works quite well for batch tagging work. Plus, I have filters on my gmail that directly email pictures from other relatives for immediate storage into PicasaWeb.
The labor being cheap mostly because the Chinese government doesn't enforce labor laws...
Yes.
...and doesn't give the people their fair share of the profits.
Ask any worker, isn't this the case in most countries/companies?
Also, don't forget purchasing power. If your expenses are only a fraction of what they would be in the US, then it wouldn't really matter that you only got paid a fraction of what a US worker would make.
Britain's National Health Service has 1.3 million employees. Number of suicides last year involving NHS workers jumping from NHS buildings: zero. Indian Railways has 1.6 million employees. Can you recall the last time 10 or 15 of them threw themselves under trains over the course of a few months? Deutsche Post has half a million employees. Ever heard a story about a dozen of them hurling themselves into letter-sorting machines?
And yes, France Telecom did have a suicide epidemic last year. Guess what. Nobody went around saying that it was no big deal because it was still below the national average in France -- instead the official explanation was that the suicides were caused by brutal management harassing workers. The Sarkozy administration took this seriously and got involved and at France Telecom a top executive actually resigned because of the tragedy.
All I can say is the French are just such huge pussies. [...]
The rest of Fake Steve's article can be found here.
If you want to compare rates of suicides at the workplace, compare rates of suicides at the ***workplace***. Jumping is a very gruesome way to die. Also, jumping from your own office building, when done willingly, is a very public statement.
And by the way, all those nine workers (including the one who signed the no-suicide contract) have chosen to jump to their deaths on premises in the exact same way in a span of five months, not twelve. Furthermore, suicide rates per country include young teenagers killing themselves and old people killing themselves (as in euthanasia). Whatever makes those stats look bigger, that's why they're included, even if one could argue that euthanasia should not be included, because the bigger those suicide stats are, the higher the government funding ends up being. And you take away these two populations, you have a much-much lower rate of suicides overall.
In any case, if you really want to compare suicide rates on premises between companies, see these examples of much much larger companies with zero rates of suicides. And yes, I understand the problem of estimating randomness and simulating the flip of a coin, but nevertheless, even if you don't completely believe me, I'm suggesting that you not mindlessly repeat the FoxConn/Apple PR report that's being parroted over the news.
What is AT&T's data cap? For either Sprint and Verizon, it's 5GB per month (which is barely sufficient as it is) on their 3G/edge networks (on 4G/Wimax with SprintTV and tethering up to 6 computers, I can only hope that this cap will be lifted entirely, or revised to something like 5 Tera-bytes per month, otherwise that new 4G feature will be completely worthless).
T-mobile doesn't have a cap, but then again they had Google remove all the tethering apps from its marketplace for T-Mobile users (not that T-Mobile users can't find and install those tethering apps manually on their own, and nor did this move disable the tethering apps already installed).
The entrepreneur was not arrested at the scene, after he claimed he had diplomatic immunity.
The cops must have been real idiots, or may be they just didn't feel like arresting that guy that night. People who have diplomatic immunity have diplomatic passports (not that it would be too difficult to procure a fake one), but at the very least, you arrest the person, and then you let him simmer in a jail until his consulate/embassy contacts you through the proper channels of the State Department.
I doubt that this guy is a local (and my guess is that he will be steering well away from that town from now on). Bluff City is a well-known speed trap. Its speed cameras have been featured in Times magazine. The drunk locals (and anyone equipped with an up-to-date TomTom/Garmin) slow down for the stationary cameras, and then burn rubber once they're past the camera's field of vision. It's a great revenue-generating scheme for such a tiny local government. It only taxes the outsiders, without negatively impacting the insiders, the ones that get to vote on who their next police chief is. Many small cities would do well to find such a politically popular (among its local citizens at least) source of income.
You are doing absolutely nothing to interact with those who are totally disenfranchised.
Who are those disenfranchised? The blind? The disabled? The homeless? The mentally ill? The non-english speakers? The incarcerated? The young? The old? I'm just wondering how you would suggest we reach this hugely fragmented group of people?
The folk with smartphones are typically those who'd already interact with government.
And yes, those same people, some of which may already be care-takers/nurses/doctors, librarians, church volunteers/priests, volunteer firefighters/medics, school staff, social workers, NGOs, community activists, good Samaritans/concerned citizens, etc, those people may be sometimes the only means we have to get to those who are disenfranchised anyhow.
And with the mandatory upgrade path of many phone carriers, it won't be long until everyone with a cell phone has a smartphone (even a cheap prepaid one). And as to the people without cell phones, don't worry, that's why we have gps ankle bracelets, embedded shoe trackers for dementia patients and little kids, and electrical meters and car parking meters that are smart enough to reward us when we're good and smart enough to call home over the cell phone network to tell on us when we've been bad.
While interesting, these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work which limits it to just a few people using Android with these apps.
These apps may not be useful to *you*, but they will certainly be useful to governments, a few companies, and some of the more vigilant/paranoid tin-foil hat wearers among us. In any case, what we need is a free open source solution that does encryption.
The number of Android users is not that big right now, but Android is coming very fast from behind, and with Google taking 0% of the commissions from their Market/App stores (leaving the entire 30% in perpetuity to the carriers/phone makers), I speculate that Android will really become the #1 dominant platform eventually.
Yes they are adding the functionality for backgrounding tasks etc..
I would have thought that this would necessitate sandboxing of some kind.
I've heard and seen nothing on the "sharing" of between applications, only of adding in 3rd party handlers for mime-types. (ie.. opening an ODF in a 3rd party ODF application from the stock mail app).
My mistake then. I was having a debate with an iPhone developer, and he was telling me the next iPhone OS would have all kinds of sharing functionality between third party applications (but based on what you're saying, adding 3rd party handlers for mime-types will make it more like a PC, but that's going to be nothing like Android at all).
I was told by iPhone application developers that the iPhone is getting the ability to run multiple third party apps at the same time (not just the stock Apple apps in the background with one third party app in the foreground), plus it's getting something similar to intents (which is the current way Android allows different (third party) apps to share functionality between themselves).
This implies a major rewrite of the entire permissions system for Apple.
And that would certainly explain why Apple has been shedding developers that use different frameworks to write iPhone Apps. The new iPhone OS is going to require a completely different programming paradigm.
He has an HTC, his wife a motorola with the keyboard so she can send 500 texts a day. They've come across several apps that will work on his phone, but she can't even find it in the market place.
She should try again. From the sound of your post, it sounds like you're located in the US, and she has the Motorola Droid. That means her phone was upgraded to 2.1 a couple of weeks ago, and will probably get the 2.2 very soon.
And anyway, there isn't really a big difference between 1.6 and 2.2. 1.5, yes. And anything below 1.5, no one is using anyway. And unlike the iPhone, which is changing its complete underlying architecture as we speak, the Android SDKs on the other hand are stabilizing, for instance Froyo is even being delivered six months ahead of schedule, and there are less and less changes that developers are clamoring for.
And when I can't find an app that someone recommended to me, that's usually because many apps that were free a few weeks/months ago have transitioned to fully paid apps (and the developer has removed the free/lite version off the market as a way to get more sales, since he already has the word of mouth going for him, and the people that miss the free app can't leave new comments anymore -- unless they pay for the app at least once).
As a developer, we're charging 4 - 5x's the price for an android app vs. an iPhone App.
Hey, charge whatever the market can bear, that's what I say. Currently, there seems to be a big shortage of Android Developers on most job sites. So please, charge away. It's a good way to weed out the overflow of clients. And right now at least, taking on clients that want to commission an Android App is much more lucrative than making your own app (later on, that will probably be the reverse situation, but I'm only speaking of right now).
Since august of last year, we've spent over $6k now on Android and sets. To give you an idea, we spent $2500 from 2008 - present for iPhones and iPod touches.
This misses the point that you can only develop for the iPhone/iPad only if you're on a Mac (for the most part). And that's fine if you already have all the Mac equipment you need, but for many of us still, we still have Windows machines or Linux machines, so the barrier to entry is much lower on Android (not to mention the registration fee to be able to develop on the Market as opposed to the App Store).
Also your entire testing strategy should be based on the type of Mobile Application you're making. For some applications, testing for every variation makes complete sense, for instance, if your application depends on the camera, it makes sense, for others, it simply doesn't. Besides, developers are organizing to share testing devices among themselves. Some companies are crowdsourcing testing and QA. And if you're near a Google office, and go to some of their events, you can usually check out devices from them free of charge. So if I were you, I'd hold off on buying the 39+ Android phones or the 50+ different Android devices that will be available this summer, and depending on the type of Application I was making, I'd give my client an itemized list of prices for the different SDKs that are out there, and let the client decide on the cut off point, on the type of support he wants to have, or not have.
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> iPhone has more applications because it has been out longer
That is total BS and it's time for Android users to stop playing the "we're too new to be successful" card.
Yes, that's obviously what the previous poster really said. Nice straw man. You and I both know that the iPhone could have an infinite number of apps, and that wouldn't make it any more "successful" than it already is.
And the same goes for when the number of apps on the android market surpasses the number of apps on the iPhone. That might be a nice marketing milestone, but that won't be the defining moment for most users. The defining moment for Android users has actually already passed. We can already get classes of applications on Android that iPhone/iPad users couldn't even dream of getting. For instance, I can hook up my phone to my high definition TV and play High Definition TV content from it already without getting a DRM error telling me I'm not allowed to do that (because I'm not purchasing the actual content from iTunes).
I can already download, purchase, share, stream, record, trim, transform, music, voice mails, HD content, from my phone from almost any freaking where I want. And as to car navigation, by default I get state-of-the-art turn-by-turn car/walking navigation plus real-time traffic information already included all for free, while the normal iPhone user has to pay TomTom the equivalent price of a standalone gps unit just to get anything equivalent.
And don't get me started on the voice recognition features, that the iPhone crudely tries to confuse the user on through their me-too commercials. Sorry Apple, Text-to-Speech is not Speech-to-Text, not even by a long shot. And by the way, I'm not even speaking of English Speech-to-Text features. For instance, I've tested my Android device on my Japanese friends, and it picks up short language phrases in Japanese very well (even thought, Google Voice can't even do that yet, although it should, technically they should be using the same infrastructure to translate as to transcribe).
And what's up with calling the iPhone -- the "iPhone 4" when the previous models were called iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. I don't think that most consumers realize that the new so-called iPhone 4 (that's not even out yet) does not/can not even support 4G yet.
You still have to write Java apps. You're still running in a virtual machine.
I think you're confusing the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) with the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).
With the first, you can write Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, Javascript, etc, that will translate down to Dalvyk bytecode, and with the second one, the Native Development Kit, you can write C and C++ that can bypass the Dalvyk VM entirely if you wish, starting from version 1.5 of the android development kit.
There was public disclosure. Adobe flash was publicly described as insecure by Steve Jobs many times.
The mobile devices which will later use the mapped SSIDs and BSSIDs to calculate their own position do not see anything but the beacon frames. It is therefore entirely sufficient to capture just the beacon frames.
The map of beacons is not the territory. Today, a sample every one meter may be required. Tomorrow, your boss may be asking you for a sample taken every ten centimeters. Resolution matters. Resolution for mobile devices may matter too. Not all mobile antennas and receivers are created equal. Some devices will detect wifi SSIDs and BSSIDs with higher resolution and some with less. And having established a good baseline of reference information may be important for that reason as well.
To whoever modded this post "informative:" it was obviously a joke. Either mod it "funny" or mod it "lame" (yes, I propose that we add "-1 Lame" to the moderation system).
Personally, I'd say the post was "insightful". After all, the Trademark system already **does** provide all the tools necessary to protect full sentences already, the only reason it's not being used more frequently is that the cost to do so for a newspaper is just too prohibitive.
But when it comes down to it, all the issues would be the same. In order to be workable, newspapers would have to find unique sentences that had never previously been published by other newspapers, and that would never be normally used commonly. The resulting headlines would be mismashes of sensationalist gobbledygook, incorrect spellings, and grammatically incorrect turns of phrases -- just to make sure they remained unique and uniquely unusable by others (otherwise, they'll lose all their value).
On that note, isn't this ordinance stepping on the toes of the FCC anyway?
Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?
As a US citizen living in the US, I expect that the information I post in a private forum in the US stays private. That being said, that kid was from the UK, so that point is moot already. It doesn't matter if he had written this on facebook, or gmail, privately, or publicly, or whatever, foreigners living abroad are free game for our agencies.
Begging the question: Was he spying?
Not according to the Taleban at least.
Qari Yousef Ahmaid, the Taleban spokesman, denied that any of his militants were involved. "The Taleban's enemies are the Afghan Government and the foreign forces," he said. "We never kill children. Everyone knows a seven-year-old can't be a spy."
Like all manufacturers, Apple does not control the quality of sub-components. Apple can issue specifications for components and include things like MTBF for its OEM suppliers as part of said specifications. But in the end, Apple does not control it any more than Ford can control that a set of springs from a supplier didn't have a defect in it. Now if a high number of defects come from a supplier, Ford like Apple may re-evaluate their relationship with the supplier. They may work with the supplier to correct the problem or discontinue the relationship.
It sounds to me like you were dying to tell us about MTBF, that's why you said something so nonsensical about a manufacturer not being able to control the quality of its OEM-sourced sub-components.
By your logic, a factory shop floor manager from the original OEM manufacturer probably doesn't control the quality of the sub-components that are made within his shop because (1) it's largely most of the rank-and-file workers that do the work (not him), (2) it's the engineers upstairs that designed the device to begin with without taking into consideration the ease in manufacturing, and (3) it's the client's poor specs and unrealistic short deadlines that drove the quality down even more. And of course, if you ask the engineers, it's not them, it's (1)the shop manager who's an idiot and a whiner, (2)it's the line workers that are sloppy, (3)it's the clients unrealistic specs and short deadlines, and (4)it's the guys in purchasing that don't buy the best-grade materials that should be used to create those sub-components from.
In other words, since your World demands that control be binary, either you have it or you don't, instead of partial control, then that means all manufacturers have no control at all over the quality of anything they make or buy from others (since they will always have to rely on someone else anyway). And it's probably a wonder to you why they would even try.
Coffee costs a buck to a buck and a half in most restaurants.
Sure enough, but just try ordering only a cup of coffee in a restaurant and sitting there for four hours straight working on your laptop. Some restaurants will allow that, but some won't. At least with Starbucks, I know what to expect.
Forget Picasa, I have a Windows machine, and I don't even use it. I do everything on PicasaWeb. PicasaWeb also works quite well for batch tagging work. Plus, I have filters on my gmail that directly email pictures from other relatives for immediate storage into PicasaWeb.
BTW, the actual news is Foxconn is going to MOVE their factories to more in-land locations of China, where the salary is cheaper than coastal cities.
Let's just hope that the new location inland will have smaller buildings to jump from, and that the new dorms will be made of rubber.
The labor being cheap mostly because the Chinese government doesn't enforce labor laws...
Yes.
...and doesn't give the people their fair share of the profits.
Ask any worker, isn't this the case in most countries/companies?
Also, don't forget purchasing power. If your expenses are only a fraction of what they would be in the US, then it wouldn't really matter that you only got paid a fraction of what a US worker would make.
Britain's National Health Service has 1.3 million employees. Number of suicides last year involving NHS workers jumping from NHS buildings: zero. Indian Railways has 1.6 million employees. Can you recall the last time 10 or 15 of them threw themselves under trains over the course of a few months? Deutsche Post has half a million employees. Ever heard a story about a dozen of them hurling themselves into letter-sorting machines?
And yes, France Telecom did have a suicide epidemic last year. Guess what. Nobody went around saying that it was no big deal because it was still below the national average in France -- instead the official explanation was that the suicides were caused by brutal management harassing workers. The Sarkozy administration took this seriously and got involved and at France Telecom a top executive actually resigned because of the tragedy.
All I can say is the French are just such huge pussies. [...]
The rest of Fake Steve's article can be found here.
If you want to compare rates of suicides at the workplace, compare rates of suicides at the ***workplace***. Jumping is a very gruesome way to die. Also, jumping from your own office building, when done willingly, is a very public statement.
And by the way, all those nine workers (including the one who signed the no-suicide contract) have chosen to jump to their deaths on premises in the exact same way in a span of five months, not twelve. Furthermore, suicide rates per country include young teenagers killing themselves and old people killing themselves (as in euthanasia). Whatever makes those stats look bigger, that's why they're included, even if one could argue that euthanasia should not be included, because the bigger those suicide stats are, the higher the government funding ends up being. And you take away these two populations, you have a much-much lower rate of suicides overall.
In any case, if you really want to compare suicide rates on premises between companies, see these examples of much much larger companies with zero rates of suicides. And yes, I understand the problem of estimating randomness and simulating the flip of a coin, but nevertheless, even if you don't completely believe me, I'm suggesting that you not mindlessly repeat the FoxConn/Apple PR report that's being parroted over the news.
Darkness,
What is AT&T's data cap? For either Sprint and Verizon, it's 5GB per month (which is barely sufficient as it is) on their 3G/edge networks (on 4G/Wimax with SprintTV and tethering up to 6 computers, I can only hope that this cap will be lifted entirely, or revised to something like 5 Tera-bytes per month, otherwise that new 4G feature will be completely worthless).
T-mobile doesn't have a cap, but then again they had Google remove all the tethering apps from its marketplace for T-Mobile users (not that T-Mobile users can't find and install those tethering apps manually on their own, and nor did this move disable the tethering apps already installed).
+1 insightful to Reuters.
It's almost as good as the Fedex Arrow.
The entrepreneur was not arrested at the scene, after he claimed he had diplomatic immunity.
The cops must have been real idiots, or may be they just didn't feel like arresting that guy that night. People who have diplomatic immunity have diplomatic passports (not that it would be too difficult to procure a fake one), but at the very least, you arrest the person, and then you let him simmer in a jail until his consulate/embassy contacts you through the proper channels of the State Department.
I doubt that this guy is a local (and my guess is that he will be steering well away from that town from now on). Bluff City is a well-known speed trap. Its speed cameras have been featured in Times magazine. The drunk locals (and anyone equipped with an up-to-date TomTom/Garmin) slow down for the stationary cameras, and then burn rubber once they're past the camera's field of vision. It's a great revenue-generating scheme for such a tiny local government. It only taxes the outsiders, without negatively impacting the insiders, the ones that get to vote on who their next police chief is. Many small cities would do well to find such a politically popular (among its local citizens at least) source of income.
You are doing absolutely nothing to interact with those who are totally disenfranchised.
Who are those disenfranchised? The blind? The disabled? The homeless? The mentally ill? The non-english speakers? The incarcerated? The young? The old? I'm just wondering how you would suggest we reach this hugely fragmented group of people?
The folk with smartphones are typically those who'd already interact with government.
And yes, those same people, some of which may already be care-takers/nurses/doctors, librarians, church volunteers/priests, volunteer firefighters/medics, school staff, social workers, NGOs, community activists, good Samaritans/concerned citizens, etc, those people may be sometimes the only means we have to get to those who are disenfranchised anyhow.
And with the mandatory upgrade path of many phone carriers, it won't be long until everyone with a cell phone has a smartphone (even a cheap prepaid one). And as to the people without cell phones, don't worry, that's why we have gps ankle bracelets, embedded shoe trackers for dementia patients and little kids, and electrical meters and car parking meters that are smart enough to reward us when we're good and smart enough to call home over the cell phone network to tell on us when we've been bad.
While interesting, these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work which limits it to just a few people using Android with these apps.
These apps may not be useful to *you*, but they will certainly be useful to governments, a few companies, and some of the more vigilant/paranoid tin-foil hat wearers among us. In any case, what we need is a free open source solution that does encryption.
The number of Android users is not that big right now, but Android is coming very fast from behind, and with Google taking 0% of the commissions from their Market/App stores (leaving the entire 30% in perpetuity to the carriers/phone makers), I speculate that Android will really become the #1 dominant platform eventually.
Yes they are adding the functionality for backgrounding tasks etc..
I would have thought that this would necessitate sandboxing of some kind.
I've heard and seen nothing on the "sharing" of between applications, only of adding in 3rd party handlers for mime-types. (ie.. opening an ODF in a 3rd party ODF application from the stock mail app).
My mistake then. I was having a debate with an iPhone developer, and he was telling me the next iPhone OS would have all kinds of sharing functionality between third party applications (but based on what you're saying, adding 3rd party handlers for mime-types will make it more like a PC, but that's going to be nothing like Android at all).
I was told by iPhone application developers that the iPhone is getting the ability to run multiple third party apps at the same time (not just the stock Apple apps in the background with one third party app in the foreground), plus it's getting something similar to intents (which is the current way Android allows different (third party) apps to share functionality between themselves).
This implies a major rewrite of the entire permissions system for Apple. And that would certainly explain why Apple has been shedding developers that use different frameworks to write iPhone Apps. The new iPhone OS is going to require a completely different programming paradigm.
Even if it doesn't listen and respond to the audience, isn't that a relatively simple software problem to solve?
That depends. Do you want the creators to reprogram that robot? Or do you want that robot to be able to reprogram itself?
He has an HTC, his wife a motorola with the keyboard so she can send 500 texts a day. They've come across several apps that will work on his phone, but she can't even find it in the market place.
She should try again. From the sound of your post, it sounds like you're located in the US, and she has the Motorola Droid. That means her phone was upgraded to 2.1 a couple of weeks ago, and will probably get the 2.2 very soon.
And anyway, there isn't really a big difference between 1.6 and 2.2. 1.5, yes. And anything below 1.5, no one is using anyway. And unlike the iPhone, which is changing its complete underlying architecture as we speak, the Android SDKs on the other hand are stabilizing, for instance Froyo is even being delivered six months ahead of schedule, and there are less and less changes that developers are clamoring for.
And when I can't find an app that someone recommended to me, that's usually because many apps that were free a few weeks/months ago have transitioned to fully paid apps (and the developer has removed the free/lite version off the market as a way to get more sales, since he already has the word of mouth going for him, and the people that miss the free app can't leave new comments anymore -- unless they pay for the app at least once).
As a developer, we're charging 4 - 5x's the price for an android app vs. an iPhone App.
Hey, charge whatever the market can bear, that's what I say. Currently, there seems to be a big shortage of Android Developers on most job sites. So please, charge away. It's a good way to weed out the overflow of clients. And right now at least, taking on clients that want to commission an Android App is much more lucrative than making your own app (later on, that will probably be the reverse situation, but I'm only speaking of right now).
Since august of last year, we've spent over $6k now on Android and sets. To give you an idea, we spent $2500 from 2008 - present for iPhones and iPod touches.
This misses the point that you can only develop for the iPhone/iPad only if you're on a Mac (for the most part). And that's fine if you already have all the Mac equipment you need, but for many of us still, we still have Windows machines or Linux machines, so the barrier to entry is much lower on Android (not to mention the registration fee to be able to develop on the Market as opposed to the App Store).
Also your entire testing strategy should be based on the type of Mobile Application you're making. For some applications, testing for every variation makes complete sense, for instance, if your application depends on the camera, it makes sense, for others, it simply doesn't. Besides, developers are organizing to share testing devices among themselves. Some companies are crowdsourcing testing and QA. And if you're near a Google office, and go to some of their events, you can usually check out devices from them free of charge. So if I were you, I'd hold off on buying the 39+ Android phones or the 50+ different Android devices that will be available this summer, and depending on the type of Application I was making, I'd give my client an itemized list of prices for the different SDKs that are out there, and let the client decide on the cut off point, on the type of support he wants to have, or not have.