First Sight of Google Android 166
CorinneI writes "At the Mobile World Congress show, four mobile processor vendors demoed pre-production devices running versions of Google's Android OS — a Linux-based, open operating system for mobile phones that will sport Google applications. The biggest surprise of the demos was how well Android runs on slow devices. 'TI showed Android on a Motorola Q-like QWERTY handheld with its 200 Mhz OMAP 850 platform, where the user interface felt smooth and fast, even with little Apple-like animated transitions between screens.' HTC, Motorola, LG, and Samsung all belong to Google's Open Handset Alliance"
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why that would be so surprising. Google has quite a bevy of talented people at all levels. All products that come out of Google seem to have something to do with advertising and Android will be just such a vehicle for them. It's how most everything in cyberspace gets funded. You get something for free (a video, a song, a game) and an advertiser pays.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't even talk about the performance of Compiz-Fusion on my Inspiron, as compared to Vista on the same hardware that an associate has.
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
You are here ---> .
Your destination is here ---> .
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Yes, you are.
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Also, it's an ARM core, so (presumably) no FPU and a single integer pipeline. Something like the performance of an mid-range Pentium 1.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, there are few common tasks which are CPU-bound these days. Video encoding/decoding come to mind. (Thus the low resolution of the Android player.) This can easily be mitigated in a multimedia device by including hardware decoder chips. Gaming is another area where CPU can have an impact, but I imagine these phones aren't being presented as portable game machines. If someone wanted to make the next Android NGage, they'd probably look to NVidia for an embedded 3D chip to offload much of the work from the CPU.
The iPhone's success wasn't because it had a fast enough CPU to render web pages. Quite the contrary. The success was that its memory, storage capacity, and touch screen allowed the iPhone developers to provide an easy-to-use interface to the browser. Safari itself isn't necessarily "better" than Opera Mini, but it is wrapped in a superior user-interface.
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The bandwidth is always the bottleneck not the hardware.
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If it weren't for you pesky kids, I'd be able to surf in peace with my Difference Engine.
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Martha will never know what hit her!
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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The OMAP 850 is slow. There are 4-year-old phones which had an OMAP 850. Can't we do better than that?
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If I was comparing 200MHz to 1Ghz, I would consider it slow as well. 1Ghz compared to 0.2Ghz. One fifth the power.
=Obligatory Car Analogy=
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
Unfortunately in this day and age, saying one CPU is faster than another based on clock speed alone is like saying one human runs a race faster than another based on his height, "Well obviously the big guy's going to win! He's 20% taller than the short one!"
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Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd call it slower.
Both will have the same acceleration until air drag is involved.
Supposing they have the same shape (formally : equal CdA [wikipedia.org]), the top speed of the 300HP car is approximately sqrt(6)=2,45 times the top speed of the 60HP one, which I would then call slower.
Weight has no direct impact on top speed.
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Both will have the same acceleration until air drag is involved.
Weight has no direct impact on top speed.
Say what?
That's why they continue to use 60HP outboard motors on oil supertankers, right?
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What would I call it? Perfectly capable of driving on the Interstate, that's what I'd call it. The bar isn't being set very high when we're just talking about meeting the needs of graphics rendering. A CPU with a built-in GPU is quite capable of "driving on the interstate" as it were. Now if they were in an actual race, presumably the 300hp car would win. (Assuming it's not an oversi
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If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
That is a really foolish analogy [wikipedia.org]. The usable speed of a car is about engineering, not horsepower. Just like computer applications, really.
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If I was comparing 200MHz to 1Ghz, I would consider it slow as well. 1Ghz compared to 0.2Ghz. One fifth the power.
The only assumption you can make based on the one sentence you quoted from the article is that one processor operates at one fifth the frequency of the other.
=Obligatory Car Analogy=
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
If, and only if, you had those two engines in identical cars, you can be confid
not only that (Score:3, Informative)
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Google Earth [google.com]
Google Apps [google.com]
Google Appliances [google.com]
Also, Google SketchUp Pro, and a few others. Many of these don't even send data back to Google.
As long as they can monetize it, Google will sell it; it doesn't have to just be an ad platform, and I think that their mobile push is an attempt at diversification away from Ads.
I don't think Google is an Ad company; I think it is an information company, and so far the best way they've found to turn hig
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran Wincows CE and Androiid side by side (Score:4, Interesting)
As others have posted, 200MHz is nothing to sniff at (unless you're throwing it away with bloatware). If Windows 3.11 could run snappily on a 50MHz 486 then there is no good reason for slow software on a 200MHz ARM.
One of the interesting outcomes of the speed difference is that this means Android based devices should have far better power figures than equivalent Windows CE devices.
Efficiency is something you have to design in early. The idea that you caan make a bloaty architecture efficient is broken. You don't get a gazzelle by shaving an elephant's legs.
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Well, the emulator is a tad on the slow side. I for one, was hoping the actual devices were going to be faster, so it's nice to hear that they are.
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I don't know why that would be so surprising.
Android is based on Java. In many minds, Java = slow. Also, some mobile phones have very high latency interfaces. Example: on the Virgin Mobile MARBL phone that I just replaced, it wo
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Sadly, Android and OpenMoko... (Score:3, Informative)
http://benno.id.au/blog/2007/11/21/android-neo1973 [benno.id.au]
-theGreater.
supposedly open source (Score:2)
Re:supposedly open source (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=android%20open%20source [google.com]
Then you find:
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html [openhandsetalliance.com]
"Android will be open source; it can be liberally extended to incorporate new cutting edge technologies as they emerge. The platform will continue to evolve as the developer community works together to build innovative mobile applications."
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Twould be nice... (Score:2)
I'm lookin at YOU E70.. (Or Treo..)
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Linux_kernel+BSD_libc+gJava != linux based open OS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux_kernel+BSD_libc+gJava != linux based open (Score:2)
It should be alright illegal to drm something you own. Imagine if our desktops were that restrictive? Why put up with it on your phone?
With the google phone I can at least download apps and develop my own.
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I mean, it's nice to have a little sandbox, sure. And it's better than nothing, and it seems a lot more likely to happen than OpenMoko or Qtopia, but it's still damned depressing, considering what might have been.
But is Android really better than, say, Windows Mobile? Think of it this way: I can download apps and develop my own for Windows on my des
Re:Linux_kernel+BSD_libc+gJava != linux based open (Score:3, Insightful)
Only the kernel of my Kubuntu system is Linux. It should perhaps be properly called Mozilla / OpenOffice.org / KDE / X.org / GNU / Linux.
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The unfortunate thing about this Android is (Score:3, Funny)
200MHz is slow? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too long to wait (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm looking for a new smartphone right now. The Android based phones will fit the bill, but I doubt any products will be available until near the end of the year - perhaps just in time for the Christmas rush.
What I want:
Would be nice, but not required:
Deal breakers:
So far, the Nokia E90 is the closest to match what I want. The Road's HandyPC S101 surpasses it, but isn't available in the US (afaik).
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- The web browser is terrible (no support for the "display: none" and "visibility: hidden" properties in CSS? Abysmal HTML table support? What were they thinking?). There is a third-party alternative (Minuet) which is even worse in most ways. Opera Mini will run on it, but you are sending all of your data to Opera by using it and because it proxies all connections you can't use it to access intranet sites if you ha
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Q9 P.O.S with WM6, also no push e-mail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also I notice there isn't any "e-mail" icon on any of the screenshots...
Does this mean it's going to be another iPhone (can only get push mail from Yahoo) type device..
that would really suck if true. I _really_ hope that they're thinking of the enterprise with these things.. having to accept either RIM or MS devices only sucks balls when I know that Linux based OS's would be so much better.
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Wow, that's among the most ignorant comments I've heard about the iPhone yet.
Try IMAP/IMAPS/POP/POPS/ExchangeIMAP
It's as good as any other phone for email.
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True push mail doesn't require the remote unit to call the server if there is a new mail.
Yeah big deal I can POP3 from a mobile device, what I want is for when my mail server receives an update it finds and update my handset.
Immediately.
Do your research,oh glass house living stone thrower of great ignorance.
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Anyway, is it even really tha
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Support for the IMAP IDLE standard [wikipedia.org].
Why should you be tied to any proprietary e-mail system, when most e-mail servers that support IMAP support IMAP IDLE?
Yes I've seen it.. (Score:2, Funny)
Smooth and Fast (Score:4, Insightful)
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Economics means you have to have a product in user's hands if you want to make a difference. That's true even in open source. Things would have been much different for Linux if BSD hadn't had licensing issues. I myself, when faced with downloading either 386BSD or Debian 0.9 over a 28.8KBaud modem, went with Debian first because of uncertainty over the licensing. I wanted a "real" unix, but it turned out Linux was good enough.
Then t
Speed is only one issue (Score:2)
My experience with mobile implementations of linux hasn't been great, experiencing laggy software and random crashes (the GP2X even had an issue where it would randomly brick itself). A mobile OS which is a Java software layer on top of Linux on devices with limited resources makes me uneasy.
snappy (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW- slashdot: fix mobile.slashdot.org so us new centro owners don't have to fight with the webpage!
OMAP850 is Edge (Score:2)
Actually, for Edge, the OMAP1030 [ti.com] is the current TI solution, but it has only a single ARM9 for the radio and application processing.
Fixed link for OMAP1030 (Score:2)
Android Source code (Score:5, Insightful)
You can also read (here [google.com]) that
No emotion chip yet, though (Score:2)
Try the veal!
Nuts (Score:3, Funny)
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Uhhh...I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but by exactly what standard is the iPhone a "dud"? Last I heard, [arstechnica.com] it was beating every forecast sales target and had already captured 20 percent of the smartphone market in less than a year. In fact, if you haven't seen one at your local coffee shop, bar, or train station yet, you probably live in a cabin in the Ozarks.
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Apple having to slash shipment estimates from 2 million down to 1.1 million shows the product is quickly running out of marketplace demand after getting the high disposable income Apple fanbase to buy the product. There are just too many fantastic phones out there to compete with unlike the portable digital music player market.
We'll see if App
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now, O2 is not a particularly bad carrier, but I travel a lot and I would really like to be able to use my phone abroad without paying the quite extortionate roaming fees.
Also, no 3G (yet).
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I'm very disappointed with the lack of catch-up by other phone makers. We're well into 2008, and nothing is available that even touches it. (If I wanted a Blackberry-type device, I suppose I might be happy with
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* PAYG.
Those two sum up the UK non-corporate market for me.
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:5, Funny)
I'm also stoked that I FINALLY got to use one of those phrases!
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In fact, if you haven't seen one at your local coffee shop, bar, or train station yet, you probably live in a cabin in the Ozarks.
Or you live in a market where apple has note brokered a sales contract with the local telecom, or basically anywhere except select parts of the US, the UK, Germany, and France. It's got techlust on its side but thus far lacks many of the features smartphone have so it may not crack all of that market yet. I think the only thing it has up on most smart phones is web browsing and hype.
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The only device that beats it in it's category is the Blackberry line... just fYI
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Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:4, Informative)
I often browse Facebook on my phone. It's a Sony Ericsson K800i - high end 18 months ago, nowadays it's getting to be the standard issue free-with-cheap-contract phone that everyone in the world seems to have. Certainly it doesn't compete with the iPhone as a web browser, but it's capable enough, and Facebook has a perfectly good mobile-optimised site. And you can always install Opera Mini.
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Wow, Apple fanboys are out in the wild. Why did I get modded as troll????
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Even my mother knows what facebook is and she hasn't even got internet!
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