Nexus Prime, And Ice Cream Sandwich, Go For a Video Tour 246
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Examiner.com, citing a report at gagdet.ro, about Samsung's upcoming high-end Nexus Prime, the first phone to be delivered with Ice Cream Sandwich. "This version of the Nexus Series (Google's Android flag bearer) runs the next version of Android: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This version is meant to combine Honycomb (Android 3.0) with Gingerbread(Android 2.3) into one OS, that will run on all devices. In addition to the merger of the two OS's, it also changes the Android UI a bit. One major change, is that the icons and the UI is a lot more sophisticated and clean, making even iOS look old and clunky. Also, it removes the requirement for Android phones to have hard/soft-hard mixed buttons, in favor of allowing manufacturers to use whichever type of button they wish. Also, it adds a soft button on the lock screen, to go straight to the camera app."
Re:Is this "open source" OS also going to be close (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what people said about Android 3!
Re:falling ahead? (Score:2, Insightful)
Only an apple fan can argue that higher performance, more specialization, and a larger feature set are actually a step in the wrong direction, and a one-size-fits-all approach to manufacturing is the right choice.
Re:falling ahead? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just my 2c... My 2 yo HTC Desire with launcherpro and cyanogenmod will outsmooth an iPhone 4 every day of the week. Apart from that, I could swear that since 2.3 the GPU could be used to render the UI, if available, but that's beside the point. ( And that's from a phone that when launched you could get for 200$ less than an iPhone and that now costs less than half the price an iPhone 4 does (unlocked). )
Also, Android will try, when resources are free, to pre-load the applications you use the most, so that when you click them, they're just there. Most android phones run at 55% of full capacity all the time because of this, and you need almost no user interaction with the tasks (if you really want to it's there, but there is no need to do anything).
Also, citing objective-C as a reason for better and faster apps also shows ignorance. Ignoring the fact the Objective-C is a nightmare to program to (and that it has a stupidly steep learning curve), you can write c/c++ for android ( http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html [android.com] ). That means that you can have the performance of C for what needs performance and still have the user-friendliness of java for the rest. When someone trying to explain to me iOS programming starts by saying "first, you try to get to a webview as fast as possible!" (true story), it must mean something.
Is iOS bad? Not by a longshot. But trying to justify your point of view with "facts" that haven't been true for years now makes you look bad. Really really bad.
Re:This is why the iPhone is falling behind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Android doesn't seem to be "winning" in the only thing that counts for a business -- profits.
Apple also comprehensively won the "profit" war back in the day with Mac computers. Guess which platform 94% of the world isn't using today?
The current trend is looking very much like the 1990s all over again -- Apple with its superior UI getting overrun by a platform which isn't quite as nice, but is distributed amongst many manufacturers and is much cheaper for end users to purchase.
And once again, as a geek, I'm not at all concerned, as it's a lot easier to hack the Android platform than the Apple equivalent. PCs brought us Microsoft supremacy, but they also brought us linux; Android's shaping to be much the same, and as long as Google and manufacturers like Samsung openly encourage users to hack their phones, I'll keep supporting them with my dollar. The fact that I'll be paying less dollars in doing so is just an added bonus :)
(I've never really understood the "more profit" argument from a fanboi perspective -- the fact that Apple is making users pay more for their phones is hardly a reason for the end users to brag. It's a great reason if you're seeking to buy Apple shares, it's not a good reason if you're in the market for a phone ...)