Google Mobile Phones Debut in Feb? 127
SpinelessJelly writes "It appears that Google's Android, criticised by Microsoft as vaporware, has sprung to life. Prototype devices are circulating, software developers are experimenting with the SDK and PC-based Android emulator, and there are rumours of a show-stopping debut at February's Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. Numerous examples of the Android GUI are also starting to leak out."
Google Mobile Phones Debut in Feb? (Score:1, Funny)
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You are not the first (nor are you likely to be the last) life-form to experience disappointment when visiting
Sorry-about-your-horniness-ly-yours,
Anonymous C. Oward
Comparisons (Score:5, Interesting)
This ignores the fact that most handset manufacturers will probably include a 3D accelerator to improve graphical performance. Google claims [google.com] that Android has a "highly optimized 3D software rasterizer", but it remains to be seen if a mere 200MHz processor is capable of sustaining the necessary graphical power to provide a smooth experience.
In any case, it's likely that a 3D Accelerator could save on battery power. Application specific chips tend to be able to do more work with fewer cycles and less silicon. Which means that a phone manufacturer can make the choice of a faster CPU + lower battery life, or a slower CPU + 3D accelerator + higher battery life.
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But what if I want a faster CPU, 3D Accelerator AND lower battery life, HUH???
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Re:Comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
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We are talking about lower resolution than Quake with slightly more features.
A 200mhz processor is overkill for that. 486's can do that easily.
The overhead required to power a separate chip and the interface between the two isnt worth it.
Damn Windows users thinking you need a dual core 3ghz processor to type up a document.
A 200mhz processor is freaking fast for most things including low res 3d.
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Re:Comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
OpenGL ES supports floating point or fixed point math. Using floating point is going to severely reduce your performance if you don't have a Floating Point Co-Processor. And fixed point math is incredibly inaccurate, leading to a lot of graphical glitches in pre-accelerator games. (And is *still* slower than pure integer computations.)
Doom was a 2.5D raycaster, not a true 3D engine. Quake is a better comparison. Quake did run on a 90MHz processor, but it also ran in 256 color mode with rather small textures. Model meshes consisted of a handful of polygons wrapped with a single (low-res) texture. Visibility and lighting were pre-calculated using a modified BSP Tree structure that took HOURS to generate.
Android phones lack such a luxury. Graphics will be produced real-time using high-color, high-resolution textures. Scaling, rotation, and lighting are expected to be smooth and responsive. Graphical output should be crisp with little to no blurring. (Poor rendering quality is VERY bad for on-screen text.) In these situations, a 200MHz processor becomes barely adequate. In fact, it still remains to be seen if it will be able to handle the load.
It's possible that the phone manufactures who use the 200MHz chip with no 3D accelerator will keep the graphical effects to a minimum. (Obviously, a non-rotated 2D image with GL_ORTHO is going to be WAY faster to render than a full-3D scene with rotation matrices.) But that would tend to put the phone at a disadvantage in the market. The hardware is powerful enough to demand a higher price, but doesn't appear to be a good value when stacked against other smart phones.
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A phone is not going to be doing complex 3D for anything but games. At the most, it will use 2D scaling and rotation, and some alpha blends. Depending on display bit depths and resolutions, that
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I do. [slashdot.org] Do you? [wikipedia.org]
Exchange integration? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exchange integration? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is offering prizes to application developers who come up with cool new Android apps. Sounds like you may have stumbled upon a good candidate for submission. Give Android the best Exchange/Phone integration to date and I bet you'll make a pretty penny off of it.
Great idea (Score:2)
oh, crap.
That said, If I worked at MS I would certianly take that idea and a business case way up the chain to see if I can't leverage it's success into a VP position.
Yes, I would skip several layer of management if I had to. I've done it before, with some success.
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More seriously I would bet they work on it, but keep it under wraps unless the platform takes off. That way if it does take off they are there with good integration, but if lack of this must have sinks the android MS has more potential in the mobile market.
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In any case, MS already have what you are looking for. Windows Mobile 5 and 6 have pretty good exchange integration.
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One thing most slashpeople tend to forget is that Exchange is much more than an e-mail server - its calendar server integration with Outlook is very complete and functional and is a core asset for many companies that rely on it for planning everything from meetings to training sessions to tracking resources such as projectors and flip-charts. Its workflow and forms functionality is less used but, still, companies that went with it now pretty much depend on it and will never migrate from it without a fight. Exchange is a very important tool for Microsoft to keep their vendor lock-in.
And, of course, Microsoft will never even consider making it easy for anyone to migrate away from their tools.
And one thing you might be forgetting is that the 80s have been and gone, and mobile phones are no longer the preserve of corporate customers.
Make this something that appeals to kids and teenagers, and you have a market that not only buys quite a few phones, but changes their handsets way more often. Exchange compatibility importance=zero. Facebook or whatever the current must have social networking site is compatibility=vital.
And is there any good reason why these phones can't dock with software that tran
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I know that, but this thread was about corporate acceptance and, AFAIK, most companies that employ child labor won't give them a corporate smartphone
Re:Exchange integration? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't want me to use Exchange? Tell that to my company; tell that to its clients; tell that to its clients' clients.
Sending that "Don't send me Word docs" message is fine if you're m
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1997 called; it wants its irrelevant rant back. I am a linux geek, and I resist Windows as much as possible. But my job is not to find ways to get my email, contacts, calendar, etc. to sync with my PDA with some insane workaround. My PDA is a productivity item. If it doesn't "just work", it's wasting my time; why would I use it?
I, too, am an old UN*X geek working these days in a Windows environment, so I do understand where you're coming from. But the one thing I cannot do with Outlook/Exchange is make it produce competently formatted, RFC compliant email. As long as I use Outlook as my mail client, my email looks like the product of an incompetent; when communicating with my peers in other organisations I feel humiliated, I feel that I am not presenting myself well. It may be possible to force Outlook to produce properly format
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I used to work for a company that implemented microsoft servers, exchange, and even IIS regardless of the customer's actual needs. It's 'industry standard' to not let hardware control DHCP to these guys! You should see what happens when a server goes down after it's been set up the Microsoft way in a
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Here here! I agree.
Screenshot != not vapor (Score:5, Insightful)
It may not be vapor but I think the February release may be rumor and marketing, maybe it's for Android(Beta)
Hmmm. (Score:2)
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Re:Screenshot != not vapor (Score:5, Informative)
It comes with an Android emulator, and a few of the Google applications. Included is an address book, a dummy dialling application, a working Google Maps application, a working browser... and any other applications that Android developers decide to write for it.
The only thing that is missing is the phone hardware, but we've seen pictures and videos of phone hardware running this. I'm surprised the release is so far away considering the resources available and how complete everything seems to be.
Re:Screenshot != not vapor (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the individual OEM's/ODP's have to A) integrate telephony (and work out the large number of issues with integrating the Android stuff with that), B) Create the mechnicals, C) Test and certify the phones for a number of different groups (OMA, FCC, etc..), D) Negotiate distribution and availability with carriers, etc... etc... etc...
Building a phone is non-trivial and involves a LOT of 3rd parties. They're on step 1a right now. I'll be duly impressed if they get a phone out before November of 2008.
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Android vs. Openmoko (Score:1)
I thought about getting a Nokia N810, but of all the neat things it does, it's not a phone!
So I guess now the question is: wait for Openmoko to put their act together, or jump on the Google bandwagon? I'd prefer Openmoko for the major openness
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Google has good GUI's (Score:1)
it is good to hear Google develops a portable device GUI.
They do know their GUI stuff.
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Design is a function of the GUI.
I do not like the design (and its GUI) picture from the article at all..
My HTC phone is better: bigger touch screen, less buttons.
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no-one will buy them when they come out (Score:5, Funny)
Designs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Designs - RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
And yes, this big drab-looking device is dog ugly - but this isn't a slick made-for-media concept phone, it's merely a functional prototype on which the developers and engineers can tinker (and we all know that as rule, they're not big on elegant design).
RTFA!!
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As Maddox might say, 'so you want your screen to turn into a smudgy piece of shit after a few minutes of use?'
I hink he has a point. I don't want smudgy fingerprints all over the screen, touchscreens aren't a good idea.
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I'm not a fan of apple, Linux, or windows...I use them all for the app they fit best. Because I use google calendar and not outlook, I can consider the iPhone the best phone on market for usability and efficiency.
Microsoft, Schmicrosoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
But Apple is going to be the ones crapping their pants; they've bet the farm on the iPhone, and major competition coming from Google won't be making them happy.
If Apple's smart, they'll make the next generation iPhone fully able to run and support Google Phone applications--that'll really make some folks in Redmond change their underwear.
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So this [apple.com] (3rd paragraph on left), this [apple.com] (under "If You Don't Have an Email Account"), and this [yahoo.com] are all wrong?
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Android looks like a really neat platform, but it's a geek platform. It won't have the enterprisey features that business people want (primarily Exchange integration) and from the looks of things, it doesn't have the sleek design that has captured the hip market (like t
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I really hope that I'll be proven wrong, but so far, I just don't see anything that makes Android pop.
T
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The thing that'll make Android "pop" is if they come up with a way to separate their phones from the carriers, so that we Americans can be like everyone else in the world, where they buy a phone, and THEN they worry about finding a carrier for it, and all phones work with all carriers.
You can already do this. The phones just cost a whole lot more. I don't see why the cost of the phones would change suddenly because of Android.
This is the fatal flaw with Apple's iPhone. It looked really cool, but when people found out they were required to only use AT&T, and had no choice in the carrier, many lost interest. A lot of people are sick of the cellular carriers, and how they get locked into one carrier for a long contract with a crappy phone, and changing to a new carrier means buying a new phone.
Most carriers have a free model that you can buy with a new contract. Getting a new phone may not be fun for everyone (having to transfer numbers, and such) but I can't believe that many people consider it that much of a hassle.
People may well be tired of carriers, but they're pretty deeply entrenched in this way of life. Until they can get cheap, unlocked pho
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I don't really understand the relevance here. Can you explain? Does it have to do with Sprint throwing in with Google on Android?
It's the reason many people are locked into their cellular carriers here in the USA. You mentioned that people can already buy unlocked phones for a whole lot more, but that's not very use
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I'm pumped! (Score:4, Interesting)
This article doesn't say much of anything new - it mostly uses screen shots and explanations that the folks at Google put in their original announcement videos.
That said, I'm personally very pumped about getting an Android phone. I hear people dissing Google here a lot, but everything that I've used that is made by Google works great - Gmail, Picassa, Google Earth, Google Maps, and the search engine itself. If these guys make something, I pretty much believe it will be cool.
Up till now, I've had very little interest in a "smart phone" - the ones I've had my hands on are clunky, and that includes Blackberries. But if I can get a phone with Android next time my contract is up, I just might do it. If nothing else, the possibility of having features that aren't controlled by the carrier is awesome. And announcements like Android seem to be pressuring carriers to go in that direction, even though Android doesn't specifically prohibit lockdown.
Down with carrier control! Up with open access! :)
GPS (Score:2)
Unless Google has some kind of intelligent solution to this problem I doubt I am inte
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They don't have this, and neither do any of the other companies that claim to do this kind of thing.. I've *never* seen such applications actually work even right in the middle of major cities.
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All in All (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy to develop ... (Score:5, Informative)
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However GMaps on my S60 mobile routinely either finds me "unavailable" or well over a mile out.
If they've got the triangulating algorythms working more accurately, why not release it on GMaps?
;-)
(And yes, that was a rhetorical question...)
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I hope they put in GPS! (Score:2)
I hope that Google doesn't make the same mistakes that Palm did with the Centro.
1. Voice dialing. Really this is just too usful to live without.
2. Full Bluetooth support. My current phone seems to support just about every bluetooth profile around.
3. GPS. Again it is just too useful once you have it.
4. Support for large MicroSD cards. I have a 6 GB card in my phone.
5. A good media player. Apple has shown that it makes a big difference.
6. And this is the big o
So, (Score:1)
Android on Existing phones (Score:1)
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If HTC re-use some of its existing hardware to deploy some Android phones, maybe... I've seem some threads at xda-developers and MoDaCo with people talking about flashing their phones with alternative WinMo versions.
My guess is: it probably will be possible... but HTC won't support it. Another possibility is that Android might appear as an paid upgrade, but it's very unlikely.
Mind you that you DON'T need to wipe Windows Mobile to try Linux on your smartphone, there are some bootloaders out ther
Neo1973/OpenMoko and Android (Score:3, Interesting)
Google's phone sounds awesome, but this is the kind of thing that hinders the "open phone" market. Too many splinters.
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Most cellphone development is already done using Java.
Also, Java offers a great feature, isolation from the underlying OS. That means that one ill behaved application won't bring the entire phone down, and reduces the opportunities for security failures. IMHO C/C++ is just too dangerous to be allowed for general development on a phone, try to imagine the kind of mess viruses and trojans could do if t
Can't they afford a designer? (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but it looks really fugly. Even with my dislike of thumb qwerty-keyboards aside.
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So is every other product... WTF ever happened to computers being simple to use?
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Microsoft have been using Vapor as a marketing tactic for years.. it goes like this:
1. Competitor announces product
2. Announce your product coming 'real soon' that is same as competitor
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i'll have to find out if all of my gay friends hang out at slashdot.