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, Insightful)
200MHz is slow? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
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.
Smooth and Fast (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
=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!"
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
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 oversized truck.
Android Source code (Score:5, Insightful)
You can also read (here [google.com]) that
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.