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"
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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:2, Interesting)
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 Apple learned their lesson with the first iPhone and come out with a competitive iPhone 2 that is focused more on features and usability and price instead of marketing.
Linux_kernel+BSD_libc+gJava != linux based open OS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Martha will never know what hit her!
Re:People Excited After The iPhone Marketplace Dud (Score:5, Interesting)
snappy (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW- slashdot: fix mobile.slashdot.org so us new centro owners don't have to fight with the webpage!
Re:Smooth and Fast (Score:3, Interesting)
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 there is architecture. Since economics means you have to get things done quickly, the most attractive way of doing that is standing on the shoulders of a couple of giants, who are each in turn standing on the shoulders of a couple of giants. This means that each increment of functionality tends to be accompanies by an exponential increase in code executed, roughly speaking. Since we had exponential increases in computer power for a long time, things seem more or less the same; there's little incentive to improve once things are good enough.
Believe me, I started out writing software for CPUs with sub megahertz clock speeds. The things we did to make things "fast" back then really wouldn't take a modern piece of software, with all its bells and whistles running on top of a modern system with its own bells and whistles (and recursively down to hardware), and make it exponentially faster. Crimes against maintainability were common back then, only most people didn't even know maintainability was a problem. In fact, I'd have a hard time saying that programmers were better back then; true, it was a more elite profession, and certainly it was an easier profession to know more or less every relevant thing about. But the flip side is that we know a great deal more about good practice, and even a tiny bit more about theory than we did back then.
Which brings us to the rub. Back in the day, bad programs were always the product of lazy programmers. Now it takes even a conscientious programmer considerable time to learn the ins and outs of some programming environment. Conscientious programmers still write better programs, all things being equal, but not necessarily on time.
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.