50+ Android Phones Expected In Near Future 378
wiseandroid writes "It's not even a year ago that the HTC Dream G1 became the first Android enabled phone to be released publicly (on October 22nd, 2008) and now we have listed more than 50 Android phones expected in the near future." Of the 51 phones on this list, 12 (from nine manufacturers) are currently available.
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:5, Informative)
Photographing documents is always terrible with phones because they have no variable focus. So they use a pinhole camera for infinite focus, but it fails at less than about 3 meters.
I always thought that a camera specifically for scanning documents would be great on a phone. They could have two cameras, one with infinite focus and one for photographing documents up-close.
You could attach an apropriate lens in front and get the same result I guess.
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:5, Informative)
You're barking up the wrong tree if you want a "very good camera" in a mobile phone, it just can't be done, the optics aren't good enough.
For reference though, an 8MB camera in a phone is likely to be *worse* than a 5MP one, which in turn will be worse than a 3MP one (which is about the optimum).
More pixels in such a small area == less light falling on the pixels == higher sensitivity pixels == worse signal to noise ratio.
The result of that is that phones with high resolution cameras have to apply a noise reduction filter, which is essentially just a blur, and none of these cameras can manage a sharp focus.
Re:Android:iPhone::Linux:Windows (Score:3, Informative)
stop drinking the kool aid (or anti kool aide or w/e)
it's still rougher around the edges than it's proprietary contemporaries as far as user-friendliness goes
This is true of desktop distros*, however for embedded devices & phones, it's unfounded.
The iPhone has only been around a few years, and it's really the first mobile that's truly comparible to a desktop or laptop's functionality (Browser, media players, apps, etc)
Apart from all the smartphones [wikipedia.org] that came before it, from 2002 there have been "smartphones" that could compete with laptop functionality and by 2007 most had 3rd party apps, 3G and bluetooth. The iPhone is good but it wasn't the first at anything.
iPhone isn't an implacable competitor,
Indeed [wikipedia.org] it's the blackberry that's the real #1 smartphone, but the real mistake is thinking that the smartphone market is "full" and to get users you have to take them off the competition, in reality it is an emerging market, you just need to sell your product to people who were previously happy with "dumbphones" (or if your nokia, get the phone companies to upgrade thier existing users to your smarphones for you)
*i think mint and distros specialised in being user friendly address most of the issues
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:3, Informative)
Really?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:3, Informative)
There is a case for the 3G that has a sliding lens for just this thing. and it work's GREAT (I've got it on my 3G). It was about the same price as all the other hard cases and it protects the camera's lens when you've got it slid over it.
You can hold the camera about 3" from what you're looking at and it'll take a crisp pic with readable text.
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More choice means more flexibility (Score:5, Informative)
The new Android SDK attempts to solve this problem by allowing developers to specify screen size profiles. Check out the blog post [blogspot.com].
Re:50+ phones and still no proper package manageme (Score:2, Informative)
Not being used by Android because it being Linux is purely immaterial.
If you want a phone with APT, you need to look at Nokia's Maemo offering.
Re:N900:iPhone:WinMo::Linux:OSX:Windows (Score:3, Informative)
No, it is totally open. You can even rebuild and replace the kernel if you so desired. In fact, it's trivial to install an app that grants you root (it's available in the APT-based repositories.)
Re:More choice means more flexibility (Score:3, Informative)
For all those different models with different screen sizes and different input options, a developer will have more work just making sure his or her app works for the wide variety of phones.
For keyboard input, I would assume that the operating system abstracts away whether the phone has a physical or touchscreen keyboard. You have a point about the screen size, but it's not like that's a new problem in software development, so any competent interface designer and/or programmer knows how to deal with it.
Relating to screen sizes, it's not that big of a deal. It's all handled by XML layout descriptions, so you can either use relative sizing or specify different XML layouts for different screen sizes.
Re:IMO Android is very impressive. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Any have a decent Camera? (Score:3, Informative)
So, even though standards have stayed more or less the same, the capabilities of even our worst cameras have increased by orders of magnitude. At some point, even a cell-phone camera is good enough to do what needs to be done, and any more technical improvement is just for dick-waving and specialized cases.
The fundamental problem with cell phone cameras is size. You just need bigger lenses to get good image quality. Ansel Adams may have used cameras that were technically far less sophisticated, but he had cameras that were much LARGER. In optics, size matters.