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:falling ahead? (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, you can dislike Android, but you're blindly full of crap.
I do. I can make a video with it if it makes you happy, but having a phone with as much horsepower as iOS without the clutter actually makes it way smother. iOS is full of little hangs and stutters that are hidden under "cool" animations, but they're there.
Second, Android is not slow out of the box. Android on a 100$ phone might be slow out of the box, but if you're comparing a 700$ iPhone with an Android phone, at least have the decency to chose an equivalent phone. The user experience on the top-of-the line Android phones has been the same (if not better) than on iOS. So, yes, my modified Android (because I can modify it to run smoother than your iPhone) runs faster than iOS. If you missed the part where I talked about pre-caching of applications, read it again. It's actually the secret for an instantly responsive apps (that, again, any top of the line android phone will do - the ones 200$ cheaper than an iPhone).
I've programmed in Objective-C. And I never said it was impossible, and good for Apple that there's talent where there's money. But when you say that everything runs through Google's VM as if that makes everything slow, you're an idiot. They might run inside a VM, but the code is native code and it runs as is. If you're doing processor intensive stuff on your mobile phone (physics simulations, video decoding, etc) you'll benefit immensely by using c code. And google's VM is actually highly optimized and way faster than the Java VM you're complaining about.
My "buddy" is actually not the only one. Remember the researchers that found the iOS tracking? ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GynEFV4hsA0&t=10m40s [youtube.com] ). They also seem to run from it around 10:50. And the thing about going for the webview actually shows intelligence. If you only want some menus to show some photos with music / sound / whatever, why bang your head against the wall? You don't need a ferrari to go on a groceries run.
And again, read the part where my 2yo Desire (that actually came out 3 months before the iPhone 4) does everything the other one does, but smoother. Try running iOS4 on an iPhone 3G and you'll be crying for your lack of horspower the same way a 100$ Android phone will. But if you level yourself from the top, nowadays, the top of the line Androids WILL beat your iPhone out of the park on pretty much everything.
Re:Two-handed phone? (Score:4, Informative)
NOT targeting the majority with your latest and greatest phone a wise move?
No sane business plan ever targets "the majority". That's an excellent way to set yourself up for failure. Every marketing strategy first targets a very small group and then new strategies are created to target the next group.
For example, even the first iphone targeted very specific users. Later it expanded with each iteration. The first iphone didn't have 3rd party app support and the iOS App Store wasn't available yet. It wasn't until 1.5 years AFTER the initial announcement of the first iphone that the itunes App Store was released.
The basics in marketing are to come up with a marketing strategy that will succeed in a specific target market. Make your target market everyone and you're guaranteed to fail.
I mean, this thing is meant to be THE Android Smartphone by Google(TM).
The nexus phones are Google's way of pushing the Android market where they would like to see it. You can think of it as "seeding" the competition.
For example when Google released the Nexus One, it was the first phone with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor. During this period, many manufacturers were trying to build the cheapest Android they could get away with so most of the phones came with slow processors and minimal RAM. Google didn't like that, and had the Nexus One built. With that came other "fast" phones (for the time) like the HTC Incredible which shared specs with the Nexus One VERY closely. That wasn't a surprise considering that HTC also manufactured the Nexus One. Immediately following this, all the other manufacturers followed up with their own offerings with similar or better specifications.
Sometime in the future, perhaps Google will start to compete with their own hardware. But at this point, I don't think that is their primary goal. The primary goal is to push the Android market forward. Secondary would be making money on the hardware since they already are the source for the OS.
As The Onion headlined a few days ago: "Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies". How apt.
You do know that The Onion is 100% satire? You've lost a lot of credibility with that kind of statement.