Ten Features To Love About Android 1.5 384
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, Google officially announced the Android 1.5 update, dubbed 'cupcake.' The new software is apparently ready to roll out to Android-powered devices beginning tomorrow. Make no mistake, Android 1.5 is a major upgrade — they could have called it 2.0. The software brings a host of new capabilities, some of which can't be found on rival mobile platforms, including video recording and sharing."
Re:Cupcake (Score:3, Insightful)
I installed Ubuntu 9.04, whats Jaunty Jackalope?
and a million things to hate about it (Score:2, Insightful)
I've tried numerous times to program for this platform but I hate it so much.
Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:3, Insightful)
The IPhone has a lot of limitations, but the amount of apps for it makes it the killer device. The iphone has more quality apps than all other platforms have total apps combined. and the new hardware/software combo coming out in the next 2 months will make it even better.
until Android, winmo and BB get more and better apps and the ability to install over 10-20 apps on the device i'll probably buy a new iphone come july to complement my wife's iphone. even with all it's limitations.
this is almost exactly like the story with Windows in the 1990's. it was far from the best OS, but the amount of apps for it clinched it's success.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exciting but still unappealing & limited hardw (Score:5, Insightful)
I really like Android as concept. Unfortunately, in the USA the number of devices are not very appealing (the ones that are available). My carrier doesn't even have android phones. Strange, because the whole point of Android I figured was to allow manufacturers to focus on innovative cell phone designs. Maybe manufacturers will eventually make more phones with Android, but right now they are kinda lousy IMHO.
Until better hardware, the future is Palm Pre or iPhone
Re:Missing Enterprise Feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you have the issue backwards. Your selection of MS-Exchange as a messaging platform has limited the financially viable choices available to your firm to basically, Windows Mobile. Don't blame your vendor lock in on anyone other than your messaging vendor and the person who decided to buy MS-Exchange. You didn't HAVE TO do it.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cupcake (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about the name, it's about the content.
Think of it like the Princess Bride.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has met it's match... As Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and others bring more Android hardware to market and Verizon, Sprint and other carriers offer Android to their customers, the tide will turn quickly on software development as well.
People have been saying this since before the G1 came out, but the market numbers just aren't meeting these predictions yet. When are all these amazing phones going to arrive at my carrier (Verizon)? And how open is this Android thing really going to be? Google has already demonstrated that it is willing to pull certain apps that T-mobile doesn't like.
Verizon is one of the big players in the industry and last I heard, it was backing away from Android. But think of the carnage Verizon would wreak on an open-source platform. (We both know they would lock it down so hard you couldn't do anything useful with it anyway.)
AT&T is the other big player and they have a conflict of interest with their iPhone, for now at least.
Currently, Android seems a lot like Linux. It's theoretically open source, but it has limited industry support and is only available on (extremely) limited hardware. But the key difference is that the cell phone industry is dominated by the carriers, who don't seem fully sold on it yet and it's not like we can just go ahead and replace our phone's OS without voiding all sorts of warranties and support.
I do hope this changes with time though. And for what it's worth, I have emailed Verizon and urged them to adopt the OS, but I am not holding my breath.
Just wanted to hit one of these points (Score:5, Insightful)
> Google has already demonstrated that it is willing to pull certain apps that T-mobile doesn't like.
Except it doesn't matter, because on an Android phone you can install an apk package from anywhere on the web without rooting your phone. (There is a single checkbox in the settings you need to check first.) The Market actually has a strong incentive to be less fascist than the app store, because if it is perceived as hampering developers, developers will simply go elsewhere. I have no doubt that Google knew this when they designed the OS, and that they intend to be more egalitarian in the future. They're also still getting used to this thing, so I'm cutting a little slack. Have no doubt that if, in the future, Google decides to be dicks about the Market, I will put the apps I develop for Android online somewhere else.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that spending $99 is going to force someone to produce a paid application instead of a free one.
And actually, I suspect instead that the real motivation is the somewhat heretical idea (stay with me here) that you can make MONEY writing applications for the iPhone. Get enough people to give you a buck an app, and in some cases you can make a LOT of money doing so.
Writing iPhone applications is a difficult, skilled process that can take a lot of time. Supporting and improving said application can also burn the hours. So if someone wants a buck or two in compensation, I, for one, am not going to cry over it. Especially if it means a steady supply of cheap and useful applications, games, and utilities.
But if YOU want to spend a week or month or more writing an iPhone application and then give it away for free, more power to you.
Re:Welcome to Japan circa 2001 (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because something has a feature the Jesusphone doesn't, doesn't mean it is mindblowing and revolutionary...
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and a million things to hate about it (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words your application will always be a second rate application, serious developers avoids such a scenario. I've never seen a platform that would run smooth without native environment tweaking.
Give me a native support (C/C++) and there is not a problem to port the code to ARM or Atom.
Java was never really cross platform, there were quirks and problems that unlike (C++) you were not able to fix. That might have changed, but still, it is a single paradigm language, and that is a major pain, god forbid this becomes a standard of sorts.
Re:Welcome to Japan circa 2001 (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference between "having a feature" and "having a feature that's actually usable".
My Nokia E71 has loads of features. And most of them are so crummy and hard to use, that they might as well not exist. It has GPS. Which is so cumbersome to use that I never use it. It has web-browser. But browsing with it is so frustrating and clumsy that I only use it when I desperately need to check something online.
The thing is that when the iPhone was released, people compared it to other phones (like Nokias) and said "my phone has had those features for a long time already, how exactly is the iPhone "revolutioary?". But they fail to understand that it's not about list of checkboxes called "features", it's about features that people can actually use.
Like I said, my E71 has a web-browser. It also has WiFI. But for some reason I never use it for web-browsing at home through my Wifi, I use my iPod touch for that.
You can't compare phones (or any other devices for that matter) by staring at a piece of paper that lists their specs. You need to actually USE the devices to make that judgement. And the thing is that iPhone might not have every single bell and whistle some other phone has, but the bells and whistles it has. are so usable that people actually use them. Nokia has been piling features to their phones for years, but since they are implemented in such a crappy way, they go mostly unused.
If your phone has a feature that no-one uses, is it really a feature?
Re:WiMo a distant second. (Score:3, Insightful)
I own neither of those phones, but could someone explain to me why 35.000 is much more important than 20.000? With that many apps chances are you will have a harder time finding quality in the heap of binary junk.
Re:Welcome to Japan circa 2001 (Score:5, Insightful)
If your phone has a feature that no-one uses, is it really a feature?
Eh yes. Because sometimes, the use of a feature is also a function of the user's intelligence, training, awareness or needs. My mother might use my PC, but I'm pretty sure /she/ wouldn't touch the gcc installed on it. Yet my PC continues to 'feature' gcc.
Re:WiMo a distant second. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. This is usually the way to spot the Apple fanboi.
When they bring up how Apple's App Store has 35,000 applications and Windows Mobile (or some other phone) has only however many thousand, point out that Windows has far more applications available than Mac OS X, so it is obviously superior.
I did this once. It was great fun to watch him stammer. "But, but, but...it's completely different! How many word processors to do you need?" "Oh, I don't know, probably about as many tip calculators, fart noise generators, and flashlights."
document compatibility?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:works for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Your concept of a smartphone is that of companies like Blackberry and Palm's 24 months ago.
Apple saw a market for a consumer smartphone and exploited the fuck out of it. Now all the traditional business smartphone companies are trying to catch up.
Re:Why would that be a showstopper? (Score:2, Insightful)
Its a show stopper for me? I was looking into mobile phone development a few months ago, no native C = no open source C libraries i can use (glib/gobject/gtk/clutter etc...)
I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again in java when my C stack does it fine just now.
Mostly I just don't want my freedom of choice removed, this is supposed to be the worlds open source mobile OS, but in reality it feels just as closed off as anything else, Its their way or the highway.
Re:Why would that be a showstopper? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm convinced that the programming model of Android is what will make it a winner. Programming for Android is very easy if you're a java programmer, and there's millions of java programmers out there.
You can't even compare it to developing for WinMo or Symbian phones, which is a very hard task.
The ease of development, and support for a market with tons of free (and paid for) apps simply blows WinMo and Symbian out of the water.
Once you get a phone with the app support of Android (or iPhone) there is no turning back.
Symbian will die soon for sure, except perhaps for low cost, low function mobiles. WinMo will survive just because it has MS to hold it up with their desktop marketshare.
Re:Why would that be a showstopper? (Score:3, Insightful)
don't forget there are millions of desktop/enterprise java developers. People who think 2Gb RAM and dual core is a minimum spec :)
Java on embedded devices is relatively small, certainly not as widespread as you'd think. I'd go out on a limb and guess that there are more Symbian developers (who use C++) as there are simply far more Nokia phones in circulation than any java-based phones.
I would think Google should release a C/C++ application environment for Android, lots of people want it, lots of code already exists to make use of it (or the underlying Linux platform), I can't really think there's a good reason to restrict use to java only.
In fact, the java-only model is a poor one, you're locked in to java, get what the environment gives you. Having Android linux based makes such good sense you're likely to get as wide a range of software running on it as you have with Linux. Making it Java only stops that, you only get Android programmers coding for it.
Beats me why they bothered - its not even real Java, considering they reimplemented their JVM to get round the licencing issues.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:2, Insightful)
In late July of LAST year WinMo _alone_ had 18K applications.
Does it matters? Most of WinMo apps are utter crap. The platform itself isn't good for any specific purpose.
Seriously, I find my old Nokia N-Gage with Symbian more useful to make calls and manage contacts than my WinMo device.
So lets all assume the platform is more useful for non-phone applications. But it isn't!
The IE browser is totally useless, it cannot render correctly most pages (meaning that you cannot really surf them).
The embedded "office" is a joke, even the MSN messenger is so badly designed that makes me feel totally annoyed with constant popup windows (people login/logoff) that steals the window manager focus.
IM+ is a very good replacement for default mobile MSN messenger. There is also skyfire that renders your pages on their servers and sends you layered jpegs, it works very nice but has privacy issues.
So what can we tell when third party apps are better than platform bundled ones? We can tell that after spending 600â on a HTC phone with WinMob, we need to spend a lot more buying apps to make the brand new phone near useful.
It makes sense, doesn't it?
If everything wasn't bad enough, the bundled messaging app is always crashing. Activesync (which I don't really use) starts up randomly for no reason on the phone at starts hogging the cpu.
Then there is also stupid design issues like when the phone is getting with low battery. In this case, WinMo likes to awake the device from his low power state to inform me that the device is low power. Of course it would be enough to tell me this once, but it doesn't. It turns on every 10 minutes or so.
This is only what I could remember from the top of my head, but I assure you, there is a lot more.
I didn't dumped the device just because I'm actually enjoying hacking Linux into it:
http://linwizard.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:Welcome to Japan circa 2001 (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah yes, it's the grumpy featurism claim.
Well my Motorola V980 phone is better than the Iphone. No, it doesn't do touchscreen or wifi, but that's just a "list of checkboxes", right? (It also does video recording simply by pointing and clicking - it Just Works.)
but since they are implemented in such a crappy way
* Installing an application from any site on my phone Just Works, it doesn't need the phone to be hacked.
* Tethering on my phone Just Works, it doesn't need the phone to be hacked.
* Copy and paste on my phone Just Works, I don't have to retype the material.
I've given you three objective examples of implementation. So let's hear your examples - I want evidence, not "crappy way". What sort of debate is that? I might as well say "My Amiga 500 is also better than any PC out there - who cares about feature lists, it's just better, it just is, honest, because I say so, anything else is just crappy." I like to think I can come to Slashdot for some intelligent debate, not "Who cares about features, it's just crappy".
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just wanted to hit one of these points (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine if you could use a completely open device, not tied to any one company like with cell phones now, and simply paid to have internet access, period. You were then free to do whatever the hell you wanted to do, the way it should have been 20 years ago. (give or take...5 years? I dunno). It's amazing how software has been used as a tool for control for so long.