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:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Insightful? LOL. There was a time when there were more applications for Macintosh. From 1986 until 1990, Windows was irrelevant. Mac was the future.... Then Windows 3.x happened. History is repeating itself in front of our very eyes.
Flash forward to now. Apple has met it's match. And unlike with windows where Apple faced an cheaper, inferior product that was just barely good enough (Windows 3.x), Apple is facing a product that is it's equal in Android (yes, it's that good). As Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and others bring more Android hardware to market and Verizon, Sprint and other carriers offer Android to theri customers, the tide will turn quickly on software development as well.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I looked at the android market website since I have an open mind until the new iPhone comes out next month. App store beats it. My wife's iphone has kids games on it along with flash cards for our son to play with. And come this summer you will be able to USe the iPhone to measure blood pressure and cholesterol.
I like listening to slacker and reading a book at the same time on my bb curve, but for a new personal cell I'll probably take the iPhone. New version will have nice 3d graphics almost as good as a console. Games suck on all the other phones
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:3, Interesting)
We'll see in the next eight weeks as Samsung and Motorola roll out their products. Android is not what a lot of people think, so far as openness - it can be as open or closed as any other phone. The value prop on Android is more to hardware manufacturers who no longer want to manager their own OS or pay tons of royalties to for an OS.
Re:works for me (Score:3, Interesting)
I owned an iPhone for a while, and while I was mostly pleased with it, I found it to be very premature as a smart-phone. It met the general requirements for everything except internet browsing, where it exceeded them in spades, but only barely. If iPhone 3.0 changes that, then I might go back. I am, however, getting more interested in the Android platform.
For those that have used an iPhone previously, what differences should I keep in mind while making the transition? Does the G1 play music as good as the iPhone/iPod Touch does? How is its e-mail client? How does internet browsing compare?
!Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
The parent makes some good points
I own an HTC Dream (called TMobile G1 in the US). My first phone bill after I bought the phone was $200 more than usual. It is now dropped because I changed my plan to allow for more mobile data, but buying the phone to start with, I had no idea that when I first turned it on it would start downloading a crap load of my gmail. It took me a little bit to figure out how to get the data usage down.
I really like the phone, but I wish there was clearer pre-sales on how much data it was going to use and how to make it cheaper to operate. I also would like a "turn data off - just be a phone" mode. Also the fact that it's advertised as having bluetooth but still - even with cupcake - can't do bluetooth file transfer is just stupid.
Re:and a million things to hate about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only is the application structure and lifecycle unique and structured around a unique UI flow, Android has unique UI classes in an otherwise mostly standard Java runtime, it uses binder for inter-process communication, it has a unique graphics stack relative to most other Linux systems, and it makes it difficult to put programs other than those written to the Android programming model on the screen, among other differences relative to most Linux-based systems.
But it has already overtaken the Nokia 8xx Web pads, which use Hildon, in user acceptance. Google gambled on establishing an entirely different application layer in the userland for Android and appears to have succeeded.
Android answers the question: "What if Linux had a userland based on a managed language runtime and every application used the same UI classes (and what if a company with sufficient resourced to do it right did it)?"
If Android perplexes you, try this:
http://www.amazon.com/Android-Application-Development-Programming-Google/dp/0596521472
Re:and a million things to hate about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, nothing prevents you from writing applications with native code.
In fact, parts of the SDK explicitly allow this.
However, it's generally bad idea because Android runs on a variety of hardware platforms, making native code "fun" to deal with in the future. I just hope they add proper JIT at some point, so Android's performance isn't fucking atrocious like it is now.
Why would that be a showstopper? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no native code (C/C++) SDK for it last time I've checked, that was about a half year ago. That is a show stopper for lot of people.
I'm not sure who, since on Android devices the code produced is highly performant.
You can do games on Android after all... and as we see with the update real time video recording and encoding. I mean, just what is holding people back here?
The only people who this bothers are those still scared of Java 1.1 and Applets. Java moved past that point long, long ago.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:3, Interesting)
It does help me, as it means I can build the rest of my app on a "real phone", then port it to the final public API when that becomes available. Then again, your project may be more time-critical -- mine is more of a hobby, so it can afford to be on hold for a while.
In any event, as RFCOMM was deferred to focus on A2DP, and A2DP is now released as of 1.5, I expect it plumbed through in the next release cycle.
Re:devices? Since when (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:2, Interesting)
Firefox, assuming Easy DragToGo [mozilla.org] installed:
Step 1: Triple click to highlight ...
Step 2: Drag in chosen direction for chosen action - open in this tab, open in new tab, save link as
but it is the choice of 4 different searches for a piece of highlighted text that really makes the extension worthwhile.
Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Crappy devices and development stagnation did the Palm line in. When the iPhone launched it looked exactly what Palm *should* have done with their devices.
I loved Palm 8-10 years ago, and I wrote several apps for my own personal use, but I stopped being interested in them when the entire marketplace passed them by.
Actually that doesn't really matter (Score:3, Interesting)
don't forget there are millions of desktop/enterprise java developers. People who think 2Gb RAM and dual core is a minimum spec :)
My experience is all in iPhone development so far, but from what I've seen it applies roughly to Android as well...
When you are developing an application for the new mobile platforms, the app by nature is small enough that taking the approach of a desktop programmer is OK. The frameworks you use are there to help keep your app small, and in the end if you hit resource constraints there are tools to hunt them down and address them.
But generally, it actually doesn't matter much in development that you are targeting mobile, not in the way it used to be the case with platforms like J2ME. And the devices are following the same More's Law path desktops have...
In fact, the java-only model is a poor one, you're locked in to java, get what the environment gives you.
Which is actually the widest range of development tools around! Eclipse is no slouch in development.
Java really is not the limitation people think it is, and it provides 99% of apps an easy way to run across a wide variety of mobile devices. The flip side of being "locked into Java" is that phones are not locked into a processor, which is actually a bit of a concern with the iPhone although Apple has shown they know how to migrate processors in a seamless manner (I don't mind having to generate fat binaries though it's not as elegant).