| reply to patcat88
Re: maybe because said by patcat88:Thats the problem. Its a smartphone. Its just 1. Sprint has been vague on this front. But as a major carrier, it's a safe bet that they're working behind the scenes. They did get the Palm Pre after all. I'm sure they're working with HTC, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, and others to get the most competitive line up of phones possible. They probably won't announce anything until it's relatively concrete and near ready to go.
And its Android which doesn't have mainstream acceptance.
The Android platform and the first Android phone only came in October 2008, it's still very young. Despite this, it's come a long way, and has a lot of development and momentum behind it. You should take another look at it, you might be surprised and see the potential it has.
Google expects ~18 Android phones by end of the year, maybe 50+ next year. HTC, Moto, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and others have announced phones and plans for more.
'»bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/2···ars-end/'
'»community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,100···b,00.htm'
'»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(o···_system)'
Your teenage daughter won't be using one. Neither will the corporate suit (unless their CIO is a FOSS geek and the corp runs off FOSS intranet apps), or the soccer mom who wants to play mp3s and check entertainment gossip and record amateur vids and pics occasionally.
'»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(o···Features'
The Android platform supports MMS/SMS, MS Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), a full web browser (WebKit-based like Chrome and Safari), 3D graphics for games, A/V support (MPEG 4 A/SP / H.263, MPEG 4 AVC / H.264, MP3, AAC, etc.), image support (JPEG, GIF, PNG), 3rd party app support (including a 'Market' with OTA dl's), support for hardware features like: touchscreens, still/video cameras, accelerometers, etc.
Considering all that, why wouldn't corporate types, moms, and teenagers, or anyone else want a sleek, easy to use, affordable phone that can do those things?
The sheeple/joe six pack want an simple, low options, premade experience, idiot proof, walled garden iPhone*, not a full blown, all the options, open (egh, poor FOSS culture, but you can load your own apps out of the box), geek OS like Windows Mobile phones. I'm not sure where Android falls between the 2.
I too share your frustration with the FOSS communities' general lack of attention to detail on user interfaces (UI). But, considering we're getting something for free, and it gets better over time, there's no need to take a dump on them. A number of projects like Mozilla Firefox and Apache have done a great job.
Android has also done good job with the GUI. Android may not be competitive with the latest and greatest 'hero phones' from Apple, Palm, and RIM, but most people can't afford those phones (with their crazy expensive service plans).
If you can afford it, go ahead and get one of those and be happy. But if you can't, Android based phones will likely be 'good enough' to be the everyman's smartphone.
Also, I'm not sure if Android is OS Standard, like POSIX or LSB or freedesktop, plus API for 3rd party user loaded apps, and a standard OS layout and core tools, plus a Reference Implementation of the standard made by Google as a live OS,
or, Android is just an OS with no real ability to cleanroom rewrite it as closed source, or under another license? (AKA, as practical and feasible as to write a closed source interpreter for Perl, as a compliment to perl, since Perl makes no effort to be a standard, and the standard is whatever the perl source does) Can you write a closed source OS to run FOSS Android apps? Also does Android include human interface design guidlines/one GUI theme/one widget set, or is that left up to the phone maker and app developer independently?
While I'm a technically minded young lad, I'm not a software developer (just don't have the chops for it, I tried years ago =/ ), but here's what I know of the technical details:
Android is a free, open source software (FOSS) project, shepherded by Google, to create an advanced, free mobile platform. It's designed to as friendly and open as possible to handset vendors, software developers, mobile operators, and users.
It's based on a modified Linux kernel, and a modified Java Virtual Machine called Dalvik (technically not Java b/c of that), uses the Java language with more languages being added. A software development kit (SDK) is available to create 3rd party apps.
I was a bit skeptical at first, because it was yet another mobile platform, completely new and thus little to nothing would carry over, and we'd see more fragmentation in the market.
Thankfully that wasn't the case, we've seen a lot coalescing around Android, and it has a lot of momentum going forward. There's a lot of good apps available, and more coming. Take a look, you might be impressed with the results (less than a year since intro):
'»www.android.com/market/'
Keep in mind Google is trying herd a lot of cats (handset vendors, mobile operators, and software developers) and have something end users want.
No small feat.
*Look at how many people still watch walled garden TV, or use walled garden non-smartphone OS phones, or never leave their carrier's WAP deck, even though there are real alternatives (WWW IPTV, and WM/Android/Symbian/Palm(?)).
VCast, MediaFlo, etc. are all pretty lame and expensive. I'm sure the walled garden will fall (if it hasn't already). |
