6 ms·

Why the Nexus One can't compete with the app experience of the iPhone

4 points by anderzole 17y ago

nickaugust 17y ago
but I thought multitouch could be written into android apps? So it’s just the apps developed by Google that won’t include multitouch. Example: Dolphin browser http://sites.google.com/a/mgeek.mobi/browser/ http://sites.google.com/a/mgeek.mobi/browser/
- samstokes 17y ago
  Presumably this is because of that pesky Apple patent on multi-touch gestures. Google are steering clear of anything close to the patent claims to avoid lawsuits, but if app developers want to test how close they can cut it, they're free to try.
jacquesm 17y ago
It's a friggin' phone. It is to make calls with. If it does pictures that's fantastic (and it seems it does, and with pretty good youtube integration as well as still upload support). Beyond that it's got a really good screen and if that allows google to come up with some android specific tweaks to google.com then there is plenty of reason to take this serious. The memory issues are a bit silly, but nothing that can't be fixed in a 2.0 release. For a first time entry in to a market that it had no previous experience with I think they did pretty well. The mobile phone market is huge, HTC has proven in the past that they can re-tool for upgrades pretty quickly so I think this will work itself out. As for the multi-touch issues, I've never owned an Iphone, so it would be hard for me to 'miss' that which I don't know, and if the major uses are (the article suggests) gaming and zooming on stuff then I probably never will. What would be more important to me is very long stand-by time, reliability and the ability to roam across the globe without switching phones. Probably I'm not a typical consumer. If I can find a discounted android, unlocked and without a plan I think I'll get one just to fool around with to see what it's like, but whatever extra bits and pieces it will always be a phone first.
- generalk 17y ago
  > It's a friggin' phone. It is to make calls with. No, it isn't. It includes a phone and you can make calls with it. > What would be more important to me is very long stand-by time, reliability and the ability to roam across the globe without switching phones. I'd like to think that if a company like Google decided to focus their efforts on a device that really was "just a phone" it'd have this feature. > Probably I'm not a typical consumer. Probably not, but there's probably a market for people like you that seems woefully underserved.
- dagw 17y ago
  I'd say that you are a very typical consumer (in a global sense). The thing is that this phone is not aimed at the typical consumer. It's aimed at a small niche of consumers whom are willing to spend a lot of money for a phone with a lot of features, and whom consider making calls almost a secondary feature. There are plenty of phones that fulfill your main requirements (long battery, quad band GSM, robust design), but they are cheap, have a low profit margin and thus the company that make them would rather you bought something else. So while they'll make the phones they won't go out of their way to market or hype them.
mcantor 17y ago
This entire article literally only says two things: 1. The Nexus One doesn't have multi-touch. (Is this even true?) 2. The Nexus One can only store 200MB of apps. I've seen few articles that stretched further to find something, anything, to write about.
- josefresco 17y ago
  OS upgrade solves the multi-touch issue. Not sure on the 200 mb app limit, seems like that could be fixed with software as well.
  - nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
    There is already a multitouch developer library available that allows developers (at least on the latest Cyanogen build) to work with multitouch gestures and input, and this is on my "aging" G1. AFAIK, there has not been a single non-multitouch-capable Android device released yet, so yes, it could be a simple OTA update to enable it if Google finally mans up to Apple. Regarding the "app limit", there is already a confirmed plan from Google to release an update for Android that will allow storing downloaded apps on the SD card as well as onboard memory.
- jpschorr 17y ago
  As nickaugust says below, the hardware and the OS support multi-touch. It's just that Google's bundled apps don't use this support. As to the 190MB limit, this is true for executable bundles, but apps and games are free to use the rest of the storage for resources (datastores, textures, models, etc.). Also, at the Nexus One event yesterday, it was noted that Google is working on the ability to use the SD card for app storage.
  - ajross 17y ago
    The inability to store applications on the external card is a really frustrating shortcoming. It's trivially fixed in the modding community (for the phones that have been rooted, of course) by just putting an ext2 filesystem on the card and making a few symlinks, but Google doesn't want to support that because it breaks the "SD cards must be unpartitioned FAT filesystems" notion. Still, 190M is a lot of space for apps, most of which are no more than 1-2M. I'm not sure this is as big a crisis as it's made out to be.
dpcan 17y ago
Everyone misses the point. A huge group of consumers are buying phones based on their preferred network - or the network where they have a current contract. I know plenty of people who ended up with a blackberry over an iphone (self included), or a droid over an iphone because they want to stay on Verizon. These people are not "jailbreaking" anything. I only recently decided to pay the bucks to get into an iPhone because I just couldn't take it anymore.... I had to have the apps. After a few weeks, I have 1.6GB of apps on my phone, several pages worth. So, back on point, Droid stinks because: 1) You can't just pick your network and still pay only $200 for the phone. (or any good phone) 2) There is almost no space for apps. 3) You have to use Google Checkout to buy an app. 4) There are only a fraction of the apps available and they haven't gone through a rigorous approval process, so you don't know what you are installing.
- nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
  4) There are only a fraction of the apps available and they haven't gone through a rigorous approval process, so you don't know what you are installing. Please. Any process that has let dead baby apps through only to revoke them later, or denied bugfix updates to applications (after waiting weeks for approval) that have been previously approved, cannot possibly be called "rigorous". "Arbitrary" and "draconian" are much more apt.

4 points by anderzole 17y ago

but I thought multitouch could be written into android apps? So it’s just the apps developed by Google that won’t include multitouch. Example: Dolphin browser http://sites.google.com/a/mgeek.mobi/browser/ http://sites.google.com/a/mgeek.mobi/browser/

samstokes 17y ago
Presumably this is because of that pesky Apple patent on multi-touch gestures. Google are steering clear of anything close to the patent claims to avoid lawsuits, but if app developers want to test how close they can cut it, they're free to try.

jacquesm 17y ago

It's a friggin' phone. It is to make calls with. If it does pictures that's fantastic (and it seems it does, and with pretty good youtube integration as well as still upload support). Beyond that it's got a really good screen and if that allows google to come up with some android specific tweaks to google.com then there is plenty of reason to take this serious. The memory issues are a bit silly, but nothing that can't be fixed in a 2.0 release. For a first time entry in to a market that it had no previous experience with I think they did pretty well. The mobile phone market is huge, HTC has proven in the past that they can re-tool for upgrades pretty quickly so I think this will work itself out. As for the multi-touch issues, I've never owned an Iphone, so it would be hard for me to 'miss' that which I don't know, and if the major uses are (the article suggests) gaming and zooming on stuff then I probably never will. What would be more important to me is very long stand-by time, reliability and the ability to roam across the globe without switching phones. Probably I'm not a typical consumer. If I can find a discounted android, unlocked and without a plan I think I'll get one just to fool around with to see what it's like, but whatever extra bits and pieces it will always be a phone first.

generalk 17y ago
> It's a friggin' phone. It is to make calls with. No, it isn't. It includes a phone and you can make calls with it. > What would be more important to me is very long stand-by time, reliability and the ability to roam across the globe without switching phones. I'd like to think that if a company like Google decided to focus their efforts on a device that really was "just a phone" it'd have this feature. > Probably I'm not a typical consumer. Probably not, but there's probably a market for people like you that seems woefully underserved.
dagw 17y ago
I'd say that you are a very typical consumer (in a global sense). The thing is that this phone is not aimed at the typical consumer. It's aimed at a small niche of consumers whom are willing to spend a lot of money for a phone with a lot of features, and whom consider making calls almost a secondary feature. There are plenty of phones that fulfill your main requirements (long battery, quad band GSM, robust design), but they are cheap, have a low profit margin and thus the company that make them would rather you bought something else. So while they'll make the phones they won't go out of their way to market or hype them.

mcantor 17y ago

This entire article literally only says two things: 1. The Nexus One doesn't have multi-touch. (Is this even true?) 2. The Nexus One can only store 200MB of apps. I've seen few articles that stretched further to find something, anything, to write about.

josefresco 17y ago
OS upgrade solves the multi-touch issue. Not sure on the 200 mb app limit, seems like that could be fixed with software as well.
- nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
  There is already a multitouch developer library available that allows developers (at least on the latest Cyanogen build) to work with multitouch gestures and input, and this is on my "aging" G1. AFAIK, there has not been a single non-multitouch-capable Android device released yet, so yes, it could be a simple OTA update to enable it if Google finally mans up to Apple. Regarding the "app limit", there is already a confirmed plan from Google to release an update for Android that will allow storing downloaded apps on the SD card as well as onboard memory.
jpschorr 17y ago
As nickaugust says below, the hardware and the OS support multi-touch. It's just that Google's bundled apps don't use this support. As to the 190MB limit, this is true for executable bundles, but apps and games are free to use the rest of the storage for resources (datastores, textures, models, etc.). Also, at the Nexus One event yesterday, it was noted that Google is working on the ability to use the SD card for app storage.
- ajross 17y ago
  The inability to store applications on the external card is a really frustrating shortcoming. It's trivially fixed in the modding community (for the phones that have been rooted, of course) by just putting an ext2 filesystem on the card and making a few symlinks, but Google doesn't want to support that because it breaks the "SD cards must be unpartitioned FAT filesystems" notion. Still, 190M is a lot of space for apps, most of which are no more than 1-2M. I'm not sure this is as big a crisis as it's made out to be.

dpcan 17y ago

Everyone misses the point. A huge group of consumers are buying phones based on their preferred network - or the network where they have a current contract. I know plenty of people who ended up with a blackberry over an iphone (self included), or a droid over an iphone because they want to stay on Verizon. These people are not "jailbreaking" anything. I only recently decided to pay the bucks to get into an iPhone because I just couldn't take it anymore.... I had to have the apps. After a few weeks, I have 1.6GB of apps on my phone, several pages worth. So, back on point, Droid stinks because: 1) You can't just pick your network and still pay only $200 for the phone. (or any good phone) 2) There is almost no space for apps. 3) You have to use Google Checkout to buy an app. 4) There are only a fraction of the apps available and they haven't gone through a rigorous approval process, so you don't know what you are installing.

nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
4) There are only a fraction of the apps available and they haven't gone through a rigorous approval process, so you don't know what you are installing. Please. Any process that has let dead baby apps through only to revoke them later, or denied bugfix updates to applications (after waiting weeks for approval) that have been previously approved, cannot possibly be called "rigorous". "Arbitrary" and "draconian" are much more apt.