7 ms·

This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS. I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging An

by dannyr 16y ago

This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS. I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging Android. But before we get too hung up on having the latest version of Android running on our phones, let us put things in perspective. I do care a lot about having the latest version of Android. But I'm like you guys, we're plugged in to the tech scene. We love our apps, the coolest and latest UI, etc. But for the rest of the country, a survey of my friends suggest that most of them do not care. My roommate just bought a Palm Pre. There are very few apps in the market. But guess what, my roommate is very happy with his phone. He said it's the best phone he's ever had. I was happy with my Android phone even when my G1 was on 1.5. I'm glad that I upgraded to a Nexus One and I'm now on 2.2 but I never felt that 1.5 was a piece of crap. My observation with the tech community is that we think we are mainstream. We're not. I don't know many fellow geeks that play Farmville but you know what, it's got 100+ million users. So before we start raising hell about having different versions of Android out there, we should consider that maybe the mainstream users do not really care.

tvon 16y ago
> So before we start raising hell about having different versions of Android out there, we should consider that maybe the mainstream users do not really care. The problem is that it exacerbates the fragmentation situation for developers, or at least that's how I read it.
jsz0 16y ago
If they were shipping 1.6 or 2.0 I might agree but 1.5 has a ton of compatibility problems these days. You can't even run Google Navigation on it. That's something the average user might notice.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  My G1 is running 1.6. I thought this excluded me from getting Google Navigation, so was intending to upgrade at the end of my contract. But then one day I got an update and navigation came with it. I'm not entirely sure why I would upgrade now? I don't want to sign up for another 18 month contract if all I'm going to get for it is Flash, voice recognition and a shinier interface. So I've gone PAYG and saved myself about £30/month. When the next useful feature comes along which doesn't work on 1.6, then I'll upgrade. Or if an Android phone is released with considerably improved battery life.
  - wwortiz 16y ago
    Before you upgrade may I suggest rooting your phone, you don't have to worry about a brick if you are moving on anyway (though I don't think that happens much with android devices), and then you can have 2.2 through a rom.
    - mike-cardwell 16y ago
      How well does 2.2 run on a G1? I always expected the hardware wouldn't be good enough for a 2.2 experience and it would end up worse than using 1.6...?
      - wwortiz 16y ago
        My droid has similar hardware and it works pretty good without overclocking, check around though because I don't have firsthand experience with a G1 but they do indeed still make roms for it with froyo.
glhaynes 16y ago
I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging Android. I'm not sure that's the case. I'm not sure it's not, either... How much users think of their Dell Android-running phone as "my Android phone" versus "my Dell phone" versus just "my phone" isn't really clear.
danilocampos 16y ago
Differentiation through user experience is becoming more and more important to success in the computer hardware business. Ten years ago, a computer was a computer. For mainstream buyers there was this thing called a Mac but only your brother's kid, who wanted to be a designer, used one and it seemed kind of expensive. Today, the tide is shifting and people expect more and more out of their bit crunchers, whether they're in your pocket or on your desktop. Smartphones, of course, are extra competitive because a lot of manufacturers are duking it out to be the best. Between Apple, HTC and Motorola especially, the bar gets set higher and higher each quarter. Who can jam in the most useful hardware widgets? Who can accomplish the tightest software/hardware integrations so features feel great to use? Whoever it is, they gain a bit more mindshare, a few more sales, a few more solid reviews. And here comes bumbling ol' Dell, treating the smartphone like it's a commodified piece of tech and all they have to do is build it cheap and somewhat good enough. Regardless of whether we're in the mainstream or not, the mainstream isn't stupid. $99 buys you a lot of (subsidized) phone these days -- whether it's an iPhone 3GS or one of the many solid, 2.x Android phones. Either option is just obviously, demonstrably better than Dell's little turd RIGHT THERE IN THE CELL PHONE STORE. Dell took their eye off the ball and they think they can apply the lessons of commodity PCs to smartphones. Just like they did with MP3 players, they will find they're well out of their depth. I think in the end this won't affect Android fragmentation by much for the simple reason that they're not going to sell many of them.
- listic 16y ago
  > $99 buys you a lot of phone these days Are you talking about subsidized price? I wouldn't talk about "buying" for $99 in that case, because there are strings attached. If not, please link to solid 2.x Android phones for $99, I could use one.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    I'm just going with the subsidized price of Dell's phone versus other phones at the same (subsidized) price point. My point is that Dell's price can't match their competitors while their feature set is so bleh by comparison. Not if they want to be successful, anyway.
flatulent1 16y ago
>This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS. Huh? If Dell shipped a PC with an old version of Ubuntu, would anyone really have a problem getting up to date? If Dell hasn't added anything compelling to Android, what is stopping people from getting the latest vanilla version from someplace besides Dell? I thought the openness and freedom from restrictions were supposed to be the strong points of Android. If you don't like one fork, can't you just load another? Maybe I've missed something big. (I'm not an Android user and don't claim to be an expert) I am puzzled that a forum with so many developers has most acting like users are helpless in this matter. What's the dang deal?? Hopefully most phones aren't stale out of the box, but without updates all would become that way. Other than seeming old already, isn't the Dell really like the rest?
- michael_h 16y ago
  I'm not 100% sure about the dell phone, but with a few of the android phones that I've been looking at, the OS image needs to be signed. So, to upgrade your samsung galaxy s to 2.2, you need to wait for samsung to release their version of 2.2. When they decide to stop releasing updates for your model, you're out of luck (jail-breaking aside). I really, really wish it were as easy as downloading an update from android.com and installing it, but that marginalizes the manufacturers.
  - evilduck 16y ago
    Or in the case of my Samsung Moment, the Radio Interface Layer is flaky and will cause random data lockups. Samsung officially stopped updating the phone back around May (yay, 8 months of support from release date!), so even if I could continue upgrading my OS without their help, nobody will ever fix the hardware driver, it will always randomly lock up.
  - nl 16y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by the OS image needs to be signed, but it's not true in the sense people usually mean when they talk about signed code. Most Android phones have the bootloader locked down, but that is different to requiring signed code. You can run 2.2 on the Samsung Galaxy S now (eg, http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-6-0 http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-6-0, and I think there are pre-release official Samsung versions around too). You do need to root it, but on the Galaxy S that's a one-click process. (Sorry if you knew this - it's not clear if your jail-breaking aside comment applied to the updates for phones or the upgrade)
krschultz 16y ago
I disagree. Cell phones are mainstream tech that people obsess over. My girlfriends high school and college age sisters know nothing about laptops, TVs, and blu-ray, but they know every version of every cell phone available in a Verizon store. i.e. "How can you only have an LG enV v2 when the Droid is so much better? Come ON, I thought you were into technology?" A survey of people will return a lot that could care less about their cell phone (I care far less about my cell phone than my laptops/computers), but it would also return a large chunk of the population that cares far more about their cell phone than their laptop. If anything, this is why laptops are now commoditized and cell phones are getting more feature competitive.
rryyan 16y ago
Take a look at the comments on Motorola's Facebook page to see (relatively) mainstream users caring about the version of Android their phones are running: http://www.facebook.com/motorola http://www.facebook.com/motorola. The complaints about un-updated phones are relentless. I think the phone manufacturers can blame Apple for this -- they set the expectation for mainstream phones to get regular and significant software updates. Now customers feel slighted if their phone doesn't get upgraded.
- dannyr 16y ago
  How does that compare to the overall number of Motorola devices? The unhappy ones are the loudest but that doesn't mean they are the majority.
runjake 16y ago
| But for the rest of the country, a survey of my friends suggest that most of them do not care. They're going to care when they find out that the latest, greatest apps spammed in Android commercials don't run on their old versions of Android.
- alanh 16y ago
  Yes. This includes the official Twitter app.
Zev 16y ago
My roommate just bought a Palm Pre. There are very few apps in the market. But guess what, my roommate is very happy with his phone. He said it's the best phone he's ever had. I'll second the sentiments. I've got a Palm Pre Plus for personal use and an iPhone 4 that I use for work (iPhone dev). I love the Pre. It's a fantastic phone. Looks great, is more open than Android, etc. But, it could use an update in hardware. The cpu is somewhat (affects scrolling) and the screen is really scratched up (despite taking reasonably good care of it and only having it for a few months). But, the Pre has some drawbacks. There's some fragmentation; Sprint is the only network provider to release the 1.4.5 update -- which is big for games. And the openness might not necessarily be for the best. I had some patches installed that really screwed up performance (iPhone 3G-running-iOS4 bad) and it took me awhile to realize that.
- anateus 16y ago
  I'm running the latest UberKernel at 1Ghz with Govnah set to screenstate 500/1000 (it downscales CPU to 500Mhz when screen is off). This turns the phone pretty damn fast! Lack of graphics acceleration for the OS means animation is still not perfect, but now apps load very very quickly. (Both are available from the WebOSInternal feed via Preware) The Pre was released with plenty of its hardware capabilities just not utilized! The 3D gfx chip being just one example (the on-board H.264 encoder that's now enabled is another).
- mattmaroon 16y ago
  I too love the Pre. I've used iOS devices a ton, and Android a little, and feel qualified to say the WebOS is just hands-down the best. You're right about the screen, you have to get a protector for it. App support is relatively minimal, but at the same time still covers most bases. The best thing about it is the Touchstone. That's one of those things that you can't even fathom how much you'll love until you use it. I even mounted one on my dashboard.

by dannyr 16y ago

tvon 16y ago

> So before we start raising hell about having different versions of Android out there, we should consider that maybe the mainstream users do not really care. The problem is that it exacerbates the fragmentation situation for developers, or at least that's how I read it.

jsz0 16y ago

If they were shipping 1.6 or 2.0 I might agree but 1.5 has a ton of compatibility problems these days. You can't even run Google Navigation on it. That's something the average user might notice.

mike-cardwell 16y ago
My G1 is running 1.6. I thought this excluded me from getting Google Navigation, so was intending to upgrade at the end of my contract. But then one day I got an update and navigation came with it. I'm not entirely sure why I would upgrade now? I don't want to sign up for another 18 month contract if all I'm going to get for it is Flash, voice recognition and a shinier interface. So I've gone PAYG and saved myself about £30/month. When the next useful feature comes along which doesn't work on 1.6, then I'll upgrade. Or if an Android phone is released with considerably improved battery life.
- wwortiz 16y ago
  Before you upgrade may I suggest rooting your phone, you don't have to worry about a brick if you are moving on anyway (though I don't think that happens much with android devices), and then you can have 2.2 through a rom.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    How well does 2.2 run on a G1? I always expected the hardware wouldn't be good enough for a 2.2 experience and it would end up worse than using 1.6...?
    - wwortiz 16y ago
      My droid has similar hardware and it works pretty good without overclocking, check around though because I don't have firsthand experience with a G1 but they do indeed still make roms for it with froyo.

glhaynes 16y ago

I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging Android. I'm not sure that's the case. I'm not sure it's not, either... How much users think of their Dell Android-running phone as "my Android phone" versus "my Dell phone" versus just "my phone" isn't really clear.

danilocampos 16y ago

Differentiation through user experience is becoming more and more important to success in the computer hardware business. Ten years ago, a computer was a computer. For mainstream buyers there was this thing called a Mac but only your brother's kid, who wanted to be a designer, used one and it seemed kind of expensive. Today, the tide is shifting and people expect more and more out of their bit crunchers, whether they're in your pocket or on your desktop. Smartphones, of course, are extra competitive because a lot of manufacturers are duking it out to be the best. Between Apple, HTC and Motorola especially, the bar gets set higher and higher each quarter. Who can jam in the most useful hardware widgets? Who can accomplish the tightest software/hardware integrations so features feel great to use? Whoever it is, they gain a bit more mindshare, a few more sales, a few more solid reviews. And here comes bumbling ol' Dell, treating the smartphone like it's a commodified piece of tech and all they have to do is build it cheap and somewhat good enough. Regardless of whether we're in the mainstream or not, the mainstream isn't stupid. $99 buys you a lot of (subsidized) phone these days -- whether it's an iPhone 3GS or one of the many solid, 2.x Android phones. Either option is just obviously, demonstrably better than Dell's little turd RIGHT THERE IN THE CELL PHONE STORE. Dell took their eye off the ball and they think they can apply the lessons of commodity PCs to smartphones. Just like they did with MP3 players, they will find they're well out of their depth. I think in the end this won't affect Android fragmentation by much for the simple reason that they're not going to sell many of them.

listic 16y ago
> $99 buys you a lot of phone these days Are you talking about subsidized price? I wouldn't talk about "buying" for $99 in that case, because there are strings attached. If not, please link to solid 2.x Android phones for $99, I could use one.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  I'm just going with the subsidized price of Dell's phone versus other phones at the same (subsidized) price point. My point is that Dell's price can't match their competitors while their feature set is so bleh by comparison. Not if they want to be successful, anyway.

flatulent1 16y ago

>This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS. Huh? If Dell shipped a PC with an old version of Ubuntu, would anyone really have a problem getting up to date? If Dell hasn't added anything compelling to Android, what is stopping people from getting the latest vanilla version from someplace besides Dell? I thought the openness and freedom from restrictions were supposed to be the strong points of Android. If you don't like one fork, can't you just load another? Maybe I've missed something big. (I'm not an Android user and don't claim to be an expert) I am puzzled that a forum with so many developers has most acting like users are helpless in this matter. What's the dang deal?? Hopefully most phones aren't stale out of the box, but without updates all would become that way. Other than seeming old already, isn't the Dell really like the rest?

michael_h 16y ago
I'm not 100% sure about the dell phone, but with a few of the android phones that I've been looking at, the OS image needs to be signed. So, to upgrade your samsung galaxy s to 2.2, you need to wait for samsung to release their version of 2.2. When they decide to stop releasing updates for your model, you're out of luck (jail-breaking aside). I really, really wish it were as easy as downloading an update from android.com and installing it, but that marginalizes the manufacturers.
- evilduck 16y ago
  Or in the case of my Samsung Moment, the Radio Interface Layer is flaky and will cause random data lockups. Samsung officially stopped updating the phone back around May (yay, 8 months of support from release date!), so even if I could continue upgrading my OS without their help, nobody will ever fix the hardware driver, it will always randomly lock up.
- nl 16y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by the OS image needs to be signed, but it's not true in the sense people usually mean when they talk about signed code. Most Android phones have the bootloader locked down, but that is different to requiring signed code. You can run 2.2 on the Samsung Galaxy S now (eg, http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-6-0 http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-6-0, and I think there are pre-release official Samsung versions around too). You do need to root it, but on the Galaxy S that's a one-click process. (Sorry if you knew this - it's not clear if your jail-breaking aside comment applied to the updates for phones or the upgrade)

krschultz 16y ago

I disagree. Cell phones are mainstream tech that people obsess over. My girlfriends high school and college age sisters know nothing about laptops, TVs, and blu-ray, but they know every version of every cell phone available in a Verizon store. i.e. "How can you only have an LG enV v2 when the Droid is so much better? Come ON, I thought you were into technology?" A survey of people will return a lot that could care less about their cell phone (I care far less about my cell phone than my laptops/computers), but it would also return a large chunk of the population that cares far more about their cell phone than their laptop. If anything, this is why laptops are now commoditized and cell phones are getting more feature competitive.

rryyan 16y ago

Take a look at the comments on Motorola's Facebook page to see (relatively) mainstream users caring about the version of Android their phones are running: http://www.facebook.com/motorola http://www.facebook.com/motorola. The complaints about un-updated phones are relentless. I think the phone manufacturers can blame Apple for this -- they set the expectation for mainstream phones to get regular and significant software updates. Now customers feel slighted if their phone doesn't get upgraded.

dannyr 16y ago
How does that compare to the overall number of Motorola devices? The unhappy ones are the loudest but that doesn't mean they are the majority.

runjake 16y ago

| But for the rest of the country, a survey of my friends suggest that most of them do not care. They're going to care when they find out that the latest, greatest apps spammed in Android commercials don't run on their old versions of Android.

alanh 16y ago
Yes. This includes the official Twitter app.

Zev 16y ago

My roommate just bought a Palm Pre. There are very few apps in the market. But guess what, my roommate is very happy with his phone. He said it's the best phone he's ever had. I'll second the sentiments. I've got a Palm Pre Plus for personal use and an iPhone 4 that I use for work (iPhone dev). I love the Pre. It's a fantastic phone. Looks great, is more open than Android, etc. But, it could use an update in hardware. The cpu is somewhat (affects scrolling) and the screen is really scratched up (despite taking reasonably good care of it and only having it for a few months). But, the Pre has some drawbacks. There's some fragmentation; Sprint is the only network provider to release the 1.4.5 update -- which is big for games. And the openness might not necessarily be for the best. I had some patches installed that really screwed up performance (iPhone 3G-running-iOS4 bad) and it took me awhile to realize that.

anateus 16y ago
I'm running the latest UberKernel at 1Ghz with Govnah set to screenstate 500/1000 (it downscales CPU to 500Mhz when screen is off). This turns the phone pretty damn fast! Lack of graphics acceleration for the OS means animation is still not perfect, but now apps load very very quickly. (Both are available from the WebOSInternal feed via Preware) The Pre was released with plenty of its hardware capabilities just not utilized! The 3D gfx chip being just one example (the on-board H.264 encoder that's now enabled is another).
mattmaroon 16y ago
I too love the Pre. I've used iOS devices a ton, and Android a little, and feel qualified to say the WebOS is just hands-down the best. You're right about the screen, you have to get a protector for it. App support is relatively minimal, but at the same time still covers most bases. The best thing about it is the Touchstone. That's one of those things that you can't even fathom how much you'll love until you use it. I even mounted one on my dashboard.