5 ms·

It's too bad, I thought the Pre's card metaphor, along with its pervasive notifications and multi-input open-API contact/message/lifestream datastore was the be

by blasdel 17y ago

It's too bad, I thought the Pre's card metaphor, along with its pervasive notifications and multi-input open-API contact/message/lifestream datastore was the best hope yet for a great multitasking handheld. The Verizon Droid is the only hope for an iPhone competitor at this point. It looks like it fixes all the hardware issues with the previous devices: * shipping the latest virgin Google build — no carrier or manufacturer fuckery * CPU + RAM as good or better than everything else (600mhz OMAP3 + 256mb RAM) * a capacitive touchscreen with 3x the iPhone's resolution * only a bit thicker than a current iPhone * a motherfucking headphone jack * nice hardware (landscape) and software (portrait) keyboards * 16gb of built-in flash AND a micro-SD slot * a camera that they made a cursory attempt to make decent (a flash!) Now the only problem will be the Android software — the spartan builtin apps, the craptacular APIs, and the abysmal/non-existent third-party apps. Hopefully that will all improve quickly once Verizon is shipping millions of the things. Having hardware that's not worse than the iPhone will be a huge help.

dcurtis 17y ago
WebOS, with its cards metaphor, is extremely impressive. The Pre is not. When Palm gets the hardware fixed/updated and the software optimized, I think they will have a very good Blackberry/iPhone competitor. The interaction and interface design in WebOS is great, and in some cases better than the iPhone. And RIM has shown that it is incapable of developing a good UI for touchscreen devices. All the things you list above are hardware features. None of those help the fact that Android is kind of crappy.
- blasdel 17y ago
  The only thing that really sucks about the Pre's hardware is the build quality. The battery life sucks because the software is too slow, wasting CPU. You're right that I list only hardware features, save the point about the unmolested software. Android is kind of mediocre -- it's way too much like the Sidekick platform with a Windows Mobile strategy. I think it can get a lot better, but only if it gains a lot of users on good open hardware, where they normally get continuous updates direct from upstream and can try out experimental software on their own. It's the same with Apps -- Verizon selling millions of these without locking them down in their usual capricious manner could really get some high-quality shit in the app store.
davidw 17y ago
Oh come on. It's easy to piss on stuff that could be better, but Android is actually a fine platform to develop for, and plenty of applications are showing up. Sure, not as many as iPhone, yet, but there are some pretty cool ones out there. And it's not "the only hope" - there will be more Android phones out, and the whole thing will only continue to improve.
- blasdel 17y ago
  There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming) That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) makes it particularly hard to just implement things yourself in 'userspace'. People have been saying "there will be a glut of Android phones out in a few months" for well over a year. This is the first Android hardware that isn't obviously a pile of shit -- it's actually better than the iPhone in many ways! Now we get to see if the software can live up to it.
  - davidw 17y ago
    > That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) It's pretty evident if you think about it: they wanted something open source under a liberal license (Apache/BSD rather than GPL), and so did not want to touch Sun's Java implementation. Therefore, they did their own thing, which is a much solution than hassling with Sun about licensing. I suspect we'll see performance improvements with time; it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a JIT if/when they want.
    - nwatson 17y ago
      For low-level performance-critical stuff you can always go down to C++, though I believe that's limited to operations on your own internal data and does not extend to system-level programming.

by blasdel 17y ago

dcurtis 17y ago

WebOS, with its cards metaphor, is extremely impressive. The Pre is not. When Palm gets the hardware fixed/updated and the software optimized, I think they will have a very good Blackberry/iPhone competitor. The interaction and interface design in WebOS is great, and in some cases better than the iPhone. And RIM has shown that it is incapable of developing a good UI for touchscreen devices. All the things you list above are hardware features. None of those help the fact that Android is kind of crappy.

blasdel 17y ago
The only thing that really sucks about the Pre's hardware is the build quality. The battery life sucks because the software is too slow, wasting CPU. You're right that I list only hardware features, save the point about the unmolested software. Android is kind of mediocre -- it's way too much like the Sidekick platform with a Windows Mobile strategy. I think it can get a lot better, but only if it gains a lot of users on good open hardware, where they normally get continuous updates direct from upstream and can try out experimental software on their own. It's the same with Apps -- Verizon selling millions of these without locking them down in their usual capricious manner could really get some high-quality shit in the app store.

davidw 17y ago

Oh come on. It's easy to piss on stuff that could be better, but Android is actually a fine platform to develop for, and plenty of applications are showing up. Sure, not as many as iPhone, yet, but there are some pretty cool ones out there. And it's not "the only hope" - there will be more Android phones out, and the whole thing will only continue to improve.

blasdel 17y ago
There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming) That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) makes it particularly hard to just implement things yourself in 'userspace'. People have been saying "there will be a glut of Android phones out in a few months" for well over a year. This is the first Android hardware that isn't obviously a pile of shit -- it's actually better than the iPhone in many ways! Now we get to see if the software can live up to it.
- davidw 17y ago
  > That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) It's pretty evident if you think about it: they wanted something open source under a liberal license (Apache/BSD rather than GPL), and so did not want to touch Sun's Java implementation. Therefore, they did their own thing, which is a much solution than hassling with Sun about licensing. I suspect we'll see performance improvements with time; it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a JIT if/when they want.
  - nwatson 17y ago
    For low-level performance-critical stuff you can always go down to C++, though I believe that's limited to operations on your own internal data and does not extend to system-level programming.