Google Android - The Android Log
Google engineer explains Android choices
November 15th, 2007 by Head RobotComputerworld’s Mobile and Wireless site writes,
Android will be different from the leading European smart phone operating system, Symbian, because it is open source, said Dave Burke, an engineering manager in Google Inc.’s mobile team. He also defended the search company’s decision to use its own flavor of Java and to not support the popular C++ programming language.
The comments were made to an audience of mobile developers at the Future of Mobile event in London.
“Software is an increasing percentage of the cost of handsets, and Google feels that there is not enough innovation,” Burke said, adding that an open-source environment would provide a good phone experience and reduce the cost of a phone by 10%. Android would provide a unified platform that allowed delivery on multiple devices, he said.
By comparison, operators pay a license fee for Symbian that is fragmented between the S60 and UIQ platforms.
The big difference between other Linux phone platforms such as LiMo and OpenMoko, said Burke, is that “this is real. It has a big momentum with key partners.”
Burke faced probing questions on details of the environment.
Game developers in the audience asked why there was no C++ support and said that would allow faster response times and better control, but Burke disagreed. “We have our own APIs [and] a better flavor of Java,” he said.
There’s lots more to read at, Google engineer explains Android choices
InfoWorld - Google’s Android: Looking Good … But What’s The Cost?
November 15th, 2007 by Head RobotSerdar Yegulalp from Information World writes today,
In my earlier blog post about Google’s Android, I wondered if one of the fruits of that labor would be a phone user interface that didn’t leave those of us not buying a phone that starts with the lower-case letter “i” out in the cold. Then I saw the videos on the Android Developer Channel and had a hard time not jumping up and down with glee. I just hope I can afford the phones that may end up using it.
First, take a second and check out the videos if you haven’t already. They’re more than worth a peek, even if you’re not doing any kind of mobile application development. If the actual products we get from the phone vendors are anything remotely like this, it will be more than worth it. Especially, and this is the key thing for me, if it means we see baseline phones that are Android-equipped and not just higher-end smartphones.
By “baseline” I mean whatever phone you can get from your provider that you’re not going to shell out a ton of extra money for. That’s what I went with when I renewed my contract with T-Mobile, a Samsung handset that does the job, but some of the features, like instant messaging, are so horribly implemented that I don’t use them unless a loaded gun is pointed at my head. The Android demo linked to above showed, among many other things, a wonderfully logical way to deal with instant messaging (the demo shows it better than I can explain it). If instant messaging was like this on my phone — even if it was only implemented in a rudimentary way — I’d use it a lot more often, and would gladly pay the few extra per-message charges on my phone bill for it.
Continue reading, Google’s Android: Looking Good … But What’s The Cost?
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