some more on android
i am giving a presentation about google’s android os to the technical marketing engineer team on tuesday morning. i am a bit nervous, but i think i will do fine. i have studied quite a bit about android, so hopefully i can answer their questions.
a few thoughts on android: to be honest, i think it has gotten a bit more hype than it deserves. i mean, list of members in the open handset alliance is rather impressive (including my employer intel), but the products just don’t exist yet. where are the phone announcements? where are the actual demos? supposedly something will come out at the mobile world congress starting on the 11th, or at least thats what the android blogs are hoping. we shall see.
i think the use of the word “open” confused a lot of people when it came to android. android is not linux. i mean, at least it is not linux in the common sense of the word. android uses the linux kernel, but it doesn’t come with the typical utilities that we associate with “linux.” no X11, no vi, not even cp! don’t expect anyone outside of hobbyist hackers to be running linux apps on android anytime soon. and if the capability does come about, one would have to ask why they would take the time with other “true” mobile linux platforms out there (openmoko, qtopia, etc). no, when google said it was open, they meant that it was open to third party java-based applications. it also is built on a sort of modular application system, where one can swap apps (including those provided by google) and they can perform the same function as long as they conform to the APIs. kind of cool, but maybe not what people imagined when they heard “open” and actually not even fully achievable yet with the incomplete SDK and the limited emulator. its been fun learning about android, but i can’t say i have all that much faith in it yet.
speaking of openmoko, i kind of want to buy this:
it looks like it would be fun to play with. but i guess they are coming out with a new version of the neo soon, so its best to wait! and maybe with the release of the iphone SDK coming up, i will just forget about openmoko altogether!