“The software development kit for Google’s Linux-based Android mobile phone operating system has been out in the wild for a over a month now, plenty of time for developers to form opinions of the platform and assess the capabilities of the API. The verdict from seasoned mobile software programmers is somewhat mixed; some are even expressing serious frustration.”
The iPhone/iPod Touch doesn’t currently have an SDK, and I doubt the promised one will be free (or allow unsigned apps which is basically equivalent).
MIDP is the most badly designed platform I’ve seen. Its biggest flaw is that the file access API doesn’t have a seek function making it impossible to access large amounts of data (e.g. maps stored on a memory card). It also has a very unintuitive ‘screen’ model.
Blackberrys just look stupid. Who wants a tiny tiny elf keyboard?
Haven’t tried developing on Symbian phones or anything else but I imagine they are equally annoying. Android really doesn’t have to be spectacular to be better than the competition. And allowing third party apps to have equal rights to the built in ones is a pretty enticing prospect!
> Who wants a tiny tiny elf keyboard?
Apparently a lot of people since BlackBerry devices had big keys for the longest time, but the Treos came along with tiny tiny keys and after a few generations of those, the BlackBerry started coming with tiny keys too
Well I guess it’s good then that the first wild Android prototype is in that vein. (http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/android-hardware-in-the-wild/google-andr…)
Haven’t tried developing on Symbian phones or anything else but I imagine they are equally annoying.
I did a couple of projects for Symbian6 but that was awful
Android targets ARM, at least initially. It is probably the least expensive, Google-capable-enough processor in the market. Open Handset Alliance member, Texas Instruments has an impressive list of Application Notes for Consumer Electronics, including Reference Designs, Tools, Software, White Papers, as well as comprehensive discussions of design considerations, and so on. It should be a fairly good indication of where Android is going. Certainly, whatever the Android hardware package becomes it will at least be organized as well as that.
And, that is that. Android is a fully integrated software stack that includes an operating system, middleware, a user-friendly interface, and applications, and it will be licensed under a developer-friendly open-source license. Google Search, Ads, and Apps along with new Services (inspired by the $10 million contest) will be the principle value-add. At least fundamentally, everything aside from the applications/services is being defined, organized and *commoditized*. What we will have is a collection of androids that will be hard to differentiate from a hardware-functional perspective. Perhaps, Google will even own/conduct the wireless network. Who needs a mobile phone, a remote control, a PMP, a PVP or even a PSP?! Android at your service!
That said, we appreciate Google. We just moved everything corporate to Gmail this week.
R&B 🙂
the simplest mobile os to develop for in win CE hands down. i mean you can do it from visual studio, and microsoft did visual studio right, it is a realy nice development environment
That is wrong on so many levels. You obviously haven’t had Visual Studio decide it can’t talk to a device you are attempting to debug on? The emulator is not particularly good, the native ARM emulator is absolutely dog slow. Unless you use Win32 API (why would you do that and forgo RAD?), you’ll end up using DotNet. The Compact Framework just does not work well in all aspects. Grids never seem to repaint properly for example (this was a Dell Axim x51 with Mobile 5 on it and various PPC2003 devices, such as older Axims, Toshibas and O2 XDA, which are rebranded HTC/Q-Tek IIRC.) I also found that I was continually hitting brick walls where Microsoft had not implemented something simple and fundamental in the CF that one would take for granted in the Desktop API (recolouring individual cells in a grid control comes to mind, though it’s been a while and I can’t remember specifics.) Sql Server CE was buggy as hell (memory leaks all over the place, so much so that it would use up all free memory and cause the OS to crash) and then the 2005 version COMPLETELY CHANGED THE API!!!
The ease of development and prototyping can’t be beaten, but after you skim the surface, the underlying code and effort is no more or less than any other OO GUI event driven API.
You obviously never tried qtopia..
the simplest mobile os to develop for in win CE hands down. i mean you can do it from visual studio, and microsoft did visual studio right, it is a realy nice development environment
The article mentions how easy it is to set up and develop for Android with Eclipse. I wonder if it really is any easier to develop for WinCE with VS. I haven’t tried either but a comparison of the two would be nice.
Give it time. They’ve still got a full year ahead of them to tweak everything just right. I have faith in Google…they know what they’re doing.
If you’ve tried to implement any of their google checkout API with existing code, you’ll know how frustrating it could be. Documentation/examples are horrible. I’m in the middle of a shopping cart project and had to implement both paypal and google. paypal was so much easier, whereas I had to dig deep into google’s forum (aka groups) to get any type of help.