“Google and HTC made a lot of dreams come true this morning when Android head Sundar Pichai announced a version of the HTC One with stock Android at the D11 conference. Google’s Hugo Barra happened to have a stock One in his pocket, and he gave me a quick look.” This is awesome. So incredibly awesome. This is the way to go for Google to ensure the most popular Android devices can be obtained with stock Android for those of us that want it. It’s also great for custom ROM makers – although it might be that crucial driver code is still closed and unusable for custom ROMs. Also, good guy HTC: they might make a downloadable AOSP ROM available for people who bought the HTC One with Sense.
How can I not buy it? I have a Galaxy Nexus and I am not happy with: battery, screen, cpu+memory, camera, speakers.
And from what I have read it improves on all of these compared to GNexus. It would be nice to know that when Android 5.0 is released and HTC takes another year to implement it I could just hop on stock Android and get the newest version.
you could get a Nexus 4. It is great in all the areas you are having problems….but you would have to leave Verizon.
Anandtech has great review of the HTC One. The Nexus 4 is bigger, has a smaller battery, a 720p where One has 1080p screen, the same weak speakers every phone has, a slower cpu, and a worse camera.
If Nexus 4 had been available in my country when it was released I would have already had it. Now it is already so outdated…
You know what I would really like to see? *All* devices come with stock Android, with manufacturer “skins” as device locked add-ons via the Play store.
With an option for the manufacturers to pre-install their apps of course, and with a compatibility check for OS upgrades to ensure that apps won’t break.
Then we *all* get to stay up to date with the Android core, as distributed by Google, and the manufacturers still get to differentiate themselves with their choice of developed skins.
This all seems fairly feasible, seeing as I can already replace the Launcher, etc. with apps from the store, and that some – like Facebook Home – are already locked to certain devices.
So lets just fix this problem once and for all.
It will never happen.
When Vodafone introduced the N95 in Germany they had a custom firmware version without WiFi support to force everyone that wanted Internet access to do so via 3G contracts.
With operators doing scummy things like this, you will never have them agree to sell you proper Android phones for the customers that get their handsets from them.
That’s why Google should make “fastboot oem unlock”-able bootloaders and 100% driver source availability and GPLv2 compatibility preconditions for having the Play Store on your phone. Make them play nicely or give up the app availability.
The problem is in the OEMs/carriers, a lot of these bundled apps and skins can’t be uninstalled at all from the device without jumping through hoops.
Understandably OEMs/carriers jointly want to differentiate in any way they can. I just don’t think HTC, Samsung, et all necessarily have an affinity for software development and they generally do a terrible job.
On the other end of the spectrum, Google would love for Android to be stock. However Android’s success isn’t analogous to that of say, iOS in that for Android to be successful it required supreme capitulation to OEMs/carriers. They’re essentially vehicles of endless amounts of crap ware like Windows PCs are.
Microsoft faces the same dilemma and solves it similarly with Signature PCs (think Nexus for PCs) but like the Nexus program, its limited in scope.
This is one of the inherent problems in being an open (as in tinkering) platform. And problem is debatable, some people here would argue its a strength and I could understand that side of the coin.
I’m not particularly excited about a stock HTC One being sold individually as much as I’m happy about the possibility of a stock AOSP HTC One ROM coming out. That should genuinely be of use to many enthusiasts, and should help any CM efforts already underway, hopefully.
I still have the best part of a year before I’m due to upgrade my HTC One X, but I want one so bad. In fact it’s the first time I’ve ever been excited about a new handset since I bought my first ever smart phone (Google G1 – another HTC device coincidentally)
Its a very, very nice phone. Not my choice of OS, but my god those speakers put every phone on the market to shame.
I like HTC a heck of a lot more than I like Samsung, so I’m hoping they get over their patch of trouble.
I would love to have one of these. Unfortunately I’m married to VZW for quite awhile.
It would be nice to have more phones with stock Android and direct Google updates, but not all of them – that would mean losing variety as manufacturers would have to wait for Google support for new hardware, like when HTC couldn’t make a Full HD Windows Phone. I’d like to see more hardware experimentation, like Samsung did with the Note or the Beam, or that Sony(?) phone that had a slideout gamepad. That’s Android’s key advantage over Windows Phone – manufacturers actually can differentiate, not just slap a skin on it. More of that please.
And you trust HTC to fully integrate an SoC firmware driver into an OS they have experience tinkering with at that level?
This is the point where the men are separated from the boys so to speak when it comes to OEMs.
We’re moving towards customized components which would require more than off the shelf parts, and the biggest beneficiary will likely be Samsung given their relative foot print in the area.
I’m not particularly excited for a 1080p Windows Phone, as I was pressed to see the difference (other than better view angles and color reproduction) on a Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4.
Cramming that much more pixels is just a battery burn and GPU hog. Not to mention sourcing the components probably raises prices on the phones.
It is a bullet point, but I think that if customers are basing purchasing decisions on a spec sheet, Microsoft has larger issues than 1080p support. They need to articulate the entire value proposition better.
I don’t really think 1080p is that important personally, just an example of how MS’s control can hold back a manufacturer. Most people don’t seem to think styli are important, but I like them, so I’m glad Samsung was willing and able to make a good stylus phone.
I wasn’t really arguing about what would make WP sell more phones, but about what would make the phone market “better” (subjectively). The small number of stock Android phones is enough for me – there are 3 good ones out there to buy now if that’s what I want. I’d like to see OEMs making something new that I can’t get direct from Google.
It’s like when people argue about removeable batteries, SD cards, how many people value those things? I don’t want a removeable battery, but I do want to use SD cards. It’s good that I have the choice, just like it’s good for battery swappers that they can have what they want even if some OEMs don’t think it’s important.
Sure. Its a trade off. You trade off flexibility for predictability. You pick up one Windows Phone then pick up the next one and the performance differences are imperceptible. That kind of predictability is a god send to developers, particularly game developers who don’t like having a moving target.
Yeah, I got a little carried away in my long winded response. It was in relation to the 1080p stuff which I think we can agree is nice to have, but there are way nicer things to have.
I can think of the flexibility being useful for other things on the SoC besides the processor though. Maybe nVidia will make a kick ass Tegra with some really cool on chip feature. That’d be more worth it to me than just “it has more cores”.
I’ll use Microsoft as an example just because they’re currently are practicing what we’re discussing.
I can certainly see where it’d hold someone back. I think Microsoft is a happy medium between Android’s extreme openness and Apple’s completely closed direction. Still, they can afford to do more to be more nimble.
Similarly, I think Google can lurch a little bit to the more controlled side of things without sacrificing too much. That said, I’m extremely ignorant as to what they already do, so I wont start rattling off ideas.
Yeah, definitely. Those smaller things should be given to OEMs to differentiate on. Cameras, Displays (minus maybe resolution unless it maintains the same aspect ratio), Build material, value-add services, etc.
There needs to be some sort of sanity in these things though, Android just lets you go wild. Some apps have a permanent ad displayed on the notification shade. Who in the hell thought that was a good idea?
Yeah, they first need to *have* a value proposition. Microsoft could have been the next Blackberry, making WP integrate with Sharepoint, Outlook/Exchange, Active Directory, everything. They should have concentrated on the enterprise, that’s what they do best. Right now, Apple’s selling point is the iTunes ecosystem and integration at all points, while Google’s is the extreme openness and integration with Google’s own services. Where’s Microsoft’s value? They could’ve had it, but they chose to go after a market that was already taken rather than the business, which is a market that is about to lose its one vertically integrated device provider (Blackberry). They had a perfect opportunity to step in, and they flubbed it by playing the “me too” game instead. Whoever made that decision should be fired immediately.
I similarly think it was a bad idea to ship Phone 7 with such limited enterprise support. Some core scenarios were supported, but it wasn’t until at least Mango that it got somewhere that was workable.
Phone 8 is really good from an enterprise management though.
It supports Secure Boot and entire device encryption, allowed businesses to deploy their own internal App stores, offer management with System Center / InTune, strong support for EAS,
I think the problem is that Microsoft took a principled stance in prioritizing SSL secured apps over VPN. There’s still debate over one or the other, but they seemed to have bet on the future.
Similary with InTune which they want to grow in the enterprise (iirc its already a $1 billion business)
I can’t find the conversation right now, but a few CyanogenMod devs I was following made that point. If people remember the G2, it was “stock android” but never got updated beyond that initial release. It was because they had removed the ui parts of their own modifications of android, rather than starting from AOSP.
If this really is vanilla version starting from AOSP code, then it has promise. If its just there sense version that’s been stripped of sense, it will take just as long to update to the next android version.
Stock == what ships on the phone.
Vanilla == AOSP
There’s no such thing as “stock Android”. The “stock” ROM is just what ships on the phone from the OEM.
There’s “vanilla Android” or “plain Android” or AOSP.
Maybe it’s semantics. But I’ve never understood how people can say “stock Android”.
Stock means default in this situation. Default in this situation means without special extra’s from OEMs. Android is vanilla/plain Android. The thing OEMs put on phones are Android+extra’s.