Missing the point much? [LWN.net]

Missing the point much?

Posted Nov 4, 2009 18:15 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Missing the point much? by rfunk
Parent article: Welte: Android Mythbusters (Matt Porter)

> Er, wasn't all that stuff junked in order to fit in the small memory of phones?

Maybe that was the reason, but the Palm Pre shows it wasn't actually necessary to do so.

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Missing the point much?

Posted Nov 4, 2009 18:57 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Comparing the amount of flash on the devices is pretty meaningless. On the Pre, it's used for
storing user data. I don't know how big the Pre OS is, but I'm damn sure it's nowhere
*near* 8GB.

pre root

Posted Nov 4, 2009 20:09 UTC (Wed) by joey (subscriber, #328) [Link]

/dev/mapper/store-root
                      442M  380M   62M  87% /media/pre-root

I have a fair number of third party webos apps installed in the above though.

Lawyers sometimes do Missing the point much?

Posted Nov 4, 2009 19:02 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The Palm Pre is a different creation beast than the Google Android. Palm gets to have a degree more control over how much memory, CPU, etc is going to be put in the phone. Google is creating a general purpose system that various vendors will 'buy into' and thus has to take their shopping list of requirements (we need it to work on XMb of ram, oh we aren't going to use this CPU, etc).

More importantly the Palm lawyers can say "we are going to be ok with GPL requirements if all this stuff goes to GPL3 or 4 or something" and it covers there production run. Google has to have all the lawyers of the consortium of manufacturers agree to that... and my guess is that is pretty much impossible (even if Google's lawyers was all for it .. which I am doubtful about.)

So throwing out a ton of stuff and using GPL2only and Apache licensed stuff makes the consortium lawyers happy and they get to reinvent years of lessons the hard way.

Lawyers sometimes do Missing the point much?

Posted Nov 5, 2009 0:28 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I think that Google is aiming Android at the low-end phone of the future.

Currently the only phones capable of running a full OS are in the 400-600 dollar range, which is only what the high-end of the market can sustain.

After a quick google'ng Symbians range around 200-800 dollars, WinMo 6.x ranges 300-700 dollars, and iPhones are 500-700 dollars. All retail/unlocked price. Getting locked-down versions tend to knock off 40- 60% of the price.

Android, on the other hand, is aiming for pure ubiquitousness. It seems to be aiming to create a commodity OS for phones that are free with contract or range in price less then 100 dollars. Of course higher end phones will just run more applications faster and be more useful for gaming. I think Android phones should get down to that price within the next two years.

This positions Android to replace the wide range of 'feature phones' software that tend to have one large application that has a number of features that makes it emulates some of the more popular things people do on real smart phones, but don't really have the resources to run a full OS. Traditional Linux desktop-based systems, by their nature, are still going to be to much for those level of systems. (I am looking forward to the day when I can just install Debian on a smart phone and use Gnome-shell desktop usably on it.)

If you look at the hardware used for Android it tends to be lower-end when compared with other smartphones. They tended to use older freescale based platforms, while iPhone and others tend to use the newer TI OMAP3 platform or the competing Qualcomm Snapdragons should be coming out soon. I think. The "Droid" Verizon phone is the first Android to use the newer platforms, which come closer to the level of hardware that you get with a new iPhone or the N900.