A Late Night Froyo Treat Android 2.2 Goes Live On The Nexus One
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Google knew when Apple's big announcement was going to be and most likely they had a good idea what it was going to be about (iPad / iPhone 4.0). So they let Apple do their thing and then after the media frenzy had died down a bit, made their big announcement. Of course Google I/O was already planned so that made the perfect forum to make their announcement.
Now to add insult to injury, the week after they talk about all the new features, they actually release them. Apple's iPhone 4.0 OS is not due until this summer and now when it comes out it will already be behind Android 2.2.
I'm not taking sides here, but certainly see it as a PR victory for Google. What I'm seeing out there is more Android news than iPad news.
Google staged a major Android conference and made a major release. Of course there is more Android news this week than iPad news.
Google timed their conference and their release to avoid Apple's big April and May releases, and to avoid WWDC and Apple's (presumably forthcoming) big June release. This isn't particularly hostile or non-hostile; it's a basic law of PR physics. The influential tech reporters are human beings that can only be in one place at one time.
(It may be an even more fundamental law of physics: There is only one Moscone Center.)
Finally, since I'm not trying to sell page views I'm free to point out, once again, that selling smartphones is not a zero-sum game. I doubt that Google's efforts to mention Apple and Apple's products in every other sentence is particularly bad for Apple. By elevating Apple to the level of "the industry standard which we all must compare ourselves to", Google buys attention for themselves, but they also ensure that even more people will pay attention to Apple's next move. It's really kind of a win-win. The ones who aren't winning here are Microsoft, RIM, and HP/Palm: The unmentioned ones.
To avoid such things from happening as part of my business decisions, I usually delay the decision making by a day so that I can "think clearly" before taking any decision.
Even discounting flash, these things are among the most requested things that people want their iPhones to do: like tethering, wi-fi hotspots, jit, media sync OTA, media streaming OTA, flash 10.1, web app access to the compass and camera, voice to voice language translation, etc.
It's not necessarily that it's "better" than the iPhone. It's that it squarely does all of the things that Jobs artificially prevents the iPhone from doing that consumers actually want.
Considering flash ... I find it sad, that google is actually supporting it. Where is the open standards idea there??
Other than that, I'm happy about the competition. Hopefully makes Apple to include some of this features. Yet, I don't see the UI on Android getting any notable improvements in Froyo :( Maybe I need to play with it, as soon as it's available.
That should be my choice as a user. I love open standards but why is it sad that they would support it if users want it? Why should it be up to Google (or Apple)? Shouldn't it ultimately be up to Adobe and me?
I'm still trying to figure out, if I can just compile froyo and put it on our labs google nexus (I would expect that from an open source mobile phone operating system, ... seems not possible from what I see).
P.S., V8 is not, strictly, a jit'ing interpreter; Nitro is. That doesn't necessarily mean SFE/Nitro is better, just that it's more of a classic interpreter and V8 is actually something more akin to ObjC but with compilation happening as soon as the code is available. The tradeoffs involved are beyond the scope of your chastisement.
Does the iPhone run non-native compiled software?
But bikes have infinite gas mikage so they should always be better, right? Or perhaps that's just the wrong axis of comparison.
No update available on my N1 yet :-(
Unfortunately, manufacturers tend to lose interest in supporting their hardware after the initial sale is made. The classic example is all the printers that worked fine under XP, but the manufacturers never bothered to create Vista/Win7 drivers, so they became paperweights).
The Google reference phones have the advantage for updates since, by definition, Google has already done the porting for those phones. In theory, Open Source has an advantage since the community can do updates. That theory is tempered by the reality that the community needs to include people that are capable of doing the porting and enough hardware information needs to be available for people other than the manufacturer do do porting.
In the case of HTC phones with Sense, they have to add a lot of engineering work between "Android version is available" and "that version has Sense added". They need to make sure all the hardware drivers still work, update them for updated kernels, etc.
If the phone is a "Google Experience Device" then it's very close to the original source, and should get updates sooner than the rest.
With Apple, you always get the new versions/betas the same day they are announced and can play around with them.
Could also smb. help me, I'm new to Android and I'm just wondering how easy is it to flash my custom firmware on a google nexus (bought over the web store)??
I'd like to hear reports of non-tech-reporters-who-went-to-IO getting it. For the record my N1 is still telling me no updates are available.
My N1 says "Your system is currently up to date" :/