Android 3.0 'Gingerbread' Elements Leaked | Hacker News Reader

Android 3.0 'Gingerbread' Elements Leaked

informationweek.com

30 pointsdavidw20 comments

From http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/leaked-andro...

It's puzzling, and disconcerting, that developers and Android enthusiasts are forced to rely on leaks and rumors in order to piece together the development roadmap of a platform that is supposedly "open."

We've long known that Android isn't /fully/ open by the fact that Google doesn't release the code until they're satisfied with it. We could have hacking on Froyo months ago.

The tradeoff though is that of every mobile operating system, Android is the most "open".

Yeah, it's "open source" in terms of the licensing, but it's not a true "open source project" where some animals are not more equal than others, where nearly everything is out in the open, and so on.

That said, I'm pretty happy with it - I'll take "open source" + some closed development any day over Apple or an RMS-pure project that, however, has no traction in terms of an installed base.

Uh oh, I hope they lower that memory requirement a little bit. Isn't the Motorola Droid the number one selling Android phone? Looks like it's not going to make the cut.

I also hope this, but the droid also doesn´t cut in the cpu requisistes. If they lower to 384Mb I would be happy :P

That's true.

If anything, although the Droid might not get an official 3.0 release I'm sure someone will release an unofficial rom or something.

Application developers need official releases. A few people using an unofficial upgrade doesn't help the platform.

Here are the versions developers are going to need to support by the end of 2010: 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0.

The Droid 2 will have fairly similar hardware, so the unofficial Droid roms will just have the Market app say it's running on the Droid 2.

I wonder how this two pronged approach will work. My gut feeling is that Google will completely lose interest in the 2.x branch and any handheld makers who doesn't want to play along with Googles minimum spec games will be left out in the cold. In three years time there will probably be no Android 2.x development from Google worth speaking of. Perhaps this is Symbian's chance to get back in the game. The interesting thing to see is if hardware makers are willing to go along with this, given how reluctant they are going from 1.x->2.x

Well it will probably not be symbian that is getting the chance as nokia is dropping it from the phones that would compete against android phones, in favour of meego.

Either that or HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc fork Android and the development diverges and the fragmentation gets worse. (As far as I know, those companies are just putting their own interfaces on top of Android right now, not full out forking the code, right?)

They wouldn't get Google's apps if they did that. No Gmail, Maps, Navigation and more importantly, they would be locked out of the Market. I think it's fair to say that Google is working with it's partners and want to keep them around.

To ensure the fragmentation is smooth, this is what I would do. The 2.x branch can be used for the low-end android phones while the 3.x and above branch works on high-end phones. But for that to happen, touchscreen and accelerometer would have to become cheaper or should have cheaper variants like the one in HTC Tatoo. And the high-quality stuff like SuperAMOLED screen and whatever comes later would have too be saved for the high-end phones.

It now solely depends on the unity of manufacturers. They'll have to work together to set some standards to differentiate between low-end (2.x) and high-end devices(3.x and above). Google does define in the minimum hardware compatibility spec that all android devices have a touchscreen and an accelerometer. But it requires co-operation among the manufacturers so that no moronic manufacturer would release a low-end android phone with 3.x or higher just to boast of a better firmware than it's other low-end competitors.

Then they have slowly phase out 2.x and start making 3.x low-end phones while the hardware tech would have improved by then (i assume so), so all the high-end phones would have higher minimum requirements to run android 4.x or 5.x or whatever is the greatest during that time.

In the meantime the android market would have to allow uploading different version of applications. Else apps that want to support low end phones but want to make use of the features of the high end phones would have considerably high binary file size and (maybe) processing overhead due to the code included to check feature support in the phone/os.

P.S: I can guess what HTC is going to do when it comes to updating Desire and Evo to Froyo. I don't think they will. They might just fast-forward to 3.x like what they did to Hero (skipped 1.6 coz 2.x was released by the time they released firmware so fast-forwarded to 2.1)

I find it unbelievable that they would have a screen size minimum as opposed to a resolution minimum. Sort of casts doubt on the whole article, from my perspective.

Perhaps they did the math and 3.5" is the smallest that the UI elements are touchable.

> Android 3.0 will also have a completely refreshed user interface.

It better. I recently rooted my HTC Desire to get a horrible reminder of what Stock android looks like: white, orange, blue and green is the worst color combo I've seen since the blue, green and orange of Windows XP.

I feel quite differently: after removing HTC Sense from my 9 month old Hero, I find myself liking the simpler-looking stock UI a lot more.

I'm also a fan of simplicity. If the new UI (CoolIris-inspired, from what the article says) is anything like the CoolIris plugins available now, I fear we're headed to over-the-top superfluous animations throughout the system. "When you scroll up and down, the view tilts to appear 3D! Yay?"

Fair enough. I suggest HTC would still win on a usability test: not many people identify a white orb with blue dots as being a globe.

Actually, are you sure you're not thinking of speed or other performance issues? Many of the earlier phones (particularly my old Hero) found Sense to be a better UI if they could run it at full speed, but used stock as it was faster.

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