Dell's Aero Smartphone: An Embarrassment to Android | Hacker News Reader

Dell's Aero Smartphone: An Embarrassment to Android

pcworld.com

87 pointstechiediy73 comments

This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS.

I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging Android.

But before we get too hung up on having the latest version of Android running on our phones, let us put things in perspective.

I do care a lot about having the latest version of Android. But I'm like you guys, we're plugged in to the tech scene. We love our apps, the coolest and latest UI, etc.

But for the rest of the country, a survey of my friends suggest that most of them do not care.

My roommate just bought a Palm Pre. There are very few apps in the market. But guess what, my roommate is very happy with his phone. He said it's the best phone he's ever had.

I was happy with my Android phone even when my G1 was on 1.5. I'm glad that I upgraded to a Nexus One and I'm now on 2.2 but I never felt that 1.5 was a piece of crap.

My observation with the tech community is that we think we are mainstream. We're not. I don't know many fellow geeks that play Farmville but you know what, it's got 100+ million users.

So before we start raising hell about having different versions of Android out there, we should consider that maybe the mainstream users do not really care.

> So before we start raising hell about having different versions of Android out there, we should consider that maybe the mainstream users do not really care.

The problem is that it exacerbates the fragmentation situation for developers, or at least that's how I read it.

If they were shipping 1.6 or 2.0 I might agree but 1.5 has a ton of compatibility problems these days. You can't even run Google Navigation on it. That's something the average user might notice.

My G1 is running 1.6. I thought this excluded me from getting Google Navigation, so was intending to upgrade at the end of my contract. But then one day I got an update and navigation came with it.

I'm not entirely sure why I would upgrade now? I don't want to sign up for another 18 month contract if all I'm going to get for it is Flash, voice recognition and a shinier interface. So I've gone PAYG and saved myself about £30/month.

When the next useful feature comes along which doesn't work on 1.6, then I'll upgrade. Or if an Android phone is released with considerably improved battery life.

Before you upgrade may I suggest rooting your phone, you don't have to worry about a brick if you are moving on anyway (though I don't think that happens much with android devices), and then you can have 2.2 through a rom.

How well does 2.2 run on a G1? I always expected the hardware wouldn't be good enough for a 2.2 experience and it would end up worse than using 1.6...?

My droid has similar hardware and it works pretty good without overclocking, check around though because I don't have firsthand experience with a G1 but they do indeed still make roms for it with froyo.

I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging Android.

I'm not sure that's the case.

I'm not sure it's not, either...

How much users think of their Dell Android-running phone as "my Android phone" versus "my Dell phone" versus just "my phone" isn't really clear.

Differentiation through user experience is becoming more and more important to success in the computer hardware business.

Ten years ago, a computer was a computer. For mainstream buyers there was this thing called a Mac but only your brother's kid, who wanted to be a designer, used one and it seemed kind of expensive.

Today, the tide is shifting and people expect more and more out of their bit crunchers, whether they're in your pocket or on your desktop. Smartphones, of course, are extra competitive because a lot of manufacturers are duking it out to be the best. Between Apple, HTC and Motorola especially, the bar gets set higher and higher each quarter. Who can jam in the most useful hardware widgets? Who can accomplish the tightest software/hardware integrations so features feel great to use? Whoever it is, they gain a bit more mindshare, a few more sales, a few more solid reviews.

And here comes bumbling ol' Dell, treating the smartphone like it's a commodified piece of tech and all they have to do is build it cheap and somewhat good enough.

Regardless of whether we're in the mainstream or not, the mainstream isn't stupid. $99 buys you a lot of (subsidized) phone these days -- whether it's an iPhone 3GS or one of the many solid, 2.x Android phones. Either option is just obviously, demonstrably better than Dell's little turd RIGHT THERE IN THE CELL PHONE STORE.

Dell took their eye off the ball and they think they can apply the lessons of commodity PCs to smartphones. Just like they did with MP3 players, they will find they're well out of their depth.

I think in the end this won't affect Android fragmentation by much for the simple reason that they're not going to sell many of them.

> $99 buys you a lot of phone these days

Are you talking about subsidized price? I wouldn't talk about "buying" for $99 in that case, because there are strings attached. If not, please link to solid 2.x Android phones for $99, I could use one.

I'm just going with the subsidized price of Dell's phone versus other phones at the same (subsidized) price point. My point is that Dell's price can't match their competitors while their feature set is so bleh by comparison. Not if they want to be successful, anyway.

>This comes with the territory of having an open-source OS.

Huh? If Dell shipped a PC with an old version of Ubuntu, would anyone really have a problem getting up to date? If Dell hasn't added anything compelling to Android, what is stopping people from getting the latest vanilla version from someplace besides Dell?

I thought the openness and freedom from restrictions were supposed to be the strong points of Android. If you don't like one fork, can't you just load another?

Maybe I've missed something big. (I'm not an Android user and don't claim to be an expert) I am puzzled that a forum with so many developers has most acting like users are helpless in this matter. What's the dang deal??

Hopefully most phones aren't stale out of the box, but without updates all would become that way. Other than seeming old already, isn't the Dell really like the rest?

I'm not 100% sure about the dell phone, but with a few of the android phones that I've been looking at, the OS image needs to be signed. So, to upgrade your samsung galaxy s to 2.2, you need to wait for samsung to release their version of 2.2. When they decide to stop releasing updates for your model, you're out of luck (jail-breaking aside).

I really, really wish it were as easy as downloading an update from android.com and installing it, but that marginalizes the manufacturers.

Or in the case of my Samsung Moment, the Radio Interface Layer is flaky and will cause random data lockups. Samsung officially stopped updating the phone back around May (yay, 8 months of support from release date!), so even if I could continue upgrading my OS without their help, nobody will ever fix the hardware driver, it will always randomly lock up.

I'm not sure what you mean by the OS image needs to be signed, but it's not true in the sense people usually mean when they talk about signed code.

Most Android phones have the bootloader locked down, but that is different to requiring signed code.

You can run 2.2 on the Samsung Galaxy S now (eg, http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-6-0, and I think there are pre-release official Samsung versions around too). You do need to root it, but on the Galaxy S that's a one-click process.

(Sorry if you knew this - it's not clear if your jail-breaking aside comment applied to the updates for phones or the upgrade)

> You do need to root it, but on the Galaxy S that's a one-click process.

Does it void your warranty like it does on the Nexus One?

I assume so, but it's reversible

I disagree. Cell phones are mainstream tech that people obsess over. My girlfriends high school and college age sisters know nothing about laptops, TVs, and blu-ray, but they know every version of every cell phone available in a Verizon store.

i.e. "How can you only have an LG enV v2 when the Droid is so much better? Come ON, I thought you were into technology?"

A survey of people will return a lot that could care less about their cell phone (I care far less about my cell phone than my laptops/computers), but it would also return a large chunk of the population that cares far more about their cell phone than their laptop.

If anything, this is why laptops are now commoditized and cell phones are getting more feature competitive.

Take a look at the comments on Motorola's Facebook page to see (relatively) mainstream users caring about the version of Android their phones are running: http://www.facebook.com/motorola. The complaints about un-updated phones are relentless.

I think the phone manufacturers can blame Apple for this -- they set the expectation for mainstream phones to get regular and significant software updates. Now customers feel slighted if their phone doesn't get upgraded.

How does that compare to the overall number of Motorola devices?

The unhappy ones are the loudest but that doesn't mean they are the majority.

| But for the rest of the country, a survey of my friends suggest that most of them do not care.

They're going to care when they find out that the latest, greatest apps spammed in Android commercials don't run on their old versions of Android.

Yes. This includes the official Twitter app.

My roommate just bought a Palm Pre. There are very few apps in the market. But guess what, my roommate is very happy with his phone. He said it's the best phone he's ever had.

I'll second the sentiments. I've got a Palm Pre Plus for personal use and an iPhone 4 that I use for work (iPhone dev). I love the Pre. It's a fantastic phone. Looks great, is more open than Android, etc. But, it could use an update in hardware. The cpu is somewhat (affects scrolling) and the screen is really scratched up (despite taking reasonably good care of it and only having it for a few months).

But, the Pre has some drawbacks. There's some fragmentation; Sprint is the only network provider to release the 1.4.5 update -- which is big for games. And the openness might not necessarily be for the best. I had some patches installed that really screwed up performance (iPhone 3G-running-iOS4 bad) and it took me awhile to realize that.

I'm running the latest UberKernel at 1Ghz with Govnah set to screenstate 500/1000 (it downscales CPU to 500Mhz when screen is off). This turns the phone pretty damn fast! Lack of graphics acceleration for the OS means animation is still not perfect, but now apps load very very quickly. (Both are available from the WebOSInternal feed via Preware)

The Pre was released with plenty of its hardware capabilities just not utilized! The 3D gfx chip being just one example (the on-board H.264 encoder that's now enabled is another).

I too love the Pre. I've used iOS devices a ton, and Android a little, and feel qualified to say the WebOS is just hands-down the best. You're right about the screen, you have to get a protector for it. App support is relatively minimal, but at the same time still covers most bases.

The best thing about it is the Touchstone. That's one of those things that you can't even fathom how much you'll love until you use it. I even mounted one on my dashboard.

I was going to write that Android needs a Dictator that lays down the law with minions and partners alike, especially to enforce a "No Devices That Suck" policy. But honestly, does Google care? If Dell wants to ship a device that sucks, let HTC prove this is a terrible idea by eating Dell's lunch. If Android 2.2 is better than Android 1.5, let customers vote for 2.2 with their wallets.

Of course, there is always the risk that a customer who hates a Dell Aero will replace it with an iPhone instead of an HTC, ...

Well, the largest problem I can see is that it's hard for customers to know what version of the OS comes in the phone they want. Google owns the Android trademark, they could just prevent anyone who isn't complying with certain guidelines from advertising the name Android.

They could call it whatever they want, just not Android.

Exactly.

Just as raganwald suggests on his last line - people will be stung by their experience and simply buy an iPhone next time.

Crap like this damages the whole Android brand. Nobody wants to hear "Oh, well you bought this specific instance X of Android on phone Y. That particular one is no good, but it's your fault because you didn't spend a week reading detailed product reviews on Ars Technica before buying your phone."

It's entirely possible that sales will nosedive after the current round of phone contracts/plans are up, as most Android owners are on their first model.

(an Android user)

People aren't stupid. They can distinguish between Froyo and Cupcake.

It's even got a clear analogue in the XP/Vista/7 debacle.

Or for those who lived through it, Cupcake is the Windows 3.11 to Froyo's Windows XP, or something like that. People do in fact get that there are different versions of software. If you're aiming at people who don't... they aren't going to know an iPhone from a Nexus One anyway.

Side by side, yes, they will see they are different. They won't know why though. Most people will never realize they are running a particular version, and few will even realize it is Android (vs whatever phone they have in their hand).

But laymen know there is an iPhone, an iPhone 3G, an iPhone 3GS etc.

Google has made a clear break with the 1.x vs 2.x series, maybe they need to make that more prominent

You are so close.

The key differences between iOS versions and Android versions, as far as branding:

1. A major iOS release always coincides with a hardware revision, and are available at least one hardware revision back. Always. Android OS upgrades are not correlated with hardware revisions at ALL, and the latest hardware from one manufacturer (Dell, case in point) may be 16 months and several major versions out of date!

2. Apple advertises the shit out of new phones & new features (again, they coincide). When have you EVER seen advertising mentioning new Android features? When have carriers EVER touted Android, the OS, much less its version number?

3. (Major) There is no NEED for an Apple fan to know iOS version. Buying an iPhone is buying the latest iOS version. Existing users are told via iTunes that they can update their phone with new software (an iOS upgrade, but they don’t even need to know it’s called that).

4. (Bonus) The different manufacturer & carrier branding "enhancements" to Android muddy the water. Now you have two axes of "versioning": The fork, and the version number. Not so with iOS. (The iPad is out of sync, but this should be resolved before it’s much more than 6 months old.)

5. You NEED to know that iOS 4 will turn your iPhone 3G into a useless lump if you foolishly upgrade to it.

The constant harping on about the utopian world of iDevices gets rather grating, even for me as a long time Apple owner. It's just a different business model, it has ups and downs that affect different people in different ways. Do we need all this concern trolling about how some random device is going to ruin it all for Google? And the utterly predictable replies from iPhone owners so distraught at the thought of Android users facing the horrors of fragmentation? What happened to the old Apple-fan way of blaming those who buy Dell devices for their own stupidity and considering them somehow sub-human as a result of their purchasing decision? Why the sudden rush of humanity and fraternity towards these poor souls?

I could perhaps agree that mostly the Apple way is still better for ordinary joes with lots of disposable income but it used to be better for a far larger group (hence why I bought an iPhone 3G) but the rough'n'tumble world of Android seems to be rapidly eroding the historical advantage Apple held with the iPhone. The fact that Apple will probably have stiff competition in tablets before they even get it upgraded to iOS 4 or release the 2nd hardware revision shows how much of their lead has been lost.

There are years between XP, Vista and 7. Between XP and Vista, almost a decade if you really want to exaggerate. It gives plenty of time for the versions and their peculiarities to absorb into people's minds. Android is different. Google makes releases fast and there's hardly an era between them.

Most people probably don't know there are Android versions, the rest will assume there's Android 1.x and Android 2.x, and a mere minority will know that the 2.1→2.2 is greater than 2.0→2.1 partly because in 2.2 Dalvik has a JIT compiler.

> People aren't stupid. They can distinguish between Froyo and Cupcake.

No, they can't, normal people don't know that there exist different versions of Android. They don't care, because they don't want to care.

> People do in fact get that there are different versions of software. If you're aiming at people who don't... they aren't going to know an iPhone from a Nexus One anyway.

If you're not aiming at these people, then you're dismissing the largest chunk of the market, and you are going to lose to your competitors.

A half-measure would be to brand the versions with something more distinctive and memorable than a number, e.g. 2.3 = "Android Ginger".

Maybe Google is shooting for where Apple is -- frequent, free updates compatible with the vast majority of active hardware. If they could get there, it wouldn't make sense to invest in branded updates. But what do they need to do with (or to) the carriers/manufacturers to achieve that?

Telling people what hardware they can and cannot use to run your code isn't very Open.

Sure it is. You restrict the use of your brand to people who meet your restrictions, à la Firefox. Everyone else can still use the code, just not the brand.

Isn't that what they already do with the "with Google" branding and their proprietary apps? I guess they just need to wield that club a bit more aggressively.

You aren't telling them where they can or cannot run the code. You are telling them where they can or cannot brand the product. The Android brand is not open source.

As I understand, I don't think Google particularly cares if someone replaces their device with an iPhone -- the last I heard from Google on the subject was (paraphrasing) 'any phone with mobile web and applications is good for us', the premise being that any device capable of visiting Google's web services was all that they wanted out of consumers, so that we could keep consuming their services and being served their ads.

I think this was the original idea. But now Apple is a direct competitor (iAds), and clearly not shy about blocking competitors from their platform. Microsoft (or whoever) could do the same as well. It makes sense for Google to control and promote their own platform for their services (see Chrome and Chrome OS), as an insurance policy if nothing else.

I think they care a little. Apple continues to make interesting moves that hint at moving away from using Google's service stack. They've acquired some companies that specialize in services that Google currently provides, for example. Plus, Bing is now an option for Mobile Safari's search bar.

Android is a direct win for Google because they're guaranteed some influence, which means more opportunities to serve the latest hot ad unit. Anything that isn't Android is a much more tenuous proposition. Look at iAds.

If a customer spends 90% of their time in service specific apps and iAds are the preferred ad platform for free apps, then Google is losing a chunk of their revenue stream. Heck, if a person buys the apps without advertising that further eats into revenue.

I get the feeling "there is an app for that" means that people have internalized getting an app instead of using the web for services where an app is available.

I thought there was already a dictator like that, named Steve Jobs. ;)

Consumer education and awareness is the critical element of this. Google doesn't need to dictate, but they should create some sort of gold star standard that certifies that a phone is the latest release or is promised to be updated to the latest release in some reasonable time frame. Companies like Dell that inexplicably stick some ancient version on their phone will suffer the consequences and will prioritize staying up to date.

I understand handset makers not providing timely upgrades (who wants to spend engineering/support $s on software upgrades for a sale you already made to a customer [really, a customer of your customer] who probably won't hold any loyalty to your brand either way), but why are so many new devices coming out with really old versions of Android? I've never really seen anything like that before... PC makers are ready to go with Windows Next the day it's out.

Because they spend a ton of money on crap "enhancements" to the original UI (except for HTC sense which I don't really care about, all others I've seen are crap). If they just released plain Android they wouldn't have anything to differentiate themselves. The problem with their plan is that they suck at software development and their enhancements make the phones worse and outdated.

I suppose you're right. Seems strange for those things to apparently be so badly broken by OS upgrades that they need months/years to fix. You'd think the savings on support costs alone would be substantial from not having to support older, presumably buggier, versions of the OS. Though I suppose most of the support for these devices comes from the telcos not from the handset makers.

Anyway, here's a radical and not necessarily good idea: what if the base "Android" release didn't have a launcher/etc at all, leaving what's commonly called "the UI" entirely up to handset makers. Sure, spin off the existing launcher as a separate open source project, but make it just one competitor among many. If diversity in this area is good and manufacturers really do want to differentiate themselves, make that a core part of the platform. It's not like it's that expensive to write a launcher.

Hardware manufacturers don't see themselves as Android distributors, they don't want to compete to see who can make the best home for vanilla Android. They see Android as a jumping off point, not a final product.

They should - Dell doesn't differentiate it's smartphone from HTC's by CPU spec.

Users of cell phones care about UI and only UI - judging from the queues outside the Apple store even the ability to make calls come second.

Agreed. The problem is, I don't think phone manufacturers are adding enough value in their enhancements for customers to care. As it stands now, the new features that Google adds in every update to Android are much more desirable than whatever features the manufacturers are tacking on.

I find this type of corporate cluelessness fascinating. When a product like this is released, it feels as though the company ignored everything; the market, the competing products and the customers. How does this happen? Is it Dell's lacklustre R&D funding? Poor leadership? Is the team who developed this product made up of soccer moms who don't know anything about smartphones? All of the above?

At the time, I mocked Verizon for branding their Android devices as "Droid," but now I think it's a little brilliant. Companies like Dell and anyone else can release crap, and it won't damage Verizon's brand, since most of the public doesn't know that they have the same OS underneath.

I think what this really says is that Dell is happy to release average, "me too" type products that really add no value to the market segment.

I dont see that the major PC vendors carry alot of weight in this segment anyway, so why the mediocre device? Seems to me that Dell has been caught completely off guard by mobile devices and still really doesnt have an answer.

Dell has a big enterprise sales force. How long before they start pushing some "all-in-one" purchases that bring this phone (or the next version) to the enterprise?

Sure, selling devices with outdated versions of Android is bad, but to me it is worse that they don't release updates for existing phones in a timely manner. If I buy a phone I want it to feel fun at least until the contract runs out, which means 18-24 months. If my friends gets new phones running better software, my fun is reduced and my next phone is more likely to be an iPhone, where I know I'll get timely updates.

> my next phone is more likely to be an iPhone, where I know I'll get timely updates.

One significant update per year, on which Apple has disabled half of the features because you don't have the latest model?

What do decisions and devices like this one do for the Andriod brand? not a lot of good I would immediately think. This is probably google's biggest problem.

No, their biggest problem is having so many countries you can't buy apps in yet. I don't this does more than minor damage to the Android brand.

Companies like Packard Bell and eMachines make nothing but low quality shitty Windows computers for decades and they didn't really damage the Windows brand. Not saying that Windows has a sparkling reputation mind you, but the things that have damaged their brand have been their own fault really. And in the end, everyone still ends up buying a Windows PC because they're everywhere, at every price point and every form factor.

Windows and Android are not the same platform and buying a computer is a difference experience than buying a mobile phone.

Even if I give you that they are the same, The eMachines and Packard Bell still looked and felt the same (from an OS perspective), you could blame the performance on the crappy PC, not the software running on it.

In the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 days, they didn't. Almost all the PC manufacturers used to include extensively customized desktop UI's. And man were they awful.

Edit: Here's a link to screenshots for the custom UI shell that Packard Bell used to ship with Win3.1 and Win95. Prepare for the horror! :-) http://toastytech.com/guis/pbnav35.html

Everything Dell is doing is Android 1.5... they're WAY behind the curve. People need to wake the hell up and realize that the most important part of their devices is the EXPERIENCE, not the bells and whistles. They won't even remotely be able to compete on the experience front without Android 2.2.

I'm not surprised. When I first found out Dell was re-entering the "small devices" sector I decided I was going to stay far away from anything they produced. I was burned on the Axim X50v and I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.

It was for close to the same reason as mentioned in the article as well (outdated system software). I bought it on the promise of an upgrade from WinMo 5 to WinMo 6 and while they delivered on the promise of WinMo 6 it was many months behind the expected release date and was so buggy and slow that it was unusable. Though that may have been the fault of WinMo more than the device itself. They never did release an update to fix any of it, either.

Embarrassing? I'd call it growing pains. Google allows manufacturers free reign and once the UI has reached a certain point I'd say that's when Android will start to get locked down. Too early for that though.

"This trend is precisely why I've argued that it's time for the baked-in Android UI to die."

Google seem to be taking the opposite approach to solving this problem. Rumours are that the next major release is set to include significant UI enhancements.

If the UI is good enough, manufacturers won't bother rolling their own. Well that's the theory, but they still need to differentiate somehow...

I am still running android 1.5 on my phone (the Cliq) - since T-mobile and motorola are a bit slow to update their older platforms. However, it still does what I need - browsing, email, calling. Bleeding edge usually add much more functionality, though I would sure like to try out the new voice activation features in 2.2

Are there many new applications that require the use of Android 2.x? It seems to me that could be a serious problem for "Android": consumer buys new Dell phone running "Android," finds they can't run half the cool apps their friends' EVOs can because they've got some old version of Android, consumer now hates Android.

Flash requires 2.2 iirc.

My understanding is that the difference between 1.5 and 1.6 was huge in terms of what it provides in API/functionality and a lot of apps target 1.6 as a minimum as a result. Probably a lot more than target 2.1 or 2.2. 2.0 almost doesn't exist, it was upgraded so quickly on the devices that had it.

My experience is that if you're on 2.1 you can run most of what's on the market. I haven't used 1.5 or 1.6 enough to know about them (other than technically), but I wouldn't be surprised if 1.5 can't run a large chunk of the market and 1.6 probably gets excluded from a lot of cool stuff, too.

One of the major differences between 1.5 and 1.6 is that 1.6 added support for different screen densities. That's pretty major. If you only target 1.6 and above with your app, it's trivial to support different resolutions and screen densities. It looks like it'd be tricky to support 1.5 and be resolution independent. I don't know for sure though.

Most of Google's own first party apps require at least 1.6 -- these devices can't even run Google Navigation for example.

Whoa, I thought there were issues with the sprawl of hardware that has come out, and the phones which can't upgrade to new OSes. But now we find out that you can't even trust a NEW phone to have the newest OS?

This is as bad or worse than the PC industry.

But is this because of Google? Are they manufacturers starting projects for ver x.x and then only to find out after 6 months of work that the new OS is not compatible with the software/hardware they've developed?

Is there information on the road-map to the development of specifications? Or are these companies just aiming low?

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