Android device as dev machine
market.android.com
market.android.com
I wonder how far we are from a total replacement of old desktop operating systems in the mainstream, even for developers? I'm aware they're not going away since there will be millions and millions that cling to them. But they may become specialty cases, not sold on computers in stores, etc.
Handy for tweaking something on the go, but developing projects (especially in such verbose languages) on a pocket-sized device would be incredibly painful.
I'd be interested to see how this works on a laptop-ish Android device though.
Also, note that I was referring specifically to the future. Android tablets have existed for about 11 months now. I'm thinking maybe 2-3 years down the road, what will they look like? Surely they'll be good enough for real software development! Especially the ones with keyboards, video out, etc. The new Transformer Prime is quad-core and all, so we're not lacking in horsepower here.
I'm not really concerned or even really thinking about the hardware - I'm excited to see what new paradigms or workflows may develop when coding on an OS like Android.
Edit: Already, user-perspective things like "saving a file" are long-gone. Will that happen in IDEs of the future, too? Will version control become even less intrusive? How will it happen? What about code completion? What does the touch interface offer in terms of giving context to code? Etc...
So it's basically a small, underpowered, overpriced laptop. Still not too attractive for any real use, let alone coding.
> Still not too attractive for any real use, let alone coding.
I disagree. I spend way more time on my Xoom than I do on any other device (discounting time when coding, since I agree with you on that one point). The software is very compelling, I love the new paradigms (no manual saving, simple UIs, etc) that pretty much don't exist elsewhere.
Also, please note, I've mentioned before that I'm talking exclusively about the future in attempts to extrapolate from my current setup. I'm aware that the current hardware/software combo isn't up to the task. But it's a combo that's existed for less than a year, and I think the upcoming years will bring exciting changes that make the use cases very attractive.
Unfortunately, the cell phone in the cell phone is really hobbling the whole process, because that attaches the future of computing to the whims of the cell phone companies. That dependency needs to go.
ARM processors probably can't get much faster without an unacceptable loss in battery life - for e.g., the iPhone/iPad are underclocked, and the Tegra 3 quad-core in the new Transformer Prime has three modes, each with lower clocking. Batteries might address this, but their rate of improvement is slow (no Moore's law there). The apparent solution is "multi-core", but we aren't able to parallelize in general, after decades of research. Note that desktops are stuck at quad-core - there's more cores on server chips, but they are usually doing many tasks already (e.g. webserving). The dramatic multi-core progress is in GPUs, which again is a naturally parallel domain.
You could switch to power-hungry performance when docked, like the Transformer Prime... but it seems a bit of an ugly chimera in general. If performance is needed for development, then x86 desktops will win. Eventually, ARM could catch up to what is needed (even if x86 keeps ahead) - but if this is to simultaneously satisfy mobile needs, it will be at a much slower pace than Moore's Law.
An ARM purely for desktop could catch up easily; but what benefit does it offer over x86, if its power-consumption advantage is irrelevant? And it lacks the massive ecosystem of x86 software. But that's not the idea discussed here, of a dockable mobile device.
Other factors: (1) ARM SoC is cheaper and smaller than x86; but Intel has made a SoC x86. (2) people like the convenience of the same data, apps and UI for mobile and desktop; but cloud provides the same data; webapps address the same apps and UI. A prediction: the iPad 3 won't be quad-core. It's too hard to convert multi-core into user performance, so it's an efficient use of power and silicon. Instead it will have masses of GPU silicon (at least x4 the iPad 2, for the x4 pixels in the retina display - possibly x8, to give an sense of improvement in addition).
tl;dr battery life and multi-core prevent an ARM-based dockable desktop.
For now. I'm sure in the future it'll get more and more attractive.
I don't much care what's in them. I'm much more interested in whether they are open computers with a cell phone attached, or closed cell phones with vaguely computery locked down capabilities.
BTW: arguably, a cell phones are already comparable in performance to netbooks: my old eee PC has a 900MHz celeron (though less powerful than today's netbooks); the samsung galaxy 2 has a dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9, and the Transformer Prime has a quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A9 (though that's a tablet, not a cell phone)
EDIT I should point out we're on the same side: I've said what you say (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014578), and I submitted the present story.
It was intolerable for development even with an Ubuntu install to chroot into.
Basically the whole tablet + keyboard form factor looks cool but is useless in practice with Android. I hope the situation improves in the future, but don't really expect it given how tiny part of the whole Android ecosystem these devices are.
Awesome.
Yes, the awesomeness would be through the roof, having Vim AND Emacs on a tablet (but only with a full size keyboard with a Caps-Lock that could be mapped to Ctrl :)
The Android keyboard event model has horrible handling of modifier keys. Basically it's a total crap-shoot whether a chord is passed through to the application or silently eaten. So you might e.g. get events for something very simple like Ctrl-A, but not Ctrl-Space or. Meta-Left.
And even rooting your device and editing the key mapping files to specify outputs for these chords doesn't necessarily make them available to the app. I haven't dug too much into why. If anyone knows, I'd love to know.
I'm thinking a phone with a mini-HDMI port, so whereever I go I can just connect it to any real monitor which is to hand. If the thing can act as a USB host, add in a micro-USB to full-USB dongle, and I can connect a real keyboard and mouse too.
What'd be even nicer would be a deck-of-cards sized "docking station", which could have 4 full USB ports (keyboard, mouse, thumb drive, spare), VGA out, and wired ethernet.
If I'm accurate, both of the aforementioned policies are sort of showstoppers for an IDE, except maybe for jailbroken devices.