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Comment by johnnylambada | Hacker News Reader

As an Android developer and someone who has studied the ASOP internals, I don’t see what the big deal is. If I were going to build custom hardware that has a custom ui then it makes complete sense to start with the open source version of Android. Google has spent billions inventing that wheel and you can use it for free. It has everything you need (except realtime). The natural way to build ui apps in Android is to make an apk. Doing anything else would be weirdly unnecessary.

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Yep. Making a feature electronic with your own OS is immediately burned by - WiFi/ip stack - 4g/5g wireless - graphics drivers

That’s why pretty much everything is android. I just wish these startups would stop shoving Ubuntu server with chromium inside and at least do something like Netbsd and libcairo.

The biggest downside I see is that 1. according to reviewers the battery life is utter garbage. Using Android probably isn’t helping that much. And 2. There is no actual purpose for this device, there’s nothing it does you can’t do better with a phone.

The target market for this is presumably the same as the Playdate but any of the normal AI apps would be better for most users tbh

The Playdate at least has games and apps, even if they are all vaguely reminiscent of simple flash games (just due to the limited capabilities).

The R1, like any "AI hardware" that has no local AI, is just a bad smartphone doing a subset of things you can do with your phone.

> The target market for this is presumably the same as the Playdate

I don't think "this could be an app on my phone" works as an argument for the Playdate the way it does for the Rabbit R1. A dedicated gaming device with real buttons is better than a touchscreen any day and the constraints of the hardware make the games unusual and highly creative. It would diminish the experience considerably if it was just a mobile app.

Contrast with the R1 which seems to want to be a general purpose device that just does everything worse than the supercomputer you already carry around in your pocket.

I agree the playdate is definitely the “quirky $200 teenage engineering designed device” to pick up between the two

Sometimes it's not about what it can do at first but what long term potential the creators see. Perhaps this is the MVP they could make and release but they made design choices that aren't apparent due to a vision for a future iteration that is more capable.

An MVP for this device would be an app, there’s no demonstrated capabilities the playdate has that a phone can’t do. I actually think the Humane pin “””succeeded””” in that they actually produced a device that has capabilities a 5 year old smartphone loaded with the same software doesn’t.

Donald Rumsfeld — 'You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.'

In that context; Android is mediocre but I don't mean that in a nasty way. It might not be the best design or the most dynamic but it is the one that we have today that is powerful and easy enough to do what is needed.

If I was to build a portable, whatever, as much as I would love to start from a blank slate, that alone could mean being years behind just to get off the ground floor. Building a base OS isn't easy even if you know what you are doing, having something that is 100% free to launch off is wonderful.

Most people don't realize that Android was originally intended to be a BlackberryOS clone, but was pivoted to compete with iOS at the last minute instead. Once you understand that, a lot of the design decisions start making a lot more sense.

The big deal is that it's just a hardware skin for an app while they are trying to pitch their customers on a new type of computing platform. It's just vaporware. It's a software company larping as a hardware company. They should be laughed out of existence.

The problem isnt that this is how they built it, it makes logical sense to do it this way.

The problem is that they went hard on how it couldn't just be an app, even making a thread on twitter about it.

Its kinda a big deal that it could in fact just be an app.

Several folks have stated that it could be just an app. I disagree. Modern versions of Android on a real phone severely limit what an app can do. It can't run forever, it can't gather any and all telemetry available to the physical device at will.

As for battery life, there's a lot you can do at the OS layer to limit what services run, but at the end of the day you're not running on a piece of hardware that has been honed by thousands of engineering hours and billions of dollars, so V1 is going to be pretty rough.

Exactly. What did anyone else expect?

Beefy STM32 and SPI display?

Being dumb hardware which connects to a smart device for the juicy tasks. If nothing relevant is running locally anyway, then this setup makes more sense on surface to get longer battery time.

But overall, I think people are just disappointed how much it sucks, and satisfied as every knew it from the beginning.

I would probably try and use buildroot, because it seems cool.

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