Android gaining momentum in smart phone race | Hacker News Reader

Android gaining momentum in smart phone race

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21 pointsgibsonf135 comments

You can add INQ to the list of companies producing Android Phones - they produce custom phones designed for social networking/IM and are very popular in Europe. They used to use their own custom OS but announced that they were moving to Android last month: http://www.gsmarena.com/inq_to_also_use_android_os_soon_do_s...

The only advertising I've seen[0] for Android phones has been from T-mobile for the G1 and MyTouch. There is zero Android branding in these ads. The only indication that the two run the same software is a mention of "with Google" at the end of the ad.

I see this as a major branding fail.

[0] I don't really watch TV, so I haven't seen as much as most people.

Well I think calling it the "MyTouch 3G with Google" is the best T-Mobile can do. I bet most of the people who are shopping for a phone don't even know what android is. They know there is iphone, blackberry, (maybe) palm, WinMo, and now there's this phone with Google. Android is not the brand - Google is the brand.

Also, TFA fails to mention that the HTC Hero launches on Sprint on Oct. 11.

I think that Android doesn't need advertising. It's something that people mostly don't care about. However, they do care about quality, which Android may provide for handset producers. So maybe, Google is not even trying to put effort in Android advertising (for masses), but lets thi job to specific device manufacturers. For example, HTC Hero is advertised quite a lot.

I think Android is something people will care about, not because of the OS itself but because of application compatibility.

Why does google need to advertise to end users? Most of the savvy ones already know about Android and the rest probably don't care what their phone runs as long as it can do email, get map directions, etc.

If they are spending money on marketing, they are spending it on the handset manufacturers.

Also, no carrier is going to advertise that their phones run the exact same system as another carrier's phone. Why give customers an easy reason to switch?

There are half a billion Nokia users that have no idea what Symbian is.

If I'm Verizon and I'm selling the Motorola Sholes, I want my potential customers to know that the cool app they saw their friend using on a G1 last week also runs on the Sholes. The ads I've seen so far have been T-mobile, so maybe others will try to do that.

Exactly. I don't care what went into making my hot dog. I only care that it tastes good!!

If anything, the money needs to go to advertising Android Market, which can attract both users and developers. Wireless company money will of course try to get people to buy the specific phones, which makes sense.

I think it's nearly time to get one - maybe an HTC, as they're well into their second generation of phones. Hecl needs more attention on Android, and real live device is the surest way to accomplish that:-)

I'm still loving my first generation HTC G1. it's a little bulky and can be slow at times (unless I kill the processes left from applications running the background, then it's snappy), but I really enjoy it.

I've heard really good things about the HTC Hero though, and would love to try one out.

I was a bit underwhelmed by my 'donut' update. More fit and finish than new features.

I really can't wait for Verizon's offerings because I need better network coverage than T-Mobile. My phone doesn't work at my parents house or my in-laws house. :-(

Ah that's a shame, I have pretty good coverage in Texas, but the speeds are a serious drawback. Do you know if Verizon has a "tether" restriction?

If you tether with your G1 and go over a 10gb transfer quota, they will reduce you to edge speed for the rest of the billing cycle.

I mainly stick with T-Mobile because my entire family uses it, so we all get to call each other for free, but I'm not against moving to a new carrier if I can get better speeds and be allowed to tether.

EDIT: I thought the donut release was pretty good overall, I saw huge performance gains and also the UI has been cleaned up a lot. Though not much else seems terribly different.

I'm in TX also, Austin to be specific. My network speed is pretty good but I'm only comparing it to an EDGE connection on my work BB.

The donut release isn't bad. Good performance boost (I wouldn't classify mine as 'huge' but we might use our phones a lot differently). Battery life about the same for me. (I still have a battery charging level issue leftover the from the cupcake upgrade.) I don't know if there were any browser updates in donut but Google Wave on my G1 is very slow to load. (1-2 minutes even on wifi.) I was mostly comparing the cupcake upgrade to the donut upgrade. There was a huge visible difference between them.

All in all, I love my G1. Way better than my work issued BB. I'm just wanting more. ;-)

The browser was definitely updated, I notice most browsing is at least a little snappier, though I'm disappointed with the browsing experience overall on the G1.

Battery life is pretty bad, but I pretty much keep it on a charger all day long now anyway, got used to knowing it's going to need a charge regularly, if I'm out and about for a while I'll use locale and power center to trim it down to only the basic needs.

I mostly just use the standard calendar, mail, messaging, remember the milk and a little irc and twitter. but I'm pretty regularly going in and purging applications with TasKill.

I'm in Fort Worth, you're pretty much a stones throw away from me.

I work with both the G1 and iPhone at my job and carry both around with me, and the browser on Android just kills the whole deal.

I don't know if it's the lower DPI screen on the G1, the lack of multitouch, or just the rendering speed. I know they're both Webkit under the hood, but man Apple spent a lot more time optimizing Safari and it shows.

The new Android SDK supports variable DPI, so maybe that's a hint that newer phones with iPhone-like screens are on the way.

I can't argue there, I can only hope as the platform matures this changes. They did such a good job with Chrome that I'm left wanting and curious with their mobile browser, at least compared to the iP(hone|odtouch).

Luckily there is also multi touch support on the android SDK I believe as well, so at least we know they have plans to implement it.

Again, comparing to a BB the G1 browsing is heavenly for me.

99% of the time I can make an entire day and I charge overnight. I don't run persistent service other that twidroid. I leave wifi on full time but with the new application/battery usage thing I might start shutting it off.

I talk on the phone rarely, it's mostly twitter, email, surfing and puzzle games.

Ahh, what puzzle games do you play? Any suggestions from the market?

My kids like 'Abduction: World Attack' (or as they call it 'bouncy cow') I play FloodFill, Labyrinth Lite, TiltMazes, Orbs Knockoff Lite, TopSETGame, Zilch Free.

I used to play Word Wrench a lot and it was a big competition between my wife and I for high scores. Then one evening, I sat for an hour with a python script cheating the high score up to about 10 times our previous best. Got tired of it soon after.

EDIT. I told her right away. I just wanted to see the look on her face when she saw the new high score.

ahahaha, I'm sure she was happy you ruined her fun as well. Good stuff, I'll check out those games, my 5 year old isn't terribly interested in tic tac toe anymore.

My 5 yo daughter loves Zebra Paint.

An better policy would be for providers to do the above, but by day. (So have a trigger of 1/3rd gigabyte a day.) This way, the penalty isn't too onerous (just the rest of the day) and the feedback/learning loop to their customers will be quicker. Make the cutoff at 3am, and they will effectively train heavy downloaders to use bandwidth late at night.

How do you tether using your G1?

You have to root your phone, once you do there is an application available for this.

rooting: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=442480

tether software: http://jkontherun.com/2009/03/21/pdanet-for-android-tether-y...

One of the tethering apps at least.

Aside from the ADP1, are there any Android devices available that allow root access per default?

The Creative Zii Egg is another full-access developer device: http://www.zii.com/

Note: It's a multimedia tablet like the iPod Touch, not a phone.

I need to learn Java for work and I'm looking for an interesting project to learn it with. Any thoughts on building an Android app for my first project? Would this be a good way to become familiar with the language?

Just be aware that Android operates in a resource constrained environment, so that some practices (such as avoiding garbage collection through resource pools) aren't typical in desktop or server-side Java applications. Also, if you're going to be doing desktop UI stuff at work, Android's UI APIs are very different from Swing et al.

Good things to be aware of, I certainly won't be doing any android development for my current job. More server-side web app type things.

Download Eclipse and the SDK (all free), get it all running, then build the "API Demos" project from the samples directory and run it on the emulator.

This program lets you play with every single part of the Android system and UI. Tinker with this for a week or so and you'll have a great introduction to the platform.

Yeah, it would indeed. There's something cool about seeing something you wrote run on a device, too.

For that matter, J2ME is fun too, because it's a fairly small platform, and there isn't a lot of Java blahBlahBlahFactory() type of stuff.

I'd say so. I never ended up building an app but was planning on it and looked around the APIs enough to feel familiar. It's a very sensible development platform and is sufficiently Java-ish that you'll pick up good habits.

Sounds like a good (interesting) way to get started. Thanks for all the replies.

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