Anyone else looking forward to Android?

[tyrian]

For anyone who feels that the iphone is too limited/closed or just generally hate apple or AT&T google's android is shaping up to be a nice alternative despite all their concessions of not competing with the iphone. Here is a good list of apps already in the pipeline and here are some videos of it in action. Honestly I'm just glad there's going to be some decent competition to apple because no matter who wins consumers benefit.

[Raggamofyn]

It looks slick and I doubt that funding's gonna run out with Google backing it. They could really compete with the iPhone, at least in terms of popularity.

[FlyingAero]

Originally Posted by Raggamofyn

It looks slick and I doubt that funding's gonna run out with Google backing it. They could really compete with the iPhone, at least in terms of popularity.

Sure if they had the advertising....

[Raggamofyn]

Yeah, it will. The Palm Centro did and it's doing well.

[k0nrad]

I'm certainly waiting for it, the competition on the market is always highly valuable, and I like the ideas behind it.

Hope that some smart guys will find a way to load it up on my Portege g500, which buggy WM5-based firmware causes me quite lot of pain (and Toshiba is certainly not willing niether to patch it nor upgrade to WM6/6.1...)

So if they make it easy to adapt for every single smartphone - or at least many of them, not only as a system base for OEM manufacturers, it is very promising.

[brandon]

I'm looking forward to it. I think it will be a very niche device at the beginning (read: geeks only) but overall as was said I think the more competition in the market the better. Personally I don't see myself getting one beyond the pure curiosity factor, so I'll likely wait it out a bit and see how compatibility with Windows and Mac works out. If its a good bit of kit - I'll end up buying one.

Overall if Google puts in the kind of ingenuity and usefulness into Android that they've put into things like gmail and google reader , they'll have a winner on their hands for sure.

[jhoff80]

I just answered this exact question on another forum.

I'm not really sure about Android as a whole yet. The videos I've seen are concentrating way too much on the 'pretty touchscreen' features for my liking. My opinion is that its always much easier to add a flashy UI for a touchscreen afterwards, but its the underlying material thats the issue. I'd much rather they have started with a keyboard device and then worked in the touchscreen support later. Maybe that's what they did, and Android will work great with one-hand, using a keyboard, etc, but for all their talk of multiple form factors, all I've seen so far is them trying to make an open-source iPhone alternative.

Also, the whole widget type thing doesn't seem to me like it fits with a mobile OS, though I could be wrong on that once I actually use a device with it.

[k0nrad]

From what I've read, seen - and experienced using an emulator from the SDK - Android does work without using touchscreen quite well right now, so it was definitely built having non-touchscreen devices in mind too.
As for the architecture - I'm not a programmer, but it's all based on Java. That makes it simple and quite powerful at the same time, right? And making frameworks for the other languages shouldn't be a problem, as it isn't with an iPhone AFAIK.

So I'm quite optimistic about it, but I don't know Android will be much of a commercial success - it's all up to device manufacturers.

And about adding flashy-UI. Writing an add-on not consuming half of your device's resources not neccessarily is easier than wirting the whole thing from a scratch.

[jhoff80]

Originally Posted by k0nrad

From what I've read, seen - and experienced using an emulator from the SDK - Android does work without using touchscreen quite well right now, so it was definitely built having non-touchscreen devices in mind too.
As for the architecture - I'm not a programmer, but it's all based on Java. That makes it simple and quite powerful at the same time, right? And making frameworks for the other languages shouldn't be a problem, as it isn't with an iPhone AFAIK.

So I'm quite optimistic about it, but I don't know Android will be much of a commercial success - it's all up to device manufacturers.

That's good to hear, though I still don't think anything has yet worked as well from the keyboard as the Treo series (from the 600 on, I mean.)

[tyrian]

Hmm yeah I guess it's hard to make a prediction of android without having a clue what kind of hardware to expect which means the platform hinges on what the phone manufacturers come up with, yeah I'm not so confident of the success in that respect either . The only decent manufacturer that doesn't have a vested interest in their own OS that I can think of is samsung and it feels kind of flimsy to pin hopes of a good design from one company. But who knows maybe the other guys might jump on an android bandwagon to compete with the iphone.

[FlyingAero]

Originally Posted by tyrian

hate apple

Yes I do...This is googles only chance...They have to destroy the iphone on their first try for any to remember the name or actually buy it...it might have the HTC touch effect...people didn't like it at first so now it has no ones attention...(in US) Android has to be on the evening news to have a slight effect...

[staker]

I agree they need to hit this one out of the park, this could be googles stepping stone to better things, more profits

[technogeekchris]

Im stil hesirtant to say until now whether this android will make a huge difference. Unless I can install this on my NOKIA E90 and compare the difference to SYMBIAN. unfortunately, i heard in some forum that this is not possible... I wish I could test it!!!

[jhoff80]

I just realized that there is an Android emulator located in the Tools folder of the SDK.

http://code.google.com/android/download.html

Quite frankly, nothing special.

[k0nrad]

Originally Posted by jhoff80

I just realized that there is an Android emulator located in the Tools folder of the SDK.

http://code.google.com/android/download.html

Quite frankly, nothing special.

nothing special indeed, but it seems to be a decent platform. Open source platform. Check the results of Android software contest - people are already writing nice code for it and it's not even a beginning.