"Most of all, I love that neither Apple nor any other company can tell me what I can and cannot install on my phone."
though on the other hand, I hate, no. HATE, the fact that $CARRIER$ can tell me what application I have to have installed on my phone without any ability of uninstalling them.
Android is not all sunshine. I might post more comments as I continue reading the article.
This isn't that much different from jailbreaking your iphone and using Cydia though. Both techniques rely on exploiting flaws of the security framework put in place by $VENDOR.
Don't get me wrong: I do like the slightly increased openness of Android, but that just stems from the fact that the OS provides more hooks to hook your app into - it's not more open in the sense that there's less control inflicted upon you on what you may or may not do with the device you legally own.
That is not totally true: there is a fundamental difference between a closed source OS purposefully locked by its maker, and an open source OS tentatively locked by a mere distributor.
On almost every Android phone, you can just flash the entire OS and replace it with a plain vanilla one or your own custom build. Try that with an iPhone...
well. On older iPhones with known issues in the bootloader, you could in theory also replace the apple OS with something completely different (remember the Android on iPhone 3G videos earlier this year?).
The fact that HTC and other vendors are sloppier in securing their phones (remember the discussions about Motorola's e-fuse?) doesn't make these phones more "open" in the "freedom" sense.
It just means that it's easier to exploit them to install a different OS.
Now the Android OS of course is open source, but what good is that if there's no device available that actually allows you to officially install your own build? This also means that my earlier comments are about the phones, not the OS itself.
The Nexus One does officially allow you to install your own build. Google gives you the directions to "unlock" your N1 bootloader, which granted, voids the warranty, but is a "sanctioned" method for flashing your phone's firmware.
Alternately, the OpenMoko FreeRunner is a "truly free" phone, and has its own distribution of Android available in which you have total control of the entire hardware and software stack.
While, as you said, you can "in theory" replace Apple's OS -- with Android, it's a practical possibility since the OS is available for you to tinker.
But I totally agree, this declared "openness" is bullshit. The situation with Android ROMs right now is almost identical to the situation with Windows Mobile and nobody would claim that is open.
My own custom build? That sounds wonderful. What phones/carriers allow this without jailbreaking? What stores/carriers sell those phones to consumers?
Before I customize it, how do I get/build a fully functional current vanilla version? By fully functional I mean all of the things normally needed/expected by default (like the app store for instance).
Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?
There are many developers on this site. Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?
What phones/carriers allow this without jailbreaking? What stores/carriers sell those phones to consumers?
T-Mobile and my local carrier Cincinnati Bell are both happy to recommend and "sell"/refer you to a Nexus One. CBW even has a couple N1's on display in their premiere display case, and a rep even asked me about what ROM I used on my N1, and said he used CyanogenMod on his.
Does each carrier post source to their builds so I can modify what the phone came with?
The carriers aren't the ones writing the software; you'd have to talk with HTC, Motorola, Samsung about that. Some carriers make specific requests, like Sprint putting their NASCAR app on, or Verizon's exclusive Skype app, but that's an app, not Android.
Have ANY of you built Android from source and used that on your phone? How did it work out?
I've had multiple attempts over the past couple years to build my own Android ROM, most recently with Cyanogen's mass of repos on Github, but either I wasn't looking in the right spot, or there wasn't enough documentation for me to figure out how to build it all on my own, so I failed on that aspect.
However, MoDaCo forum has the concept of "kitchens" where you can customize what features you want to include/exclude from various ROMs, and allows you to generate "your own" ROM that you can then flash to your phone, and I personally find this extremely attractive, even if I don't use it for myself because I like what the "vanilla" Cyanogen build includes.
All that said, you do however have multiple valid points, and I don't disagree with you on any of them.
I've been pondering making the switch, but I refuse to buy a smartphone that I am not in control of. (The current solution has been to not buy a smartphone.) Can someone who has done this share how practical this solution is? Does your carrier retaliate in any way? Is this a constant task to keep updated? Do you lose features? Or is this something so simple any techie should do it without any pause for thought as it is all upside and no downside?
Installing Cyanogen on basically any HTC phone is trivial. You don't lose features (though you might gain a bit of flakyness in the software, depending on the phone). Carriers wouldn't be able to retaliate (unless you need a warranty repair) and keeping it updated is trivial too as the ROM Manager comes with auto update functionality
The downsides are that you might lose your warranty and that stuff breaks a little bit here and there (at least on my SLCD Desirefor which sending mail via Gmail stopped working and which crashes here and then - the usual little things)
I started using Froyo earlier this year by loading it on my Droid. (I really wanted the chrome to phone!) It took about 30 minutes to do, mostly by reading guides ahead of time then giving it a whirl. No problem at all.
Functionality overall improved. Verizon releases a version that requires additional cash for a few simple things (like tethering) that using 2.2 allowed stock.
Some android apps developed problems updating. The cause was some apps were not appearing as valid/runnable for 2.2 in the market.
Wait, verizon's 2.2 for the droid requires additional cash in order to tether? I ask because I'm a droid owner using verizon's 2.2 on my droid. I see the tethering option available, but I haven't tried to use it yet, so I don't know if it requires extra cash.
Getting Cyanogen on your phone isn't always an easy task. I'm rooted on my EVO, but not rooted enough to get Cyanogen. Thanks Sprint for locking down an "open" phone.
Oh you mean that hacked up version of AOSP by slang-talking enthusiasts often missing the proprietary drivers needed to use things like 4G, GPS, and the device's camera? The one that includes the wallpaper with the scantily clad women in breast-exposing football outfits?
That ought to go well with the IT folks at the office.
It is not in Cyanogenmod 6.0 final for Dream and Sapphire. It used to be in 5.0.x series.
Edit: Sorry, my bad, it is still there. The Cyanogenmod wallpapers section grew up in size and somehow I missed that the last wallpaper is still there.
People that felt this way should have purchased the Nexus One from Google while they were generally available. If more folks had, it might have validated the carrier-less model of selling phones.
It's hard for any company to try and work against the carrier-subsidized pricing of handsets. As long as carriers are supplying the access, this will continue to be the case.
To pay $500 for a phone, versus the $100 subsidized price, is a silly move—especially if you're planning to upgrade every 2-3 years.
I say this because the service from the carriers still costs the same regardless of how you obtained the handset, and in some cases you may be paying even _more_ for service if you don't have a contract.
(Of course, I'm speaking with the US/Canadian carriers in mind. I know things are better outside of North America.)
Are all the features accessible in non-contract plans?
I've got a few contract-only perks here in Canada on Rogers, such as the 6GB data plan add-on for $30/mo, and an "Employee Purchase Program" discounted voice service at $17/mo.
I don't think you can get non-contract data plans for under $30, and that only buys you 250MB/month, and voice plans start at around $25-30/month.
I may be able to set up a similarly-priced plan up here, but I would lose out on many of the important features (tethering, visual voice mail, larger data caps, free evening/weekend calling, etc.)
I did buy a N1 (gray import even). Too bad it has its hardware flaws: The touchscreen is really bad (choppy, inaccurate) and the button on my wired headset started working only rarely after two weeks of usage (sometimes the press isn't recognized, sometimes as "jump back" - and sometimes it even recognizes button presses even if there's no button on the headset).
Yeah. I've also got an N1, and the hardware flaws suck. The touchscreen is my biggest complaint, having previously used an iPhone. That said, I'm extremely pleased with it overall, and the lack of a carrier telling me what I can and can't do with it is surprisingly awesome.
My biggest issue with buying an unsubsidized phone is that I would still be paying the carrier a premium for subsidizing a phone purchase (to my understanding) without actually getting that benefit. (I guess there are other carriers, I have not actually bothered to look) In the end I just seem to be loosing about $400 or so since my phone bill remains the same, but I have to spend more to buy the phone.
Actually, as another poster already pointed out, with TMobile you don't have to pay the carrier a premium. They have a set of plans (called "Even More Plus") that are unsubsidized and are cheaper monthly.
Since the initial N1 model used the Tmobile 3G bands, it made a perfect match, and a great deal for anyone willing to do the math.
Apparently the author agrees with you, because he complains about "how sluggish some manufacturers are to release critical operating system updates for their devices." I'm curious to know how he reconciles that with the comment that you have quoted.
I've been pissed off at my HTC incredible not being updated with Froyo, and being UI-ily inconsistent (why when I hit the Home button when I'm already at the Home screen does it proceed to give me a zoomed-out view of all my desktops? Why do I even have multiple desktops on a phone?), and being excessively carrier-branded, and Google lost the not-evil designation with the net neutrality thing.
And, I've been impressed with the iPhone 4's physical and software shininess (and yes, I'm willing to not hold it that way), so much so I was leaning in the iPhone direction for the next round of phone, assuming they did a deal with Verizon (big if), but this now has me reminded of the sucky elements: namely, no Google Voice, bad notifications, and the potential to get hurt, rather than helped, by OS updates.
I've tried more than once to escape the iPhone for the less-locked-down Android, and every time I've gone crawling back. I tried the original Droid and had a lot of stability problems (in retrospect, probably a bad hardware sample), and I just spent a week and a half with the Droid Incredible (with the Froyo update), including the long Labor Day weekend... at the conclusion of which I went down to AT&T last night and had my iPhone 3GS reactivated, then returned the Incredible to Verizon this morning.
I could write a long treatise on the pros and cons of both platforms, but what it comes down to is that Android still has too many rough edges not to annoy me, and I'd rather eat the restocking fee and activation charges than spend most of the next two years carrying a phone that annoys me every time I use it. Living in Apple's walled city can be expensive, annoying, and sometimes feels like living in Duloc -- but the trains run on time and the mail generally gets delivered properly. It's not always perfect in reality and Apple sometimes does stupid things with UI (hello, vertical buttons in iTunes 10), but it's usually a very smooth experience and I can't deny Apple does a better job of sweating the small stuff than their competitors. I think that's part of why they have so many rabidly loyal customers. Yes, they're very good at marketing, but in my experience their products do a good job of backing up the marketing ("magical" adjectives on the iPad excepted, perhaps).
I do miss the Droid Incredible's high-res screen, which is why I'll probably buy an iPhone 4 soon. I don't even care that it's on AT&T -- a week and a half of running around Akron and Cleveland running into Verizon dead zones where my iPhone always worked has led me to the conclusion that AT&T isn't all that bad.
Like you, I was eagerly anticipating the Froyo upgrade for my Incredible. However, after receiving the update, I am actually looking for ways to go back to 2.1. I haven't noticed any visual improvements, in fact the Sense UI seems more sluggish. Also, HTC and Verizon jammed in a ton of uninstallable software with Froyo. I now have Skype Mobile, Amazon MP3, My Verizon Mobile, some "Stocks" app, City ID (which continues from 2.1) and a bunch more that you can't remove and it all randomly starts running when I'm not looking. The battery life (which used to be great, much better than a buddy's Evo) is terrible as a result. Google really needs to reign it in.
>The battery life (which used to be great, much better than a buddy's Evo) is terrible as a result. Google really needs to reign it in.
I've actually had the exact opposite experience, it's super snappy now and the battery seems to last a full 40-50% longer. I've noticed in some forums that people seem to be having either your experience or mine. Strange that would happen on a fixed target, unless there's some differences in the guts of different revs of the Incredibles.
Maybe VZW is split testing the rollout with different bundles and settings. My wife has had the same issues as me with her Incredible after the update. Maybe our charger is hosed and we only noticed a difference when looking for changes between versions.
Your Incredible+Froyo experience couldn't be more different from mine. Performance and overall snappiness has increased noticeably after upgrading from Eclair. My battery life hasn't been negatively affected either. If anything, it's improved.
The RAM/CPU specs are close to my netbook. I'm surprised that JIT compilation isn't standard for a Java-related language, it's pretty old now.
The fragmentation is a concern, for market size (for apps), though it will sill be massively larger than for Apple. The appstore deficiency is a greater concern - google need to buy a startup for this, they suck at UI.
The Oracle suit does scare me though. Why invest sweat equity if it might all be washed away? That's the idea, I guess.
Regardless of what happens to this particular platform, the hardware is just about there, so something fantastic will soon be here.
The latest version of Android (Froyo) supports JIT.
Not sure I agree with the "They suck at UI" comment. Most of the rest of the Android UI is really well designed. The Market Place app needs improvement though yes.
Thanks, I'm surprised it wasn't in the first version.
I bet that UI came with the the Android acquisition. Though gmail is very good. All of their other good examples of UI's that I can think of also come from acquisitions: it's an opportunity. Google is great at engineering.
The UI has improved dramatically since the first Android phone came out, ie post-aquisition. I'm assuming the people responsible for the Market Place app are the same people responsible for the general UI but I could be wrong.
I think the next release will be the big major release android finally needed. Android 2.2 offered the JIT (which really is a HUGE difference!) and overall i think that Android is pretty much feature complete. Apart from the UI which lacks behind the polish of the iPhone. Development of Android 3.0 concentrates on the UI, Google even aquired some UI designer of WebOS (which is said to have a really nice UI). Also, i think Android 3.0 focuses on UI scalability in general, which might mean that we will see this UI in most phones/tablets/TVs/whatever in the mid-term, fighting the fragmentation :)
I believe the fast app switching is more or less the same, but Android lets developers write services that can do anything in the background, isn't iOS limited to just audio or VOIP? For example, I can't write an app to download new tweets every hour or something like that.
It's definitely a double edged sword on Android... some apps that use background services can turn into real battery hogs.
Generally correct: iOS offers a few more services than just audio and VOIP, but it is a fixed list.
On the other hand, I've never seen an app on Android that sucked down battery life, and if it did, I'd uninstall it just like any other buggy app. I've never bought into the whole "background services drain battery life" line that Apple popularized.
To be fair, the reason that Android background apps don't drain the battery is because Google put a _huge_ amount of engineering into power management (witness the lkml flamewars about "wakelocks" as they try to merge this code back upstream).
Android also has the lovely screen showing which apps are burning the battery. In my experience, an _overwhelming_ fraction of power use is by the screen and the radio. (And by games running in the foreground, but that's to be expected.)
I've never bought into the whole "background services drain battery life" line that Apple popularized.
Yes, that's a red herring.
But there is indeed a real problem with the "real" multitasking that android implements: Responsiveness. This is one area that they absolutely need to work on urgently.
On the iPhone everything is near instant, or if you have to wait then there is clear indication that the phone is doing something.
On Android we get the familiar (but unwelcome) choppyness that we know from Desktop Operating Systems. Button presses will not always be recognized immediately (or sometimes not at all). Page transitions are not always smooth, often they are choppy or do outright freeze in the middle. It is very often not obvious that you have to wait; i.e. a button press will cause the UI to freeze momentarily but without giving you any feedback that your press was actually registered.
And ofcourse the unpredictable delays when opening or switching apps.
A multi-second delay before opening the phonebook or dialer is simply unacceptable for a phone.
This description actually makes it sound worse than it is. Despite these problems I'm quite happy with my Samsung Galaxy overall. But they need to work on this stuff if they want the perception of android as "slow" and "choppy" to change. Because that's the first thing you notice when playing around with an android device in the store.
What are you talking about? I get the same choppiness on my iPhone 3G (with 3.1.2 and even worse on 4.0) that you get everywhere else. The iPhone is not free from choppiness unless your using the iPhone 4 only. Even 3GS users have choppiness problems on 4.0
To clarify, I was indeed referring to the iPhone 4.
Perhaps I should just have left the reference out altogether. Imho it's a serious problem that needs to be addressed regardless of the state on other platforms.
I've noticed the same problems on the Samsung Galaxy S phone I got from Sprint last Tuesday. It's the "Epic 4G" variant. I also have issues with camera and GPS apps freezing or crashing pretty frequently.
Yeah, it's really not much of a problem. Especially now that Google is working on their own push notification service there really shouldn't be a need for that many background services.
I love Android, I'm all in favor of the robust multitasking model, that having been said - StumbleUpon and PayPal do NOT need long running services in the background and they were both promptly uninstalled and ranked poorly because of that.
I am so lucky. I work at home surrounded by computers, so I really don't need a smart-phone because I'm at home most of the time. When I do leave my house, I take my LG Chocolate with me and we have a Garmin in the car for GPS. Ahhh, simplicity.
though on the other hand, I hate, no. HATE, the fact that $CARRIER$ can tell me what application I have to have installed on my phone without any ability of uninstalling them.
Android is not all sunshine. I might post more comments as I continue reading the article.