T-Mobile To Launch Android Tablet 101
nandemoari writes "T-Mobile is planning to use Google's open source operating system 'Android' on devices that blur the line between cellphone and home PC. In addition, Samsung says they will also produce Android phones, but need to work out the kinks first. Both announcements come shortly after HP revealed that it is investigating the idea of using Android to power some of its low-cost netbook computers in place of Windows."
Re:Why Not Existing Phones? Am I Missing Something (Score:5, Insightful)
why do we need to feature new phones?
Because the phone manufacturers and networks would love you to buy a new phone and sign a new 2 year contract. If they allowed you to upgrade your software, the only company that wins is Google.
Is this a good idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong if they make something great, but this just strikes me as a device that we don't need.
A cell phone (I've got an iPhone) is designed to be portable. I'm just not going to use a portable 8" tablet all the time. A cell phone should be small, but it's portable so I can whip it out at any time to look something up.
Something larger, a home PC, is too big. Even if we take something like a netbook, it's bigger than something I want to carry around all the time. I don't think there are enough people who will want to carry something that size around all the time.
I'd expect battery life to be a problem, at least if you want to keep it light.
There may be a reason that people aren't rushing to buy stuff bigger than Nokia 810s. As other cell phones get more powerful and easier to use for the web, there doesn't seem to be a big reason to carry something bigger. You quickly get to the point where a netbook would fit you better.
But something between a netbook and a cell phone? I'm skeptical of the size of that market.
Re:Why Not Existing Phones? Am I Missing Something (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes we totally can do that. In fact, many people already have. The hard part is writing the drivers with no hardware documentation.
wow, why wasn't any of this at the CTIA conference (Score:3, Insightful)
The CTIA 2009 conference was just a few weeks ago and there was almost no news on Android. Now we are hearing from many vendors who where there but showed and said nothing about these products. I even saw one post where a reporter had to ask about Android to find out they were going to ship an Android phone mid-2009. That same reporter noticed that this vendor was only announcing Windows Mobile 7 stuff at the show and _that_ wasn't even targetted for 2009.
Now that we are starting to see/hear about Android products and phones, it really blows me away that businesses still let Microsoft sucker them into defining their marketing. I would not like to see Google or anyone else have to resort to paying customers to pre-announce and pre-promote their products to stall or diminish the value of the partners other products. But this is classic Microsoft and not any new and improved Microsoft. They've done this in the 80s and 80s so change is not in their blood. But what is up with these companies how let them do this and take their money while allowing them to dictate what their customers want, need, or deserve? Does $$$ really buy everything including the future of your company?
It's good to see someone is finally talking about new product showing up this year. I still wonder what kinds of backroom pressure is being exerted to limit these kinds of things.
LoB
Re:I still haven't purchased an Android Phone... (Score:4, Insightful)
which seems counter-intuitive to the concept of an open platform
Not at all. Android can't have drivers for a technology if there's no way for its authors to get their hands on specs, short of reverse engineering each piece of hardware which is prohibitively time intensive.
WTF are you talking about???? (Score:4, Insightful)
Android is Open Source . Did you miss the memo?
Google only wins if we win. It is a symbiotic, and very healthy relationship type known as interdependence, which you may want to read about here [wikipedia.org].
Oh yeah, and one final thing. Google already won. We already won. I have a G1 running Linux with root access and the ability to cross-compile whatever kernel, libraries, and applications I want and install, boot, and use them.