CyanogenMod 9 Working On the Nexus S 218
MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about progress toward getting an AOSP build working on the Nexus S. From the article: "Over the past week, ROM Manager extraordinaire Koush has been frantically working on making a working build of CyanogenMod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) for the Samsung Nexus S. The custom ROM, which is built purely from the Android Open Source Project, has now reached 'alpha 11.' All major features are present and no significant bugs remain. It's too early to say that the build is ready for prime time or mission-critical work — the final release of CM9 is due in the new year — but it's certainly stable enough for daily use. The most significant feature, if you can call it that, is that Koush's build of ICS is really very smooth — it's as nimble as Gingerbread, if not more so. Unlike the previous, non-CM build that was released last week, this alpha build of CM9 has every feature enabled, including Google Wallet, and setting a mobile data limit. As usual, the custom ROM is pre-rooted, has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware. "
Yay (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay (Score:5, Interesting)
Not done. That is Ubuntu running in a chroot environment. And it makes phone calls fine, because Android is still present. Personally, I would love to see a real Linux distribution running on an Android device. Android has so many limitations: the bionic C library, Dalvik apps only (yeah, I know about NDK, but "real Linux" has Python, Perl, C++, OpenJDK Java etc.)
The limitations of Android stem from being targetted at 2005 phone hardware, so they created a cut-down Linux. With 2012 tablets, dual-core 1.2GHz+ CPU and 1GB+ memory, there is absolutely no reason for these artificial software limitations. I want to see Gnome on a tablet. And KDE. And other GUI environments. And I want Android to be relegated to an app-compatibility environment in the same way that Java and Mono exist today - not because that's a bad thing, but because Android is just one application environment of the many that exist on Linux. Why shouldn't tablet programmers use Python+PyQT to build their apps, deployed on Debian-style apt-get repositories? Why shouldn't we have Ubuntu for Tablets? The hardware is powerful enough now, and it is only going to get more powerful, we don't need to be hobbled by the design choices of what was (8 years ago) a small startup in California.
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I think you missed the point of tablets. They are not general purpose computers, they are about displaying information. You wouldn't want to do too much serious work on one because the form factor is not suited to that, e.g. the on-screen keyboard can't be typed on nearly as easily as a hardware keyboard, and touch is no where near as accurate as a mouse.
For light gaming and web browsing they are ideal, and Android is ideally suited to that.
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> How touch friendly are Gnome and KDE--and their applications?
Not at all. I was running an Ubuntu chroot under WebOS to get at least some apps. And usability is absolutely terrible.
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Exactly. Same reason why Apple chopped down OS X to make iOS for the iPhone and iPad.
Usability of desktop OSes on handheld and tablet devices is awful, even though compatibility is great. You can buy phones running Windows XP and Windows 7 (they're on the market), but we're talking about Windows UI on a 4" screen. And we know how Microsoft did with nearly tw
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
You sure are demanding and lazy, aren't you?
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If I could buy PS1 games in a paper sleeve at the checkout of the drugstore for $1 a pop, I would buy just about anything I could get my hands on. I would pay 2 to 3 times that for PS2/XBox games.
99 cents per song is
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Then why don't you program it? It's not something that I want so I have no plans of doing it for you.
Re:Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Then it hasn't met my standards, because it's no longer a phone. I want an open source program I can compile and install on my distro of choice that lets me use it as a phone.
Well, get coding. It's open source after all
Otherwise all this sounds like is Varuka Saltz stamping her feet and shouting "Daddy, I want it NAOOOOOOOOOOO".
As for me, I'm grateful to Cyanogen, Koush and the rest of the rather lengthy CM team for their hard work (yes I donate too). Most of us have to work with what we've got, thanks to Google we've got a great platform to work with (anyone complaining about Android never used WinMo) and thanks to people like Cyanogen, we've got an even better phone OS that is free and open.
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Well, get coding. It's open source after all
Otherwise all this sounds like is Varuka Saltz stamping her feet and shouting "Daddy, I want it NAOOOOOOOOOOO".
Maybe he would be willing to pay for it.
I'm exactly like Varuka stamping her feet. And after parting with my cash I have an expectation that my slice of the development costs is reflected in feature development.
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Varuka Saltz
It's Veruca Salt. Verruca are plantar walts.
That's the joke. (Score:4, Informative)
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N900 fits your bill.
Runs Android too if you feel in the mood. :)
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well, if you'd hack android to run in ubuntu for n900, it would fit the bill.
but then he would say that ubuntu isn't his distro of choice.
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How the hell is that supposed to work without a "Phone distro" to start with?
Ubuntu runs on many Android devices just fine... you just need to write the phone stack and front-end yourself - nobody's stopping you.
In other words: You CAN put pretty much anything you want on there... there just isn't anything usable *to* put on a phone yet. How is that Android's/Google's fault?
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Well... there's a little more to it than that. A "phone" environment is fundamentally different in the sense that an incoming phone call usually will (and should) stop whatever else you're doing dead in its tracks until the call is dealt with. A scheduling and notification strategy optimized for realtime multiplayer games is going to be completely dysfunctional when your real-world use case involves being able to freeze the action mid-shot and take an incoming phone call, then gracefully ease back into the action when it's finished. That's why Android makes such a big deal about differentiating between "service" and "activity" -- a service can keep running when another activity has the activity focus.
If Android apps weren't forced to divide up the workflow and separate out the parts into "things that can (and should) run in the background without a user interface", and "things that only make sense when the application has focus and the user's exclusive attention", we'd have the same problems that IOS does. Where things in Android's world become confusing is the ambiguity at the "service" end, between "things that happen occasionally on a schedule" (like polling a server), "things that happen in response to something else" (incoming communication, arrival at location, change of sensor state, etc), and "things that should happen, and keep happening, until something else gives them a reason to stop" (like music playback). Complicating things more is the fact that you can sort of *get away* with doing things in background services using threads and traditional Java sleep/wait strategies, but Android will break things that insist on doing things that way in increasingly aggressive ways (particularly Gingerbread and beyond), even when they do it in ways that are considered to be perfectly legitimate and polite in mainstream Java.
Starting with Gingerbread, Android has started becoming downright mean & aggressive towards apps that use TimerTask to schedule periodic tasks in background services instead of using alarms & intents... not quite breaking apps outright, but getting VERY aggressive about killing background services that use TimerTask with partial wakelocks in ways that even a year ago would have been considered mainstream and exceptionally well-behaved (like grabbing a partial wakelock ONLY during actual network activity, to at least ensure that the phone didn't get put to sleep halfway through a http request, even if the service itself ended up suspended until the phone was awakened by something). Now, Android will kill background services after about an hour simply because it decides they've been running for "too long", even if they've been asleep in a TimerTask for most of it. I never even noticed this until I got my Photon last month, because my previous phone (Samsung Galaxy S/Epic 4G) was stuck in Froyo-land, and my app worked flawlessly on it. I knew it didn't reliably poll when the phone was asleep, but it still managed to make it work often enough to not be a big deal. Once I got the Photon, I noticed that it was just silently dying outright after about an hour, and not coming back to life after the phone was awakened.
I can see Google's logic, but I don't think they've done a particularly good job of reaching out to developers (many of whom are still stuck in Froyo-land, if only because American carriers suck & most users are still stuck with it, often including the developers themselves). Yes, the emulator exists for newer versions, but frankly, it's so slow, even on a fast quadcore PC, I'd rather tear off my fingernails one by one than suffer its slowness (and the fact that it seems to either die, or spontaneously lose contact with Eclipse, once or twice per hour, necessitating even more delay and interruption). After I bought my new Photon, my old Epic turned into my "permanently tethered to the computer development phone".
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TimerTask might never have been officially "supported", but the practice of using it was widespread to the point of making it into at least one major book on Android programming as an example.
Yes, Android has always been entitled to kill background services when RAM is needed, and has reserved the right to do it for any reason, or no particular reason at all. The unhappy surprise was Gingerbread's aggressive enthusiasm for killing background services for reasons seemingly closer to "just because it feels li
Re:Yay (Score:4, Informative)
Debian runs on the Neo Freerunner, and there's software for the phone functionality. You can make calls, receive and send SMS, connect over GPRS and read your email, browse, use the GPS. It's usable, although running desktop apps on a phone can be frustrating sometimes. And it's slow.
There's a project to run Debian on Nokia N900, however it's incomplete and because of a few proprietary components you can't "compile and install" something to make the phone work. The community is working on replacing those.
The original OS on the phone is Maemo, which is essentially Debian-based, X-based, and you can compile and run it except for those few components. You can also run full Debian in a chroot. You can also port the apps missing in Debian from there any time you wish. It's non-trivial perhaps.
You can run Kubuntu on N900. The phone functionality in Debian and Kubuntu is being worked on.
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Easy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWLOqVdtbkw [youtube.com] - Ubuntu on Galaxy S.
Ubuntu (Score:2)
Not sure if it's "real" enough for you, but Ubuntu is coming to tablets. [engadget.com]
Whether that means you'll be able to run any Linux application you like remains to be seen, but I imagine if it's Debian-based it should be quite hackable.
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Ubuntu is already running on the ASUS TF101 and an idiot proof install is in early stages of development.
The image file self-destructs if they try to install it?
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I want a real linux distro, not google's vision of how linux should be. Let me know when I can load Debian, SuSe, Fedora, etc, on my phone and then we'll talk.
Do any of those have phone support? If not then I can't see why you would want them since loading them on to your phone seems pretty pointless...unless of course you don't actually want to use it as a phone.
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Should, but they won't. Mostly because at least in the US they're subservient to the carriers who don't want you to do as you wish, but rather want you to do as they wish and use your device as little as possible, pay as much as possible, and throw it away in favor of a new device and a new contract after 2 years are up.
Until then, pick a handset and go look at http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo [slashdot.org]">Nemo, maybe grab an N900.
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Mostly because at least in the US they're subservient to the carriers who don't want you to do as you wish, but rather want you to do as they wish and use your device as little as possible, pay as much as possible, and throw it away in favor of a new device and a new contract after 2 years are up.
No they won't because they want to sell a shitload of handsets and that means that they focus their effort on the most juicy target. Advanced support for geek has an extremely limited return on investment.
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The android manufacturers should provide an open source kit for getting any linux distro to act as a phone. It's their hardware.
You mean the handset manufacturers? Why would they do that?
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Come on now, follow the rules and post that stuff in the apple section.
Think of the children.
Re:Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
No, it was "dropped" because Nokia's internal politics damaged the company enough that they stuck an ex-Microsoft executive in the CEO slot who promptly killed off the winner they managed to create in the N9 and forced Nokia on to WP7.
But please, blame the core OS for political and managerial failures.
Re:Yay (Score:5, Funny)
No, it was "dropped" because Nokia's internal politics damaged the company enough that they stuck an ex-Microsoft executive in the CEO slot who promptly killed off the winner they managed to create in the N9 and forced Nokia on to WP7.
Uh, no. It was dropped because their marketing strategy of having three guys chime in on every Slashdot smartphone thread about how great the N900 is was insufficient to gain any traction in the US.
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You, sir, are a legend.
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Get a sense of humor.
Not open enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought one: it was a wonderful device (except for the touchscreen being resistive), but what killed it for us was that it had critical parts of the GUI being non-open.
We would have deployed 200 of them, but we needed one minor bugfix: the ability to operate the camera during a voip phone call (which meant being able to disable the shutter sound so as to allow the sound-card not to block). Sadly, the camera library was crippled: it's very, very easy to use Hildon (basically GTK) to access the image capture with gstreamer, but we only if we didn't use the proprietary feature called "auto-focus"! So we couldn't fix it ourselves, and when we reported the bug, the Nokia team confirmed it, but didn't actually get round to fixing it (at least, not within many weeks).
It's a real shame too: I could SSH into the phone, launch X-applications (on either $DISPLAY), install applications with a real package manager, and enjoy all the other Linux goodness.
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Two years ago he would have wanted an N900. Now he'd want a N9.
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I want a pink unicorn. And it has to be able to speak English. And shit rainbows. I want it now.
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Holy shit, you're right. You know what, fuck it, I'm going to go back to using a slide rule.
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Sure, but that point is not the same for everyone. Just because you or someone else has decided that they don't want to mess around with mobile technology, doesn't mean that it should be a path denied to everyone. Nor should it be actively inhibited and fought against by companies selling high dollar devices.
An entire new space is opening up and the desire to be able to hack in it and do things that aren't totally corporate-controlled is strangely meeting resistance
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Bah, what a boring world view.
I'm in the process of disassembling my espresso machine and sticking an Arduino into it. The Apple-like interface doesn't appeal to me at all. It will be done when keeps temperature properly, has a status display, and is accessible by wifi.
I have tried some Apple stuff. Yeah, it's sorta pretty for a while, but at least for me it gets outright maddening the moment I bump into one of the annoying limitations, and there's a lot of those.
SGS4G support Please! (Score:2)
I have had to use ICBINB builds of Gingerbread for my Samsung Galaxy S 4G because CM7 was not available for that phone.... please please please support it for CM9!
Re:SGS4G support Please! (Score:5, Informative)
I have had to use ICBINB builds of Gingerbread for my Samsung Galaxy S 4G because CM7 was not available for that phone.... please please please support it for CM9!
If you're into hacking, the difference between the SGS 4G and the SGS is the radio (IIRC), so you'll need to replace the radio drivers with ones that work (I.E. one's you've backed up from the device). I had to do this on a Motorola Milestone (and the locked bootloader didn't help).
This is a "Do at your own risk" thing, if someone more knowledgeable then I has better advice, by all means please post it, mine info is 2 years out of date.
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I installed a couple different Modem ROMs.... the last one I installed gave me the best wifi signal. Never had problems with cell signal.
I am not too comfortable installing a ROM for another phone... no matter how moderate the difference in hardware....I have Odin and the proper files to recover, but I hate it when I soft brick my phone.
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Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:5, Interesting)
Qwerty keyboards are useless. Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail. Screens are huge these days so seeing the keyboard on screen while typing is no big issue. Instead of getting a thicker bulkier keyboard equipped phone a bigger screen phone is a better compromise. Physical Keyboards are simply inefficient on mobile devices - not that great for typing, add bulk etc.
The Galaxy Nexus kind of device with no buttons at all is the future, even the soft buttons disappear for video etc, maximizing screen real estate. Ultimately you want the smallest possible device with the biggest possible screen.
Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of having a big 4" screen if you constantly lose half of it to an on-screen keyboard? Especially in landscape when vertical pixels are at a premium? If I wanted to constantly have a 1" high screen, I'd buy an older model QWERTY phone, the landscape screen size would be the same as a 4" keyboardless phone.
Not everyone buys a phone just to watch videos or play games. some buy it to use as a phone (giant screens aren't that great to talk on), or to type a lot (QWERTY phones have more usable screen space even if the actual screen is smaller), or have issues with on-screen keyboards.
There's no such thing as "the one perfect phone for everyone", just as there's no "perfect keyboard" for everyone. Hardware keyboards aren't going anywhere. Here's hoping more manufacturers add them to their offerings.
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So how do you use that bluetooth keyboard while standing in line, or when using public transportation? The whole point of typing on a phone is that you don't need a flat surface to put down something the size of a small laptop...
I've done the folding Bluetooth Keyboard thing, and it sucked. Sure, it worked well enough at a desk, but out and about? Pfffff... flipping open a physical phone keyboard is much easier.
As for the little mini-keyboards the size of the phones themselves: How do you hold it and the ph
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You seriously call somebody an idiot for expressing a view contrarian to your own, without offering any argument or evidence in support of your own position, nor making any attempt to explain why they might be wrong? Rude.
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You wrote: "It is a phone, you shouldn't be typing novels on it Buy a tablet if you want to type a lot". Yet I said nothing about typing a lot on smartphones, no one did (except you), so your counter-argument kinda sucks. Let me reiterate: you're an idiot.
Sure, there are worse things to write novels on than a tablet. The etch-a-sketch, for instance. Stone slates. Water. But there is such a wide choice of better, more suitable technologies for the task: pen or pencil on paper; laptop and desktop computers;
Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:4, Insightful)
The thought of anyone trying to do actual work on a smartphone boggles my mind.
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I'll take a phone with a built in QWERTY keyboard over a tablet for use on public transport any day - ESPECIALLY for getting work done, IF that work involves typing up a lot of natural language. To type decently on the tablet, you need to put it down somewhere, and the typing really isn't that much faster than with a decent QWERTY phone keyboard (too many mistakes without tactile feedback when trying to use all 10 fingers)... and those split thumb boards for tablets are far inferior to a hardware QWERTY pho
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I tested Swype quite thoroughly back when it was new. It's still a dictionary based input method that requires the user to enter new words manually in order to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy...
I don't want to enter a new word into the dictionary every time I use it - this includes acronyms.
I don't want to switch languages on the keyboard every time I talk to a different person.
I don't want to have to look at the screen while I'm typing.
I don't want to lose screen real estate while typing.
I don
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"You haven't used a recent version of Swype or other similar keyboard apps, maybe you tried an early beta."
Correct - however, the concept had big problems back then, and it still has big problems now.. However, if you have a link to a (working) APK, I'd be happy to try it again.
"Swype automatically adds words to the dictionary, you only have to tap non dictionary words the first time. It remembers words you enter. Including acronyms."
That's just it - a user dictionary exists, and in order to input new words
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a) swype isn't faster, b) you can't see shit if your screen is used up by OSK, c) the keyboard can be a slider, to add the same usable screen area and a osk, you can't do sliding really.
it's no fun when your control buttons disappear anyhow.
there's one real reason why they're dropping button counts. COST. so are you just trolling for max profits.
(things might be different if you had flexible displays and actual tactile feedback for on-screen-keys.)
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slider phones are viable, they sell pretty well. several phone companies would like to ship their big earner models without them though, as they want less moving parts for assembly - and because several large purchasers(operators) have designated them as "business" phones..
also for other reasons, I got a xperia play. it has a slide out controls. they're absolutely fantastic for browsing information compared to obscuring the screen with fingers, trying to hit the tiny links or doing the pinch zoom ripaska.
al
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"Qwerty keyboards are useless. Swype or similar input methods are faster and more intuitive than mashing tiny hard keys that add bulk and extra mechanical components that can fail."
Bullshit. If I can't type without looking, it isn't a decent input method... touchscreen devices cause me pain and possibly injury in the future, because I constantly need to look at the freakin screen while I'm typing. So it's either walk or type, unless I want to run into telephone poles or get run over by Granny in her motoriz
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Swype fails horribly when you need to type non-dictionary words. Touchscreens also lack arrow keys, necessary for navigating text boxes and more. And in portrait mode, Swype takes up the ENTIRE screen, making it completely useless. The lack of keyboards is precisely why people believe smartphones and tablets are consumption-only devices, when, in fact, the
Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear you.
It would be so nice if the major Android phone manufacturers would stop spitting out new phones every 6 weeks, and instead focused on 2-3 phone hardware platforms per year. I say platforms in that they use the exact same innards (SoC, storage, etc) but with 1-2 screen sizes, and with/without keyboards.
Sony Ericsson is the closest to doing this with the Xperia Mini/Mini Pro, Xperia Neo/Pro, and Xperia Arc/Play. They all basically have the same hardware, with just screen size and keyboard/gamepad variations.
Just imagine how much simpler life would be for their Android devs, support staff, and customers if they did this.
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(Yes, I know that the iPhone has this. Peripherals are the one thing that iOS devices crush Android in.)
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Absolutely disagree. Two thumbs on a keyboard with tactile feedback are better than 10 fingers on a glass touchscreen any day... and if you're unly using two fingers to hunt and peck (or two thumbs, in the case of split keyboards), that gap gets even bigger.
And until that tablet fits in my front pants pocket without causing me pain, it's useless for mobile computing anyway...
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Tap based or "slide-around"-based, it's still a keyboard without tactile feedback, based on a user dictionary to compensate for the inherent lack of accuracy. And still more or less impossible to use without constantly looking at the damned thing. :(
Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:4, Insightful)
But you aren't the customer. The customer, at least in the US, is the mobile carrier who wants to restrict you as much as possible. The fallout from this is that even in places where you can buy the device unlocked, the devices are still crippled (see Motorola.) The end result is that ~2 years on I am still using my N900.
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They still exist, but they're not very prominent. I use an HTC Evo Shift 4G, basically a smaller version of the Evo with a slide-out keyboard, and I far prefer it to any of the touchscreen-only devices I've played around with.
Motorola Droid3 (Score:2)
It exists. Motorola Droid3 -> http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/DROID-3-by-MOTOROLA-US-EN [motorola.com]
The keyboard is amazing. The phone is awesome (even the actual phone part, as in I can hear the other person and the other person can hear me). Dual core processor, very nice screen.
One click rooted, removed motorola/verizon crap, can't be happier.
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Re:What happened to qwerty devices? (Score:5, Insightful)
I still carry my n900, but I got an iPhone for work, and bought an Android tablet recently, and I have had the same rude awakening of just how user-friendly the n900 actually was. I have spent the last two years looking for something newer, faster, and *better* than my n900, and I just haven't found it. Given how awkwardly Maemo begat Meego which has stumbled into Tizen, I'm not even very optimistic that anything will come along in the forseeable future. I'd practically kill to have a whizzy new n900 with the latest CPU and screen, but nobody wants to sell it to me. Even the most open android thing kind of pales in comparison to the promise of a genuinely open platform.
I love the fact that I can write PyQt scripts while I am on the subway that work perfectly on my real computers when I get to the office/home. I can forward X11 apps to/from my phone just as I do with my normal computers. (Obviously, some aren't worth forwarding to a phone, but others work just fine on a touch screen.) The X11 forwarding over SSH with implausible complicated SSH tunnels between overly complicated networks is, AFAIK, impossible on Android, despite the fact that Android has VNC and ssh terminal emulator apps. In the context of working on a real big "Enterprisey" production network, having a "normal" ssh/X11 stack makes a huge difference.
I know the n900 never got Angry Birds, or whatever, but it has been an invaluable tool in a way that no other mobile device seems willing to be, not even the "very open, easy to do whatever you want" Android platform, which is disappointing.
Yeah Baby (Score:2)
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Like the other poster said it's a bit of a catch 22. You can't do a nandroid backup without a custom recovery image. Can't do a custom recovery image without unlocking the bootloader. Can't unlock the bootloader without wiping the phone.
I had this same problem on the nexus one. The trick is to root the phone without unlocking the bootloader and then using a backup utility that requires root (Titanium Backup or whatever, I actually preferred MyBackup Root). This can be done by using a local root exploit
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Informative)
Although Android is not a true open source project, they normally release the source code with one major exception. A lot of the argument about that was because Google refused to release the 3.x Honeycomb source code. Google themselves said that the reason they never released it was that it was a 'hack' to get Android on tablets and was not up to their quality standards and they didn't want it spread any further than necessary. They promised that they would release 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, which would meld the phone and tablet code and they have done so, leading to the CyanogenMod 9 release.
Open source vs. community development (Score:5, Informative)
A project that releases source code under an open source license is an open source project.
Android, unlike many open source projects, isn't an open community development project, but while those two things often go together, they have no necessary relationship.
Re:Open source vs. community development (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a big difference: Android is pretty much entirely funded and developed by Google. It's not a community project.
Their project, their copyright, their licence, their rules. Demanding that they give you the source to everything they develop is simply childish. Be grateful for the source you get, since it cost the wider community nothing, not even time.
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Well, unlike Android, MySQL is under a GPL licence, requiring them to open the source to released binaries in a timely fashion, is it not? So Oracle couldn't legally withhold source at all, unless they changed the licence somehow.
I was under the impression that MySQL is (or perhaps was, until a couple years ago) a much more community-driven project, with many contributors who would be livid to see their work bought & derailed, but perhaps I'm wrong there. If it really was developed solely by MySQL AB (a
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As long as they own the copyright, yes, they can.
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This is a simple matter of competence and trust. When Google says "we will release the source later" even those of us who are a bit outraged* mostly trust them. When Oracle says little and occasionally mutters "we are working on the community" we immediately see a bunch of executioners coming out and start to panic. I know that I immediately switched to Jenkins / Libre Office the minute I heard that there was a fork away from Oracle. I still haven't got it together to get Cyanogenomod even though it's p
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> And any open source project that releases major new versions without source is called a "bait and switch" project.
Well, yes - Google is in it for the money, not for the community. Many companies operate on the same principle: you can get the source under an open source license, but you can get it sooner if you pay.
I was a bit miffed about Gingerbread, but now that Google has released the source code for ICS in a very timely manner, all is well again for the open source community. Now if only they cou
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The source is open.
More specifically the source to most versions of the stock version of the core of andriod is open. The remaining versions is probably burried in the VCS history somewhere but afaict you are on your own as regards finding them since they aren't tagged. Apps that form a key part of the user experiance are not open and neither are any customisations made for individual phones (other than bits that the GPL forces them to release).
It's certainly better than no source at all but I wouldn't describe it as an "open
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It is incredible that Google are willing to give away the source code for free, and it may actually kill Android in the tablet arena if Amazon's devices gain ground. The Kindle Fire is going to get a lot better and Amazon are releasing bigger Kindle tablets next year.
I agree with most of what you said, but this bit baffles me. How does Amazon releasing an Android tablet (the Kindle Fire) kill Android in the tablet arena? I expect all the forthcoming Kindle tablets will run Android as well. Seems like a good way to get Android using devices into lots of people's hands, meaning the market for Android apps that work well on tablets is bigger (even if the stock Kindle Fire is tied to Amazon's app store, nothing stopping devs releasing on there as well as Google Android Mark
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Informative)
That's right. Just to clarify, even Honeycomb's code has been released at this point, although it's not "tagged" so it isn't as easy to get to. Google did this on purpose to encourage developers to build using the Ice Cream Sandwich code instead, which is probably better for everyone involved.
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Well that's easy: no version of Android is really open source.
Call me when the rest of the Open Handset Alliance releases source for their bits. Oh. Right. They don't. Qualcomm, Broadcom I'm looking at you and all of your infernal binary blobs. Is Android 4.0 open source? Kinda. I won't hold my breath for Google to release code for "older" ARM chips (v6 chips like the Qualcomm MSM7k series). Christ. Is Davlik still deliberately broken on OSX? Or maybe Google will ACCEPT SOME OF THE LONG STANDING F
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is google wallet open source too? did they use just open source drivers?
because call me skeptic but...
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You mean Droid 1? Re:droid3 (Score:2)
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It's the RAM. Overclock that CPU to 800 or 1000MHz and it flies, but the 256MB of RAM is a huge bottleneck. I'm currently running a Desire which is an order of magnitude faster in daily use (used to have a Milestone) because it has 512MB of RAM, but even that's still a pretty big bottleneck. Here's to hoping that the standard 1GB on current models will be enough to keep Android running smoothly for the next two years or so...
I wonder when the first Android devices with upgradeable RAM will start to appear ;
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works for me.
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Something about seeing the phrases "pre-rooted" and "Google Wallet" in the same sentence scares me.
You want your financial details to be secured by allegedly-trusted hardware? I'd rather a secure cryptographic protocol that requires the client only to have the correct credentials. Sure, having an unwalled garden (the 'pre-rooted' bit) will lead to data theft through malware, but it's no different to being conned out of cash from your physical wallet.
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Something about seeing the phrases "pre-rooted" and "Google Wallet" in the same sentence scares me.
Really? I'm more worried about contradictions like this: "has ROM Manager installed, and absolutely no bloatware". Also, props to the CyanogenMod guys for including closed source adware.
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