Overall the Android beta didn’t feel as well-oiled as its iOS counterpart – we’ve noticed the occasional light hiccups while panning across the scene, so here’s hoping that this will be fixed in the final release. Regardless of this minor flaw, we’d still highly recommend Android users to check out this free Angry Birds beta in the market
I noticed this on my Droid, but after playing this amazing game on my iPad, I don’t want to play it on anything smaller, honestly.
More and more, I get the feeling that if there’s a rift between the old “Don’t be evil” Google and the new “Let’s do whatever we want” Google, that it’s a rift between Schmidt and Larry/Sergey — if not personally, then at least culturally within the company. On the one side, the Larry/Sergey Google that makes amazing cool things — the search engine, Gmail, Android. On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.
Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky, in a great editorial about a problem on the Android Market:
Earlier tonight our friend Michael Gartenberg tweeted that when he went to the Android Market to search for the word “Jewish,” a number of Nazi and Hitler themes turned up. Of course, we had to take a look for ourselves, and sure enough, the search for a fairly innocuous word related to a religion and culture turns up skins which are disgustingly, hatefully pro-Nazism and pro-Hitler. That’s a problem, no matter how you look at this.
Awesome, but this line from C–3P0 comes to mind:
I’m standing here in pieces and you’re having delusions of grandeur!
We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.
Motorola Droid users better not get too excited by Android 2.2, also known as “Froyo.” While Verizon Wireless is set to push out the latest version of the Android operating system to Droid users starting this week, two key features will be missing: tethering and Wi-Fi hot spot capability.
Verizon says the Droid won’t get these two features, which are built into the Android 2.2 OS, because the device’s hardware isn’t capable of supporting it.
Know why the iPhone 4’s antenna grip got tons of attention but there aren’t stories about the same sorts of minor flaws on other phones?
Because if there’s a minor flaw with whichever Droid Xtreme Edition or HTC Whatever is being hyped by the gadget blogs this month, who cares?
Apple is on a pedestal, and people love knocking pedestals down.
Android phones are being pre-loaded with trial software and apps that can’t be deleted off the device by the user. These apps touting mobile TV, football games, location-based search and games are the new face of bloatware, also known as crapware or craplets in the PC world. The term is shorthand for non-essential software or media files bundled with a device in a bid to boost revenue and ostensibly give consumers a chance to try new services.
Apparently, these are the droids consumers have been looking for: Early numbers indicate that the new Motorola Droid X, carried by Verizon Wireless, has been a big hit, selling out online and in many stores since its debut on Thursday. Time to get scared, iPhone 4.
The success of this smart phone compared to its biggest competitor, Apple’s problem-ridden, antenna malfunctioning iPhone 4, has got to be rankling Steve Jobs just a little bit.
Louis Gray, on switching to Android:
I also will never tell you that Android is perfect - in software or in hardware.
[…]
The momentum is clear and the option of multiple choices is clear. If I like Android and hate my new carrier, Sprint, I can switch to Verizon and get the Incredible. If I have an aneurysm and love AT&T, I can get the Aria. If I want a small screen, I can do that. If I want a physical keyboard, I can find a device that does that. But for iPhone, I simply would have to take whatever Apple offers and believe that their choices are right for me. I’ve chosen Apple many times and will again in the future, but I don’t think I should buy into a system that restricts my choices when another one is out there that enables my choices.
The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.
Apple tends to do that a lot. It’s deeply ingrained in their culture, priorities, and product development practices. In brief, their philosophy seems to be to ship only what’s great and leave out the rest. That’s why, instead of having a bad copy-and-paste implementation for the iPhone’s first two years, we just didn’t have one at all.
Android developer Derek James:
As far as development, I know the Android team doesn’t like the “F” word, but fragmentation is a very real issue. There’s the increasing number of hardware configurations. There’s vertical firmware fragmentation in the sense that there’s a spectrum of versions in the ecosystem ranging from 1.5 to 2.2. And then there’s horizontal firmware fragmentation in the customized variants by the manufacturers, like Sense UI and MOTOBLUR. This rapidly expanding diversity is great in terms of expanding the user base, but it increasingly makes development and testing a pain. The Android team has done a great job of trying to mitigate these issues. The development tools associated with Android are very nice. But it will become more and more difficult to develop apps and games that run on more and more configurations if the gap between the oldest and newest firmware version continues to grow and manufacturers continue to release their own versions.