[wellylug] Android: A Better iPhone ?

[Daniel Pittman]

Sam Vilain <sam at vilain.net> writes:
> On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 09:00 +1300, Adam Bogacki wrote:
>> http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7604/1.html
>
> If anyone finds out a good place to buy these without paying $1099 for
> the HTC Magic or having to sign a 2-year contract ... let me know :)

Good hardware costs; you are probably better off, financially, just accepting
the contract and letting the phone vendor subsidise the hardware for you.
Otherwise you can look forward to $600 to $1200 for any handheld computer.

(For example, the iPhone is AUD $719 or $879 for the hardware without
 contract, for the previous and current generation kit respectively.)

> There should be some cheap knock-offs available.  eg the aPhone A6 looks
> like a direct iPhone rip-off aesthetically but runs Android.

Be careful: at least one vendor has shipped a phone that *looks* like Android,
but isn't.  Which is ... surprising, given that Android is OSS, but is
probably because it costs a lot of money to build hardware capable of running
it and all.


> The new Motorola Droid is CDMA only, for Verizon in the US - it's got much
> more RAM, faster processor and runs Android 2.0.  The older phones won't run
> the newer Android version (which has just been released)

Well, nothing expect the Droid can run 2.0 right now, because the code isn't
released.  However, given that Android is nicely open it is pretty likely that
a backport of 2.0 will land for older phones soon.

After all, the HTC Hero with Sense UI, which is 1.6 + custom framework has
been ported to run on the G1, which was never designed to the purpose...

> but the 1.x OS series is probably going to be alive and well for some time
> anyway so it doesn't matter that much...

Upgrading without official vendor support is surprisingly easy; the experience
is simpler than, for example, Linux on a standard laptop[1]...

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  Actually, better than Linux on a good laptop like a Thinkpad, which
     generally have excellent hardware support as well as Linux-specific
     vendor firmware support.

-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
               ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons