[wellylug] Android: A Better iPhone ?

[Bruce Hoult]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> Bruce Hoult <bruce at hoult.org> writes:
>> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Sam Vilain <sam at vilain.net> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Something to watch for with these phones. Apparently they can only
>> store applications (and their built in data) in the internal storage,
>> not on the card, and it's limited to 256 MB.
>
> One of the most common hacks on the G1/Dream is "apps2sd", which allows the
> applications to be stored on the SD card rather than internal flash.  Comes at
> some cost, and it doesn't appeal to me much, but the option is there...

It would not surprise me if simple symlink tricks will work. I did
that on iPhone 1.x, which had two partitions, a small system one that
included apps, and a large user one for music etc. Apple never
expected extra apps to be put on it, but some of were jailbreaking
them :-) You could fill up the system partition very easily.

But that's all hacker level stuff, not your average user.


>> I've only got three screens of apps on my iPhone (far less than many
>> people I know) but a quick check shows that is 860 MB.
>
> O_o  iPhone applications must be either really bloaty, or you have a lot of
> multi-media heavy stuff.  Anyway, my point is that Android applications tend
> to be lighter.

That's only an average of 19 MB. Of course many are very much smaller
than that, but X-Plane, for example, has quite a lot of scenery. I've
seen people with navigation programs that have 400 MB of map data.


> The few that do use substantial data tend to support the SD card for storage
> anyhow; my eBook reader, the camera, etc, all do.

That's user-supplied/generated data, which of course can be
arbitrarily large. I'm talking about what comes with the application
itself.