Tomorrow is Christmas and all I can think about is all the new stuff I’m going to have to keep track of at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in the first week of January. It’s going to be my fifth year in attendance as a professional journalist, and the previous years I’ve gone are starting to blend together in my mind. Fortunately, I can gauge the year in history by the amount of Android stuff I see there. Two years ago, there was only the smallest bit of Android-based stuff because the first open source version of the OS was only just released. Last year, the presence had increased significantly, and I saw a lot of new smartphones, a couple of e-reader/tablets and a couple of strange and unique contributions like desktop video phones and Android-powered Microwaves.
This year, aside from the Verizon LTE Android phone that we’re expecting, everyone thinks CES 2011 is going to be all about tablets.
I have my reservations about that prediction.
Yes, Motorola is undoubtedly revealing an Android tablet of some sort, and LG, NEC and Dell have all said they will be showing something off too…but other than that the field is pretty wide open.
Speaking of LG though, there’s a company who’s in the Android space way less than it should be. Last year I saw two Android phones from LG, and earlier this year the company pledged more presence in the area, but frankly I was highly unimpressed with its smartphone attempts. Many of the phones LG showed off last year were solidly based in the pre-iPhone, post BlackBerry design ethic. The company’s got a lot of clout in consumer electronics, but last year it looked to be focused solidly on its TV sector, maybe a tablet would kickstart interest in their smartphones.
A ton of Android-based tablets pour out of China every day. I mean, just check out dealextreme and you’ll be treated to a new piece of shit $99 plastic tablet running Android 2.2 every day of the week. I really hope predictions for CES 2011 will be proven wrong and that there will be something to take my breath away, because I want to see how far companies have taken Android out of its comfortable niche of portable/pocketable touchscreen devices.
Specifically, I want to see OTHER devices running it, like point and shoot cameras, pocket camcorders, media players, clocks and watches, game systems, in-car systems, DVD players and TVs, set top boxes, digital toys, and home automation gadgets.
Frankly, after hearing that Samsung is on track to sell 10 million Galaxy S smartphones before this year is even out, I’ve accepted that Android is now the mainstream smartphone OS. It has reached the average user who upgrades his phone only when his contract runs out, and my efforts will be best invested in tracking the smartphone market overall, and the specific unique applications of Android’s open source branch.
If you’re like me, you read MG Siegler’s post on Techcrunch entitled “Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With,” and were a bit ruffled by it.
In the article, Siegler breaks down the myth of Android openness, and though his reasoning is a bit suspect, this is the kind of thing new Android users needed to hear. Describing Android as “open” is about as subjective as you can get. It’s like describing it as “good.” Therefore, people have assigned all kinds of crazy expectations to what “open” means, and most of them are false.
At one point, Siegler says, “Open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android.”
Proving to mean?
Wasn’t that what it meant all along?
I point you to Steve Horowitz, Google Engineering Director, speaking at Google I/O in 2008, before Android 1.0 was launched.
There, he said the following:
“We are going to give [Android] to the industry to allow innovation
on top of the platform, and to enable the industry at large to build and deploy devices with rich and powerful features and functionality.”
I’ve embedded a video of Horowitz’s presentation, which includes a nice walkthrough of a pre-release version of Android. I encourage you to watch this and remember why Android was developed in the first place.
So who do we have to blame for this whole “open” thing? Naturally it’s the Open Handset Alliance, that famous group of 78 different mobile technology companies and service providers who fostered the development of Android.
“Android was built from the ground up with the explicit goal to be the first open, complete, and free platform created specifically for mobile devices,” the group’s website still says. Check out this early OHA promo video explaining Android…
Talk about mixed messages. On one end you’ve got the people saying “you will be able to have a phone that does whatever you want it to!” On the other, you’ve got Android co-founder Nick Sears, telling it like it is:
“Andy Rubin…myself…and Rich Miner…the three of us all believed that it was too difficult to get new products out to consumers in a timely fashion, and we thought the missing link was not having an open platform.”
The open platform is to help get new products TO CONSUMERS faster, not to help the consumers do more with those products.
And yes, there are two development branches…Android “with Google,” and the open source version of Android. Personally, I think they should have different names because even the tech journalists are confused. Google’s Android should just be called Android and everything else should have its own name, like MotoBLUR, Sense, TouchWIZ, UX, and so forth. There are 20 handset makers in the OHA…and each will have their own UI, which is actually a whole new OS built on top of the free and open Android framework.
You just need to look at TouchWiz 3.0 to see how vastly different the experience can be on an OEM-customized version of Android. Seriously…try the media player in TouchWiz. It could pass for a whole different OS.
Similarly, we have to look at the OPhone phenomenon in China. That’s a carrier UI and not a manufacturer one, and it again is a totally different OS (called OMS, even though it’s built on Android). Dell’s got a phone running it, and the same phone running Dell’s custom Android UI in the US. That’s kind of the idea behind the openness…not whether or not you’re allowed to tether the phone or sideload apps.
If carriers just re-branded the different versions of Android like China Mobile does, we wouldn’t even have to have this discussion.
If I wake up with a headache and it wasn’t the result of drinking the night before, I feel like it was given to me for some cosmic reason. Sort of like Daphne in this early episode of Frasier I happened to catch the other day…she got these psychic headaches whenever somebody nasty was nearby. (In that episode it was Lillith, but I digress.) I feel like there are greater forces at work that are making me take things slow on mornings that I wake up with brain fuzz.
So I woke up with a ripper this morning, and I came downstairs to see that Symbian Guru has abandoned Symbian for Android. Because my head was throbbing, I lingered on this blog entry a bit longer than I normally would, and I realized it was because I had to say something besides “welcome to the platform*.”
I have watched with excitement as my friends and family one by one switch to Android. My brother got the EVO 4G yesterday, my Sister-in-law got the Backflip two weeks ago. My girlfriend, who is terrible at remembering names, has repeatedly brought up the HTC Aria, asking about it and recalling the advertisements shown during the early World Cup 2010 games.
This is not about building a community any more. With 160,000 Android devices being sold per day, this is about being at the right place at the right time.
Ricky says this in his Symbian-Guru farewell post:
While European carriers stumble over themselves to carry the latest Nokia devices, American carriers tend to pick up the lame-duck and low-end versions of Nokia’s phones. This is improving, but at a snail’s pace. Both Symbian and Nokia are dying brands in the U.S., if not already dead, and I’m sick and tired of banging the gong alone.
I spent much of my last month in Europe taking pictures of billboards, noting TV advertisements, and comparing displays in mobile phone shops, and I can say this: Nokia and Sony Ericsson still rule Europe. But HTC is making a huge push there. When I drove into Prague on the 611, I passed by the biggest HTC Android advert I had ever seen plastered on the side of a warehouse. It must have been a football field long.
Furthermore, because of Sony Ericsson and Samsung’s support of Android, the platform is gaining a lot of recognition over there. In the newsstands in Munich, publications like Mobile Zeit and Mobile News all had the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 prominently featured on the cover. It was in display windows all over the place, and there were advertisements for it on walls, on TV, and on the radio.
I keep telling Americans that Sony Ericsson is going to break Android through to the European market, but I don’t know if anyone believes me.
But back to the abandonment of Symbian. With the new top-of-the-line Nokia N8 rocking the first version of Symbian^3 on the way, you’d think that a Symbian enthusiast would be all over it. But Ricky totally nails it:
When the Nokia N8 was first announced, I was dead convinced I would purchase one out of my own pocket. I started putting money aside, ready to even pre-order the N8 as soon as I could. However, the more I use the Nokia N97 as my primary device, the less I’ve been convinced that the N8 is going to be better. Time and time again, Nokia’s high-end smartphones have arrived with pathetic processors, stingy amounts of RAM, and small batteries – why should I put up another $500 of my own money ‘just to see’?
When I reported about the N8 on Betanews, I talked to Nokia about the device’s 680Mhz processor, noting that their absolute top of the line device has a processor only as fast as the current generation of mid-range Android phones.
They said “there are optional ways to achieve great performance” outside of raw processing capabilities.
It kind of upset me that they’d put a freaking 12 megapixel camera into the device, but chose to rely on “options” to deliver a screaming user experience. It just reminded me of the people who put stripped-down Linux distributions on old machines and claim they run just as fast as newer, more powerful machines.
They may be efficient, but why should efficiency only be employed when it’s a necessity?
But I digress. This is not proclaiming the death of Symbian in any way or naming winners and losers in the mobile world. This is just another reminder that one by one, people important to other mobile platforms are becoming Androids.
Android is not perfect. But no technology is, and that’s part of why it’s such a wonderful and exciting field. You get familiar with the limitations of your hardware or software and delight in the workarounds you devise. You learn their strengths and exploit the hell out of them.
That’s what technology is all about, that’s what Android is all about for me.
Well, the rumors are coming in, and they’re not exactly the most positive things. As usual, people are throwing around the same tired-ass fragmentation argument.
Rumor 1.) Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) is due in mid-October, with the first handsets shipping in the Nov/Dec range for the holidays (which sounds like a revisitation of 2.0)
Rumor 2.) Minimum hardware requirements for Android 3.0 devices are: 1GHZ CPU, 512MB or RAM, displays from 3.5″ and higher.
Rumor 3.) A New 1280×760 resolution is available for the devices with displays of 4″ and higher (I keep screaming “convergence,” but I don’t know if anybody is listening…)
Rumor 4.) Completely new 3D-esque UI. This one seems almost logical. Hopefully you will be able to turn off all animations.
Rumor 5.) 3.0 will be for high end devices, and lower-end handsets will keep Android 2.1/2.2
Tim Bray has joined the Android team at Google, so get used to him speaking for the platform.
The 55 year old co-creator of the XML standard left Sun and picked up at Google this week, and explained in his blog some of the reasons why he chose Google over a company like Apple.
In short, he thinks Android is the place to be, and had this to say about the iPhone:
“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.
I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.
The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.”
I don’t think I’m alone in giving this a big round of applause.
“Sterile” …what a good word to describe iPhone.
I too am a daily Mac user who has absolutely no interest in the iPhone. It’s simply not exciting (the goddamn iPad just serves to remind me how boring the platform is) despite the elegant hardware and snappy interface. It’s so uniform and uninspiring and STERILE. Nobody goes “Wow, is that an iPhone?” anymore. Nobody. Because once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, and they’ve been the same for three years now.
My peer group is increasingly being overtaken by Android devices, and any time someone pulls out their phone, there’s a conversation between them about different facets of the platform, UIs, apps, and future developments. It’s a more inclusive environment not only to OEMs and developers, but also to users.
It’s funny that ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn said “This beat is about to get a lot more fun” now that Tim Bray is involved, because I always thought it was the most exciting area in all of mobile technology.
Maybe it just takes someone of his stature to make people believe it.
I’m lying on the floor watching the Olympics with a stomach full of vindaloo and a post-prandial coffee in my hand.
I’ve got to tell you…I’m kind of glad that I’m not in Barcelona right now.
Though I did really want to go to GSMA’s Mobile World Congress 2010, the exciting announcements so far haven’t been anything extremely shocking.
The first noteworthy announcement today was that Sony Ericsson’s first Android device, the gorgeous Xperia X10, is now the parent a full family of devices. The new members of the Sony Ericsson Android family include the X10 mini and X10 mini pro. It’s a bit like the iPod line now, you’ve got the full-sized version, and the miniature ones (one with keyboard, one without, lots of color choices.) Not a bad way to go, actually.
Here’s the features and stats right from Sony Ericsson:
Timescape UI
“Four corner control”
5 megapixel camera and video
QWERTY keyboard – slide and text for quick and easy messaging (Mini pro only)
X10 mini and X10 mini pro support HSPA 900/2100 and EDGE 850/900/1800/1900, HSPA 850/1900/2100 and EDGE 850/900/1800/1900.
Xperia X10 mini:
Size: 83 x 50 x 16 mm
Weight: 88 grams
Phone memory: Up to 128MB
Memory card support: SanDisk microSD, up to 16 GB
Memory card included: 2GB
Operating system: Google Android 1.6
Processor: 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7227
Talk time GSM/GPRS: Up to 4 hours
Standby time: GSM/GPRS: Up to 285hrs
Talk time UMTS: Up to 3.5 hours
Standby time: UMTS: Up to 360 hrs
The X10 mini will be available in selected markets from Q2 in Pearl White, Black, Pink, Lime, Red and Silver
Xperia X10 mini pro:
Size: 90 x 52 x 17 mm
Weight: 120 grams
Phone memory: Up to 128MB
Memory card support: SanDisk microSD, up to 16 GB
Memory card included: 2GB
Operating system: Google Android 1.6
Processor: 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7227
Talk time GSM/GPRS: Up to 4 hours
Standby time: GSM/GPRS: Up to 285hrs
Talk time UMTS: Up to 3.5 hours
Standby time: UMTS: Up to 360 hrs
The X10 mini pro will be available in selected markets from Q2 in Black and Red.
It’s the first Samsung device to run Android OS 2.1. and the first Samsung device in South Korea. Kind of a big deal when they’re supposed to do a lot with this whole Bada thing. Called the SHW-M100S, the new device will arrive in March on SK Telecom. This means I can head over to the random SK Telecom store I found in Little Korea and maybe be able to get my hands on it.
Some early features/specs listed:
Android 2.1 with TouchWIZ UI
800MHz processor
3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen (WVGA),
5 megapixel camera with 720p video capture
802.11n
Full GPS
T-DMB mobile broadcast TV
Today, Android SDK Tech lead Xavier Ducrohet announced Android 2.0 support in the SDK, which unveils some of the big capabilities in the latest version of Android, expected to hit the market soon on at least one of Verizon’s upcoming “Droid” devices. In the developer video posted today, for instance, all the new features were shown off on a device connected to the Verizon network, and the release notes say it will be deployable in November.
The keyword with Eclair is interoperability.
Motorola recently launched its custom Android build with a UI called MotoBLUR, the central function of which is the ability to integrate with a user’s many social web services from a single interface. The new APIs included in Eclair give this communicative function to all developers. So with the new Account Manager API, developers can centrally store account credentials on the device, the Contacts application can now sync and aggregate contact data from multiple accounts, and the Sync Adaptors API provides full two-way contact sync with ANY backend.
To provide a single, unified face for this data, the Quick Contact function has been added. By clicking on a contact’s picture, a user can pull up a menu of all the different ways to reach that contact…Gmail, Email, IM, Phone, and the various Social networks. It’s like the existent “live folder” concept for contacts, but brought together under the standard contact list, or in any app the developer chooses.
Android 2.0 also updates the Bluetooth API so apps can now access Bluetooth controls to discover, connect and share information with nearby devices, which unlocks the ability to make peer-to-peer and proximity-based applications.
The built-in Android browser has been updated with a refreshed UI with an actionable address bar, bookmarks sorted by thumbnail, double-tap zoom command, and HTML5 support, which opens up Application cache, client-side SQL databases, geolocation API support, and fullscreen video tag support.
The camera app has again been tweaked, but this time it includes digital zoom (with macro mode), built-in color effects (posterize, solarize, etc) and built-in flash support.
It even adds Exchange Support and includes Multi-touch support for the soft keyboard.
Throw this out there with the upcoming availability of Verizon Droids, the Sony Racheal, and whatever else is coming out, and we’ve got a really huge quarter for Android. I’m gonna start doing video blogs soon, it just takes a bit longer to write and record them.
The problem of widget disorganization in Android has been approaching for some time. Now that many of the most popular apps come with widgets, I’m really beginning to feel the clutter on my homescreen. With today’s release of the official Pandora app and yesterday’s release of the official Facebook app, I now have two more medium/large widgets to deal with, and some reorganization to consider.
Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska
I’ve reached the point where things have gotten ugly. With traditional icon-based apps, I can at least do a cohesive theme where everything is the same size and color and it matches the background. With non-themed widgets, though…I’m kind of at the mercy of the app’s designer.
Fortunately, I can add up to 7 more homescreens with Open Home, but anyone who’s dealt with a pack-rat will tell you that giving a hoarder more space doesn’t solve any problems, it just makes them harder to tackle.
I wouldn’t call myself a “widget hoarder,” but let’s see. In my “Add to Home Screen > Widgets” folder, I currently have: Analog Clock, Calendar, Facebook, Music, Open Home Big Analog Clock, Open Home Music, Open Home Setting Widget, Open Home Weather, Pandora, Picture Frame, Search, Tiny Clock Widget 2, Twidget Lite, Voice Text, Voicemail+ Large/Small, Weather Large/Small/Tiny, Weather Channel WxWidget Large/Small.
Do I really need SIX different weather widgets and three clocks? Not really, but you sometimes need to compare to get the best looking widgets that also provide the best results, plus it’s really only three in multiple sizes. The WxWidget actually isn’t my cup of tea, though it’s a super popular and handy app with more in-depth updates and alerts, but the Weather Widget by Lock2 is 100% better looking and gets the job done (I believe it’s designed after HTC Sense’s weather widget). It’s free too, but I highly advise floating a donation their way if you’ve got some change to spare.
Before I can even begin to think about organizing anything, I have to have a deep philosophical “chicken or egg” discussion with myself: Do services gain homescreen position because I use them more, or do I use them more because they’re on my homescreen? My homescreen is usually a bit of both. I use the weather widget a lot mostly because it’s there, not because I always care about the weather. Shazam is an app icon I feel like I always need on my homescreen, but I don’t use it nearly as much as, say, the Google Search bar, which I have relegated to a secondary screen. But really, I’ve started to feel like I don’t need app shortcuts any more with the way things are going. Everything I use pretty much resides in the “side drawer.”
It’s times like this that I wish there was a Widget “snap to” program, or a position randomizer, where I could just hit a button and have the widgets fit to a grid on my screen and I could decide if I liked it or not.
New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite
Because I prefer an uncluttered layout, I’ve switched to a five-screen layout where each screen serves a different purpose. The main screen has weather and calendar, the “music screen” has the Mp3 player and Pandora, the “feed screen” has Twitter and Facebook, the “utility screen” which right now only has the settings widget, and the “Google screen” only has the search widget right now, but anticipates the arrival of new homescreen toys from Google.
It’ll get the job done for now, but more widgets=more processes which ultimately means slowness. It’s running acceptably now, but we’ll see how things get bogged down in the real world. This is something we need to think about as Android users, since the elegant use of widgets is helping to make Android both stand out above icon-based smartphone interfaces, and run more efficiently for the user.
MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen told The Street yesterday that AT&T ditched its plans to carry a Motorola Android phone, referring to the HTC Heron which Motorola originally designed to be a Windows Mobile phone, and then reportedly retracted at the last minute to load up with Android instead.
A lot of pundits have put a lot of weight behind Motorola’s first two Android handsets, saying that this is the company’s “last chance” to recover its phone-producing arm, or some sort of swan song because of the spin-off that was supposed to take place in the third quarter of 2009.
Last October, Co-CEO Sanjay Jha said “While our strategic intent to separate the company remains intact, we are no longer targeting the third quarter of 2009, primarily due to the macro-economic environment, stresses in the financial markets and the changes underway in Mobile Devices.”
Not having support from AT&T is a big detriment, some say, as it’s the only carrier consistently stealing subscribers away from other carriers.
But wait, AT&T didn’t just cock-block Motorola. It’s actually given the big thumbs down to TWO companies offering an Android device. Apparently it pitched HTC’s Lancaster into the dumpster this summer as well, only that time, we don’t know exactly why. Rumors were that it could have been too underpowered or perhaps even too problematic for a successful launch.
Because AT&T is the exclusive iPhone carrier, people often forget that it offers any other smartphones. Maybe they don’t consider any other products noteworthy, I don’t know. But the point is, AT&T’s selection of smartphones is led by Windows Mobile. Check this out:
AT&T's smartphone roster by OS
If you look at these stats as a direct reflection of the U.S. smartphone market as a whole, you’ll notice right away that the OS distribution is kind of out of whack. Yes, AT&T has 70 million subscribers, and that’s an important factor in the availability of an OS…but how much does it really determine market position?
I mean, does Windows Mobile have the lion’s share of the domestic smartphone market because it is the most common OS in AT&T’s smartphones? Of course not: Blackberry does, then iPhone, THEN Windows Mobile.
Let’s assume that on September 10th, T-Mobile and Verizon get Motorola Android phones, and lets see how their charts look.
Here are our friends over at T-Mobile. We know those zany Germans love Android (they got the Samsung Galaxy before anyone else, after all.) However, we see that Android happens to be T-Mobile’s ONLY smartphone OS that isn’t Windows Mobile or Blackberry. It’s probably because they’re too busy gunking up their phone lineup with those silly Sidekicks.
T-Mobile's smartphone OS distribution
And here’s Verizon. As you can see, they’re the most balanced/least diverse smartphone carrier in our list thus far.
Verizon's Smartphones if they get Motorola Sholes
AT&T already offers the most diverse selection of Smartphones, at least by operating system…so maybe it’s not trying to thin the proverbial broth by adding any old mediocre Android device to the pool.
Now, you’re probably going to say “Hold up a second, fancy pants! Where’s the Palm Centro in all this?”
I know right? Check Sprint, they’re the only carrier still offering Palm’s (awesome) gear as of this very moment. While we’re looking at them, you’ll notice that Sprint’s got quite a diverse OS lineup…but that diversity is mostly due to Palm’s multi-platform delivery.
No Android here...yet.
So yes…my point. The carriers we expect to have Android on them also happen to be the ones with the least diverse smartphone selection.
I know there’s only a correlative link between number of OSes and likelihood of new OS adoption (and not a causal one,) so don’t bite my face off for pointing it out.
