Hey, there is Android pillow available! http://www.androidcentral.com/android-pillow-your-android-dreams
With things like that coming, that OS can't die
With things like that coming, that OS can't die
Google Android
- Thread starter westmeadboy
- Start date
I see your pillow and raise you a set of refrigerator magnets.
I have wanted to buy your software for ages, but have not had a compatible device for it. Now, I am in the market for a new device, but I will not buy an Iphone or a Palm. I will consider whatever windows comes up with for an Iphone competitor, if it comes soon, but otherwise I am buying an Android phone and will make do with what is out there for that.
Regarding the future of Android, I think this news was a pretty strong statement about what the future of Android development will be:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000 ... icksArea.0
Tim Bray--co-inventor of XML, notable tech blogger, and until recently a Sun Microsystems employee--has joined Google's Android team in part to show the world what he thinks is wrong with Apple's iPhone.
...
Specifically, he likes Android's developer-friendliness, its full suite of interfaces, its open-source nature, its strong Google backing, its open market--and its competition to the iPhone. Bray offers the following tirade against Apple's ways:
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.
Regarding the future of Android, I think this news was a pretty strong statement about what the future of Android development will be:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000 ... icksArea.0
Tim Bray--co-inventor of XML, notable tech blogger, and until recently a Sun Microsystems employee--has joined Google's Android team in part to show the world what he thinks is wrong with Apple's iPhone.
...
Specifically, he likes Android's developer-friendliness, its full suite of interfaces, its open-source nature, its strong Google backing, its open market--and its competition to the iPhone. Bray offers the following tirade against Apple's ways:
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.
I saw that, but my whole point is that Google isn't really in control here - they may not like the idea of carriers / manufacturers locking down Android, but there isn't any way they can legally stop them, and at the moment they don't even seem to want to try. From my perspective, the only real advantage Android has over iPhone is that developers can distribute apps independently - if that's going away then Android's just a harder-to-program-for iPhone, with its "openness" acting as a liability compatibility-wise without being an asset distribution-wise.
Android Market's slightly laxer approval policies don't really help - we've never had an app rejected by Apple, and it's extremely unlikely that even Google would let us distribute a free app, process add-on orders exclusively through our own system and pay our credit card company 3% instead of paying Google 30%, which is about the only thing they could theoretically let us do that Apple doesn't.
So as I said, the burden is on Google to prove themselves here - if they can somehow get Motorola and the other manufacturers / carriers in line (via threats / money / cool-new-free-Google-apps-only-for-phones-that-follow-their-rules / whatever) and avoid letting anyone else ship an Android phone that doesn't allow users to install unapproved apps, that'll go a long way towards winning me over to the idea of an Android version, but if Android continues degenerating into a locked-down and fragmented mess then I doubt anyone will even be talking about it in 5 years.
Android Market's slightly laxer approval policies don't really help - we've never had an app rejected by Apple, and it's extremely unlikely that even Google would let us distribute a free app, process add-on orders exclusively through our own system and pay our credit card company 3% instead of paying Google 30%, which is about the only thing they could theoretically let us do that Apple doesn't.
So as I said, the burden is on Google to prove themselves here - if they can somehow get Motorola and the other manufacturers / carriers in line (via threats / money / cool-new-free-Google-apps-only-for-phones-that-follow-their-rules / whatever) and avoid letting anyone else ship an Android phone that doesn't allow users to install unapproved apps, that'll go a long way towards winning me over to the idea of an Android version, but if Android continues degenerating into a locked-down and fragmented mess then I doubt anyone will even be talking about it in 5 years.
character
状元
It looks like Google is serious/desperate about getting current Android HW/SW into developers hands. I got a message indicating I'll probably be getting a Droid for 'free' because I signed up for an O'Reilly Android dev course. This is after they sent phones to developers with apps in the Market which met certain criteria, and frequent Android forum posters. (This may also address the probable issue of the G1 not being updated to 2.x, making it hard for some devs to test on later OS versions outside the simulator.)
westmeadboy
榜眼
Yeah, a lot of early adopters are still developing on their G1s and Google wants to make sure that the serious devs have the latest hardware/software to make sure their stuff runs well (and looks good) on the latest devices. Also it tempts devs to use new features not available in the early SDKs.
In other news...
Google, Intel and Sony link up to support Android apps through televisions and set-top boxes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/techn ... webtv.html
That's pretty cool, if you ask me
<wonders if Mike will use the f-word!>
In other news...
Google, Intel and Sony link up to support Android apps through televisions and set-top boxes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/techn ... webtv.html
That's pretty cool, if you ask me
<wonders if Mike will use the f-word!>
character - interesting; seems like one of their strategies for dealing with fragmentation is to wow developers with how cool the newest OSes are in the hopes that they'll maybe target their software to those. (more 2.0-only software -> more users pressing manufacturers to update their phones to 2.0 / refusing to buy new phones running 1.6) Though I'm not sure if that's really the best approach; it sounds gutsy on the face of it, but throwing money at the problem doesn't address the underlying issue of Android customization being out out of their control.
If I were Google, I'd switch to a hybrid open / closed licensing model; keep the Android "core" fully open-source, but make a lot of the higher-level stuff (including whatever nifty new UI they cook up for Android 3.0) a bit more restricted; maybe even still keep the source code for it open, but require a license to make commercial products based on the non-"core" stuff. And along with that, roll out a new, consistent, well-marketed brand (not just "Google") for Android that specifically described that licensed version. The license fee could be tiny - $0.01 per device would be fine, or even just a flat annual fee - but the important thing would be that Google would now have the power to require that every Android phone (or at least every state-of-the-art / capable-of-competing-with-iPhone-4.0 one) follow a certain specific set of rules, including support for un-approved apps (or at least for Android Market) and certain modest requirements about hardware (limited number of screen sizes, say) / available libraries / other compatibility-related stuff. The current "Google" trademark license for some Android phones doesn't really help, since there's no benefit feature-wise AFAIK to a "Google" versus a non-"Google" Android phone and consumers know they can get Google applications on other phones too.
This change would no doubt cause widespread outrage among the same people who bash Apple for its lack of openness now, but it's unlikely at this point that it would be enough to drive people to a different OS (maybe an "OpenDroid" fork would spring up but it would only be lightly used), and it would do a very effective job at keeping fragmentation from getting out of hand.
westmeadboy - interesting... Android is replacing Windows CE in a lot of markets like this, I think. Set-top boxes aren't exactly a relevant one for Pleco (though I guess we could come up with some nifty handwriting recognizer thing involving a Wii-like motion-sensor-equipped remote control ), but having seen the source code for both Windows CE and Android even I will admit that Android is the less terrible of the two, so now that it's matured a bit it makes sense that manufacturers would start using it.
If I were Google, I'd switch to a hybrid open / closed licensing model; keep the Android "core" fully open-source, but make a lot of the higher-level stuff (including whatever nifty new UI they cook up for Android 3.0) a bit more restricted; maybe even still keep the source code for it open, but require a license to make commercial products based on the non-"core" stuff. And along with that, roll out a new, consistent, well-marketed brand (not just "Google") for Android that specifically described that licensed version. The license fee could be tiny - $0.01 per device would be fine, or even just a flat annual fee - but the important thing would be that Google would now have the power to require that every Android phone (or at least every state-of-the-art / capable-of-competing-with-iPhone-4.0 one) follow a certain specific set of rules, including support for un-approved apps (or at least for Android Market) and certain modest requirements about hardware (limited number of screen sizes, say) / available libraries / other compatibility-related stuff. The current "Google" trademark license for some Android phones doesn't really help, since there's no benefit feature-wise AFAIK to a "Google" versus a non-"Google" Android phone and consumers know they can get Google applications on other phones too.
This change would no doubt cause widespread outrage among the same people who bash Apple for its lack of openness now, but it's unlikely at this point that it would be enough to drive people to a different OS (maybe an "OpenDroid" fork would spring up but it would only be lightly used), and it would do a very effective job at keeping fragmentation from getting out of hand.
westmeadboy - interesting... Android is replacing Windows CE in a lot of markets like this, I think. Set-top boxes aren't exactly a relevant one for Pleco (though I guess we could come up with some nifty handwriting recognizer thing involving a Wii-like motion-sensor-equipped remote control
), but having seen the source code for both Windows CE and Android even I will admit that Android is the less terrible of the two, so now that it's matured a bit it makes sense that manufacturers would start using it.westmeadboy
榜眼
Here's an interesting article related to the recent Apple patent lawsuit against HTC:
http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/ ... sts-steal/
http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/ ... sts-steal/
character
状元
Beyond seeding phones to developers, the other prong of the defragmentation :wink: strategy seems to be updating all but the oldest phones to 2.1: Sprint Moment and Hero to get Android 2.1 in “the coming weeks”
But Google has already released its own phones. Given the repeated statements that people will buy specific phone hardware to run Pleco, I'm not sure vendors customizing other Android phones should be a deal breaker.mikelove said:
I prefer the Wintel model of setting 2-3 levels (i.e. "Designed for Windows XP," "Vista Ready," etc.) and providing advertising support (which is a perfect fit for Google) as an incentive for manufacturers to make phones which meet those standards (the kinds of things you note above). Then the Market can transparently limit apps to only those phones which meet the right level.
This was discussed at a local Android meetup -- with Android you can get an embedded computer/touchscreen controller package with no license fees, something a former embedded engineer said they would have killed for. Here's an old article MIPS Ports Android, Shows Embedded Gadgets
westmeadboy
榜眼
Here's a demonstration of how apps can interoperate in Android:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkff8g-KtE4#t=03m32s
Note - the browser doesn't know anything about Wikitude etc, its just that Wikitude has registered itself with the system as being able to handle a certain action. So, if the user installs a new dictionary, then that should appear in the list of apps to search using.
So, you could be in a browser, select some chinese word you want to look up and then directly bring up your dictionary app. No need for any javascript hacks etc. No need to copy to the clipboard, back out of app1, bring up the dictionary app, paste in the clipboard contents, back out of dictionary app, bring up app1 again, return to place within app1 (if that was not automatically restored)
Now, admittedly, this particular implementation is something in HTC Sense UI, not the core SDK but before anyone mentions the f-word, its not like anything will break if someone is using a non-Sense device.
To support this all the developer has to do is put one line in the app manifest file which essentially says "I can handle action X". Action X is not something Sense-specific (AFAICT) so when the SDK does eventually support this particular copy-paste feature, the existing apps will be supported without need for any update.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkff8g-KtE4#t=03m32s
Note - the browser doesn't know anything about Wikitude etc, its just that Wikitude has registered itself with the system as being able to handle a certain action. So, if the user installs a new dictionary, then that should appear in the list of apps to search using.
So, you could be in a browser, select some chinese word you want to look up and then directly bring up your dictionary app. No need for any javascript hacks etc. No need to copy to the clipboard, back out of app1, bring up the dictionary app, paste in the clipboard contents, back out of dictionary app, bring up app1 again, return to place within app1 (if that was not automatically restored)
Now, admittedly, this particular implementation is something in HTC Sense UI, not the core SDK but before anyone mentions the f-word, its not like anything will break if someone is using a non-Sense device.
To support this all the developer has to do is put one line in the app manifest file which essentially says "I can handle action X". Action X is not something Sense-specific (AFAICT) so when the SDK does eventually support this particular copy-paste feature, the existing apps will be supported without need for any update.
character - they might be upgrading some devices to 2.1, but other manufacturers are still coming out with brand new devices running 1.6.
And if people are willing to buy specific phone hardware to run Pleco, how much more of a burden is it to tell them to buy an iPhone / iPod than is to tell them to pick something from a short list of fully-Pleco-compatible Android phones, many of which may have different names / not be widely available in their particular market? The whole reason for supporting more than one platform with Pleco is to let people use it on their existing phone / a phone they really like, so supporting only a subset of Android phones kind of defeats the purpose of supporting Android.
I might also add that something like half of the customers for our iPhone software actually use it on iPod Touches - those are absolutely ideal for dedicated Pleco device purposes, they cost as little as US$200, are available basically everywhere, and are easy to identify: there's no "Does my Sandisk E3400(b) 2010 Fiesta Edition 16GB run Pleco" email involved, if it's an iPod with a touchscreen then it's Pleco-compatible. And they're something a lot of even Android users are likely to find handy beyond Pleco - one thing Android definitely doesn't do as well as Apple yet is music sync, particularly not for people who have 5+ years of iTunes purchases (many of which are old enough to not be DRM-free) in their collection, so I suspect a lot of people even with Android phones are also carrying around separate devices to play music on, or would be willing to get one to act as a better / easier-to-sync music player than their cell phone if they also get the added bonus of being able to run Pleco. There may be a few Android music players, but none that are comparable to an iPod availability- or compatibility-wise.
westmeadboy - actually my first thought on watching that video was "wow, they really ripped off Apple's text-selection system" - I still think software patents are bogus (and software patent lawsuits equally so), but that seems like more of an exact copy than it needs to be.
Anyway, it's a neat feature, but with "Live Mode" we can actually offer considerably better Chinese lookups within a web browser embedded in Pleco than we could with an Instant Access type system like that. (Live Mode is really going to come into its own on iPad - gobs of RAM + fast processor + big screen = ultimate Chinese web-browsing machine) So even in a hypothetical Android version of Pleco, I think more people would want to look up text in browser sessions within Pleco than in a separate web browser app.
And sure, this might not break things on other devices, but some devices won't support it, so we have users getting upset that that cool system they saw for looking up words on their friend's phone doesn't work the same way on theirs. Plus we have to worry about Motorola using, say, a different name for the same action, or some particular cell carrier deciding that inter-app data transfer is a security risk / allows one to circumvent the DRM in the crappy e-reader application they're getting paid a bunch of money to preload / etc and turning it off in their version of an HTC phone on which it works just fine in a different carrier's version. (both HTC and Motorola have shown a very high propensity for sucking up to cell carriers)
And we could easily see a feature like this in iPhone OS 4.0 this summer - iPhone OS already allows you to register custom URL protocol handlers in your application info plist, we use that for product registration in fact (users can tap on a plecoregister:// link in an email to register).
And if people are willing to buy specific phone hardware to run Pleco, how much more of a burden is it to tell them to buy an iPhone / iPod than is to tell them to pick something from a short list of fully-Pleco-compatible Android phones, many of which may have different names / not be widely available in their particular market? The whole reason for supporting more than one platform with Pleco is to let people use it on their existing phone / a phone they really like, so supporting only a subset of Android phones kind of defeats the purpose of supporting Android.
I might also add that something like half of the customers for our iPhone software actually use it on iPod Touches - those are absolutely ideal for dedicated Pleco device purposes, they cost as little as US$200, are available basically everywhere, and are easy to identify: there's no "Does my Sandisk E3400(b) 2010 Fiesta Edition 16GB run Pleco" email involved, if it's an iPod with a touchscreen then it's Pleco-compatible. And they're something a lot of even Android users are likely to find handy beyond Pleco - one thing Android definitely doesn't do as well as Apple yet is music sync, particularly not for people who have 5+ years of iTunes purchases (many of which are old enough to not be DRM-free) in their collection, so I suspect a lot of people even with Android phones are also carrying around separate devices to play music on, or would be willing to get one to act as a better / easier-to-sync music player than their cell phone if they also get the added bonus of being able to run Pleco. There may be a few Android music players, but none that are comparable to an iPod availability- or compatibility-wise.
westmeadboy - actually my first thought on watching that video was "wow, they really ripped off Apple's text-selection system" - I still think software patents are bogus (and software patent lawsuits equally so), but that seems like more of an exact copy than it needs to be.
Anyway, it's a neat feature, but with "Live Mode" we can actually offer considerably better Chinese lookups within a web browser embedded in Pleco than we could with an Instant Access type system like that. (Live Mode is really going to come into its own on iPad - gobs of RAM + fast processor + big screen = ultimate Chinese web-browsing machine) So even in a hypothetical Android version of Pleco, I think more people would want to look up text in browser sessions within Pleco than in a separate web browser app.
And sure, this might not break things on other devices, but some devices won't support it, so we have users getting upset that that cool system they saw for looking up words on their friend's phone doesn't work the same way on theirs. Plus we have to worry about Motorola using, say, a different name for the same action, or some particular cell carrier deciding that inter-app data transfer is a security risk / allows one to circumvent the DRM in the crappy e-reader application they're getting paid a bunch of money to preload / etc and turning it off in their version of an HTC phone on which it works just fine in a different carrier's version. (both HTC and Motorola have shown a very high propensity for sucking up to cell carriers)
And we could easily see a feature like this in iPhone OS 4.0 this summer - iPhone OS already allows you to register custom URL protocol handlers in your application info plist, we use that for product registration in fact (users can tap on a plecoregister:// link in an email to register).
westmeadboy
榜眼
Agreed its a bit of a rip off but the power is not in the magnifying glass or the way text is selected but how you can then send that text to a variety of apps (those that are registered to support such actions). This kind of interoperability has been there in Android since day 1, so all apps and all devices support it. Even if this is introduced in iPhone 4.0, apps and devices will still need to be updated. Meanwhile you will still have a bunch of users complaining about why its not available on their Pleco.
I have to say I completely disagree that users prefer to use the browser within Pleco. Well, users in general at least. When I'm in an email, sms, web site, or indeed any third party app, and I find a chinese word I don't know then I want to look it up as easily as possible. I think the video demonstrates a very effective way to do that. Having the browser within the Pleco seems completely back-to-front IMHO. How do you manage it? I mean, say I'm in a browser and I want to look up a few words... do I then copy the url, back out of browser, bring up Pleco, go to in-app browser section, paste url, find where I was on the page, select text etc?
I have to say I completely disagree that users prefer to use the browser within Pleco. Well, users in general at least. When I'm in an email, sms, web site, or indeed any third party app, and I find a chinese word I don't know then I want to look it up as easily as possible. I think the video demonstrates a very effective way to do that. Having the browser within the Pleco seems completely back-to-front IMHO. How do you manage it? I mean, say I'm in a browser and I want to look up a few words... do I then copy the url, back out of browser, bring up Pleco, go to in-app browser section, paste url, find where I was on the page, select text etc?
Well yes, but it's better to have a feature only available with a software update than to have a feature completely unavailable on a particular phone. And to have that feature implemented in a nice consistent way, so that instead of spending our time debugging it on half a dozen different phones / researching and documenting which phones support it and which phones don't / etc, we can spend our time refining it to make it work better on every iPhone / iPod.
And looking up words in Chinese documents with text selection is only practical if your need to look up words is relatively infrequent; for people who only have to look up a word every paragraph or so, it can make sense, but the vast majority of our users aren't at that level yet, and for them Chinese web browsing already represents a "mode change" - switching into Pleco to do their Chinese-language web browsing isn't a big hassle, and the benefit (being able to look up words right on the page just by tapping on them, and move to the next / previous word with a single button tap) is pretty significant. It's a fully functional web browser, supports bookmarks / back / forward just like the built-in iPhone one, so you just load that up and you can continue on your merry Chinese-reading way without having to switch back and forth between applications.
And looking up words in Chinese documents with text selection is only practical if your need to look up words is relatively infrequent; for people who only have to look up a word every paragraph or so, it can make sense, but the vast majority of our users aren't at that level yet, and for them Chinese web browsing already represents a "mode change" - switching into Pleco to do their Chinese-language web browsing isn't a big hassle, and the benefit (being able to look up words right on the page just by tapping on them, and move to the next / previous word with a single button tap) is pretty significant. It's a fully functional web browser, supports bookmarks / back / forward just like the built-in iPhone one, so you just load that up and you can continue on your merry Chinese-reading way without having to switch back and forth between applications.
Title of that one's a bit misleading - it's clear from the article text that it's not "switching to" but "also developing for" Android.
Still, it's not surprising when you consider that the bulk of iPhone applications are either a) really simple or b) games. The former are straightforward enough to port that if you've already got the concept / design / brand in place you're already something like 80% of the way to a successful Android app, and with most games, the bulk of the development cost is spent on design / graphics / media assets rather than on programming, so again, once you've got that in place you're 80% of the way to Android. In neither case do you need to / expect to be particularly concerned about how successful / how fragmented Android is a year from now, because you're (hopefully) going to recoup your costs a few weeks in.
Pleco is probably already in the 95th percentile of iPhone apps programming-complexity-wise, and once we've got flashcards out we'll be pushing closer to the 99th - the costs for us to support Android are huge, and the timeframe long enough that we can really only recoup our development / licensing costs (not to mention the opportunity cost of the dozens of major, fantastic new features we wouldn't be adding to our iPhone app because of Android work) if Android sticks around and remains un-fragmented / backwards-compatible-with-minor-modifications for at least the next 3 years or so. Which is not something I'd bet on at this point, particularly not with Google's withdrawal from China now appearing certain.
Still, it's not surprising when you consider that the bulk of iPhone applications are either a) really simple or b) games. The former are straightforward enough to port that if you've already got the concept / design / brand in place you're already something like 80% of the way to a successful Android app, and with most games, the bulk of the development cost is spent on design / graphics / media assets rather than on programming, so again, once you've got that in place you're 80% of the way to Android. In neither case do you need to / expect to be particularly concerned about how successful / how fragmented Android is a year from now, because you're (hopefully) going to recoup your costs a few weeks in.
Pleco is probably already in the 95th percentile of iPhone apps programming-complexity-wise, and once we've got flashcards out we'll be pushing closer to the 99th - the costs for us to support Android are huge, and the timeframe long enough that we can really only recoup our development / licensing costs (not to mention the opportunity cost of the dozens of major, fantastic new features we wouldn't be adding to our iPhone app because of Android work) if Android sticks around and remains un-fragmented / backwards-compatible-with-minor-modifications for at least the next 3 years or so. Which is not something I'd bet on at this point, particularly not with Google's withdrawal from China now appearing certain.
westmeadboy
榜眼
There is a big difference between Google and Android when it comes to China.
I think its actually a great thing for Android (in China) that Google is pulling away. The situation last year with Google-branded Android devices where the Google services where not always available was damaging the image of Android.
Android is a lot more than the Google Apps! With Google moving away, Android becomes even more attractive to carriers and device manufacturers in China.
You see this a lot in the news. With Google pulling away, instead of Chinese carriers backing away from Android, they are still going ahead but, understandably, pulling away from including Google Apps on their devices. For example, wasn't it China Unicom who were talking about using Bing? I remember, watching an interview 2 years ago of Eric Schmidt (I think) saying that if, say, someone wants to put Yahoo! search on an Android device, then that's great too. I'd love to hear Steve Jobs say something like that!
Now, if Apple pulled out of China and the AppStore was blocked, that would pretty much kill the iPhone in that region (because of its closed nature).
I think its actually a great thing for Android (in China) that Google is pulling away. The situation last year with Google-branded Android devices where the Google services where not always available was damaging the image of Android.
Android is a lot more than the Google Apps! With Google moving away, Android becomes even more attractive to carriers and device manufacturers in China.
You see this a lot in the news. With Google pulling away, instead of Chinese carriers backing away from Android, they are still going ahead but, understandably, pulling away from including Google Apps on their devices. For example, wasn't it China Unicom who were talking about using Bing? I remember, watching an interview 2 years ago of Eric Schmidt (I think) saying that if, say, someone wants to put Yahoo! search on an Android device, then that's great too. I'd love to hear Steve Jobs say something like that!
Now, if Apple pulled out of China and the AppStore was blocked, that would pretty much kill the iPhone in that region (because of its closed nature).
radioman
状元
@ mfcb... Check out a VPN like Strongvpn.com - It can be used on your iphone / desktop / laptop computer. 6 or 7 dollars a month frees you from the Great Firewall of China (or your company's firewall, or just about any other firewall). This particular VPN has 24 hour customer service, as well as the feature allowing you to pause your account.
However, if you are relying on internet cafe's for your access, this won't be an option. But for your iPhone or laptop, both can be configured and tested before even going to China.
However, if you are relying on internet cafe's for your access, this won't be an option. But for your iPhone or laptop, both can be configured and tested before even going to China.
mfcb said: