pufftissue said:
Fully open and fully closed have their pluses and minuses. I hope that both sides move towards the middle ground. Google seems to be realizing that the wild wild west nature of Android is starting to hurt itself, so they're becoming more "Apple-like" and closing things off. Of course, if they keep doing that, why not just stay with Apple?
That's my concern; the lack of Honeycomb source code is a very very bad thing (makes our life considerably harder in terms of bug fixing / subclassing / making our custom UI act like Google's / etc) and has me worrying that Google may consider deviating from other long-held principles too... banning other app stores, for example. I'm all for reining in fragmentation, but they can't really do that without reining in hardware variation / standardizing drivers and OS updates (unlikely since it would mean little left for manufacturers to use to differentiate themselves) - withholding source code is doing the Android community a lot of harm for the sake of reining in a few fringe OEMs who wouldn't have moved very many units of their putative Honeycomb-based phones anyway.
pufftissue said:
I am interested in Android because of the pre-paid market. I was very impressed with a test drive of and the value proposition of the LG Optimus, which isn't an iphone 4. But at $25 a month with data included, is all that I'd need.
I really do expect Apple do something about that soon... mentioned here before that I thought something with the internals of an iPhone 4 in the cheaper 3G/3GS case might be in the offing, if they can sell an 8 GB iPod Touch with that stuff for $230 it stands to reason they could sell something similar for $350 with a 3G chipset and a bigger battery.
pufftissue said:
I'm hoping that the Android version of flashcards will follow soon after the dictionary beta.
That one there's some debate about... we really really want to give the flashcard system a thorough redesign before porting it over to Android, but we gave into pressure to release a port of quickly on iOS (we're still not happy with it) and may be forced to do so on Android as well if the beta proves popular. It wouldn't have as pretty a UI as the iOS one, though, and we might drop a few particularly programing-intensive features at first (certain test modes, e.g.) if it let us get it out the door faster.
Zeldor said:
It looks like Google is starting a war to stop fragmentation, at least with Honeycomb. One interesting article here:
http://www.mips.com/blog/?p=46
I didn't know that MIPS was trying to get into the Android game, but an emphatic NO on that front - we are absolutely NOT going to re-license our handwriting / OCR libraries for a new processor architecture, re-optimize everything around that, include two NDK libraries, etc... I can guarantee right now that a MIPS-based Android device will not be able to run Pleco at any time in the foreseeable future, at least not without some sort of wacky ARM-emulation technology that's unlikely do make much sense on a power-limited mobile device. And given the push towards native development for Android games etc, I doubt other developers are going to be eager to support another architecture either... nor will manufacturers be eager to use it, since it won't be able to run any current NDK-based apps. So that particular fragmentation issue hopefully won't be rearing its ugly head anytime soon...
Zeldor said:
As for beta - are you planning to make some scripted tests? Something that everyone could launch and submit results later? Like loading times, search times, and dunno what else [some screenshots to compare by users and see if all is displayed properly could work too]. You could make then a list of devices that 'should' support Pleco, based on that.
No plans for anything as rigorous as that - I think we'd rather go with subjective impressions.
