Google Android

gato said:
Galaxy Tab is not selling as well as previously reported.
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That one never made sense... very little support from carriers, and all of the early adopters knew that 3.0 was right around the corner. But ultimately I'd say it's a good thing for the Android tablet market since it lets everybody focus their development efforts on 3.0.
 
westmeadboy said:
Here's an interesting comment about Google hiring devs with app ideas:
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Agree with some of his points, but I don't think his idea about optional review tags will help much - I don't think low app quality is really the main reason people aren't buying Android apps, there are plenty of terrible apps on iOS too; sporadic rejections notwithstanding, Apple is for the most part pretty laid-back about badly-designed apps as long as they don't actually violate any rules.

App success on iOS has always had more to do with PR and advertising than anything else - to create iOS-level sales for developers, Google needs to help Android apps look as pretty and work as consistently as iOS ones do so that people will feel like they're worth paying for.

westmeadboy said:
Mike - Is this a worry for Pleco on iOS?
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I don't think so - first off I'm not sure if this is accurate (it may be that Sony was selling books using their service in their app, which has never been allowed for Amazon or Pleco or anyone else), but even if it is, we sell everything with In-App Purchases anyway. I can't imagine Apple would make us cut off access to previous purchases for people who already had them running quite happily in Pleco - if they did, though, there are a number of ways we could work around that.
 
There's been a correction on the Samsung earnings call. "Quite small" has been changed to "quite smooth". Interesting.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/31/ ... ite-small/
Corrections & Amplifications
Samsung executive Lee Young-hee said Galaxy Tab sales were “quite smooth,” according to a recording of the company’s conference call with analysts. This post relied on a transcript of the call, which quoted her erroneously as saying they were “quite small.” Samsung said the transcript, done by a third party and initially cited by a company spokesman, has since been corrected.
 
westmeadboy said:
Interesting comments here regarding Nokia, WM7, Android and some iOS:
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This seems very doubtful to me - Nokia's core business isn't shiny smartphones for EU businessmen, it's durable low-cost phones for people in developing countries. Nokia wants a smartphone OS that in a year or two it can stick in a $50 device and sell to Vietnamese peasants and Brazilian truck drivers - the holy grail for them is getting all of those people to upgrade to smartphones. So it has to be cheap and scalable to low-cost hardware, while WP7 has hefty per-device license fees and demands big gorgeous screens and fast processors.
 
mikelove said:
westmeadboy said:
Interesting comments here regarding Nokia, WM7, Android and some iOS:
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This seems very doubtful to me - Nokia's core business isn't shiny smartphones for EU businessmen, it's durable low-cost phones for people in developing countries. Nokia wants a smartphone OS that in a year or two it can stick in a $50 device and sell to Vietnamese peasants and Brazilian truck drivers - the holy grail for them is getting all of those people to upgrade to smartphones. So it has to be cheap and scalable to low-cost hardware, while WP7 has hefty per-device license fees and demands big gorgeous screens and fast processors.
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Yes, I agree. I was actually referring to the comments...
 
westmeadboy said:
Yes, I agree. I was actually referring to the comments...
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Ah, sorry, thought you meant the comments in the post - I don't usually read Engadget comments (other than for posts relating to Pleco :) ) since there tends to be a lot of tedious Apple-bashing any time the subject of iOS comes up, but there are a few interesting ones for this post.
 
I assume you will offer generous license transfer possibilities from Itunes to Android as you usually do?

Would make me use the Iphone until you tell me which phone to buy :)
 
I may be getting one of the superphones soon - probably LG Optimux 2X with Tegra2 [I'd be tempted to get Motorola Atrix if I had just a PC, not notebook]. So I will happily test Pleco on it. I should be able to make some testing on my father's HTC Wildfire too.

I will be getting into Android app making business probably soon too - it's big enough now already. I wonder if there are any good ways to make Android maps that would be easy to remake for iOS or other apps [well, Symbian, MeeGo, WM& later].
 
sofamensch said:
I assume you will offer generous license transfer possibilities from Itunes to Android as you usually do?

Would make me use the Iphone until you tell me which phone to buy
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Probably, but we're not promising anything until the product is finished. And the iPhone version is probably going to continue offering a lot of advantages over the Android version for quite a while, so you might not necessarily want to move your license over to Android too quickly if you can stand to carry around both devices.

Zeldor said:
I may be getting one of the superphones soon - probably LG Optimux 2X with Tegra2 [I'd be tempted to get Motorola Atrix if I had just a PC, not notebook]. So I will happily test Pleco on it. I should be able to make some testing on my father's HTC Wildfire too.
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Thanks.

Zeldor said:
I will be getting into Android app making business probably soon too - it's big enough now already. I wonder if there are any good ways to make Android maps that would be easy to remake for iOS or other apps [well, Symbian, MeeGo, WM& later].
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I'd really recommend waiting a while on that to see how the market shakes out; right now a lot of people are losing a lot of money writing Android apps, the market may be big but nobody wants to pay for any software in it. I'm hoping we're somewhat insulated from that phenomenon at Pleco, but uncertainty about sales is a big part of the reason why we've been continuing to put lots of effort into iOS rather than going 100% Android until we get that version finished - we absolutely can't afford to lose ground in the iOS market in the course of our pursuit of the Android market.
 
What I'm going to write certainly is not the scale of what you are making. Luckily no licenses required [well, at least for initial version].

And to get back to Android market - there are just so many phones, tablets coming... and so many sizes, different hardware stuff [like 3D on LG's new slate]. I know how designing UI is even for web app, it must be real nightmare to plan accomodate 3-12" and then see someone complain that it does not work with his Atrix and 102" 3d plasma :p Well... certainly people trying to use the app on tv/big screen via hdmi output should be considered.

BTW, I wonder if it'd be hard to add an option to translate subtitles in real time [e.x. when you have chinese subbed movie you want to play via hdmi and Pleco to translate subs (translating movie would be even better :p) in real time and display them on the movie - many Chinese movies come with subtitles really].
 
Zeldor said:
And to get back to Android market - there are just so many phones, tablets coming... and so many sizes, different hardware stuff [like 3D on LG's new slate]. I know how designing UI is even for web app, it must be real nightmare to plan accomodate 3-12" and then see someone complain that it does not work with his Atrix and 102" 3d plasma Well... certainly people trying to use the app on tv/big screen via hdmi output should be considered.
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My hope is that eventually developers will get together and start making manufacturers accommodate us, rather than the other way around - if a significant number of developers agree that we're going to design around these three screen sizes and no others, or that we're going to design our interfaces to look good with the stock Android UI and nothing else, or that we're going to optimize around having such-and-such number of buttons below the display, or that we're going to require this set of OpenGL APIs to be supported and bug-free, then it'll be in manufacturers' interest to follow those rules so that users won't have difficulty running the apps they want.

Google seems to be either unwilling or unable to rein them in, but if you get enough major app developers on board with this then ultimately it could make life better for everyone else in the Android ecosystem - users get the assurance of apps that actually work on their phones, developers get to spend more time making great apps and less time fixing nasty hardware bugs, software stores do a lot more business in paid apps because users are confident that they'll work well, the manufacturers lose out a bit because they no longer have quite as much freedom in their hardware designs but ultimately the platform as a whole is better off.

Zeldor said:
BTW, I wonder if it'd be hard to add an option to translate subtitles in real time [e.x. when you have chinese subbed movie you want to play via hdmi and Pleco to translate subs (translating movie would be even better ) in real time and display them on the movie - many Chinese movies come with subtitles really].
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Yes - in a lot of cases those subtitles are actually embedded in separate subtitle files rather than in the actual video frames (this is generally better since it means more readable subtitles and smaller video files), which makes them very very easy to decode, but even without that, as long as the subtitles are over a plain background (rather than being layered right on top of the video) it should be doable. With subtitles on top of video it would be a bit harder - if they're surrounded by outlines then we might be able to do a filter where we'd pick out large evenly-lit white blobs in the bottom 20% of the screen and discard everything else, but it would be quite challenging.
 
westmeadboy said:
There was some talk earlier about battery life. Here are some figures (from a trusted site) for various popular devices:
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I don't think I quite appreciated what a big jump the iPhone 4 was - shows Apple definitely knows what they're doing with the A4. So it's going to be interesting how the combination of their first dual-core CPU + probably-the-newest-PowerVR-chip does relative to the 2011 Android devices - it seems like dual-core isn't hurting battery life much so far.
 
@Zeldor:

You just are looking for a Bablefish (see Hitchhikers Guide through the Galaxy) :)
Really, Pleco is a -dictionary- and thats what it should be. Otherwise you never learn the language.
 
sofamensch said:
@Zeldor:

You just are looking for a Bablefish (see Hitchhikers Guide through the Galaxy) :)
Really, Pleco is a -dictionary- and thats what it should be. Otherwise you never learn the language.
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That reminds me, has anyone produced a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy mobile app yet? It would truly be the ultimate tablet app, maybe even a special-edition tablet from some adventurous company...



...and back on topic:

There has been talk that Google will bring many of 3.0's features into the 2.x (phone-stream) Android, starting with 2.4

Hopefully, the performance and interface features Mike has been looking forward to will appear on Android phones too, meaning better Pleco for us and less work for him.
 
A bit OT, but what do you guys think about latest big news? Nokia switching to Windows Phone... looks like awesome thing for Microsoft, but really moronic move for Nokia...
 
Zeldor said:
A bit OT, but what do you guys think about latest big news? Nokia switching to Windows Phone... looks like awesome thing for Microsoft, but really moronic move for Nokia...
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Not that great for Microsoft either - do you think HTC et al are going to be eager to keep investing in developing great new WP7 hardware (which, let's remember, hasn't exactly been selling like gangbusters as-is) when Nokia's now officially Microsoft's best buddy? Better to focus on Android where they're on an equal footing with every other big vendor.
 
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