Android and Me » Alex Byrnes

Un-packing Icon Packs

Alex Byrnes — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:00:19 +0000

Icon packs are a cheap, easy way to beautify your phone but they can take up a lot of precious application space and they’re usually designed to be used with one desktop manager. Here’s a simple way to make them easier to handle. You will need root access on your phone. If you don’t have root, you can try the JesusFreke Images or Haykuro’s.

An Android application file (extension .apk) is just a zip file in disguise. Replace the a-p-k with z-i-p and they will be recognized as a zip archive by any zip archiver like WinZip, Windows Explorer (seen as compressed folders), StuffIt etc. This also includes the handy ASTRO for Android. You can use any combination of these tools to do the same thing, but I’m going to use ASTRO because you can actually do all of this on your phone without developer tools like adb.

If you have the SDK and know how to use adb, just replace the terminal commands with commands in “adb shell.” It’s also easy to type “adb pull /data/app/the.icon.pack.name.apk” and work with it from your desktop. First, open Terminal Emulator. Type “su” to get super user privileges. At this point you may get a prompt from “Superuser Whitelist” if you’re working with a JF Image for root. Add Terminal Emulator to the whitelist and you’re free to go on as root.

cd /
chmod 777 data
cd data
chmod 777 app
cd app

You’re now in the directory with all your .apk files. Do an “ls” to see everything that’s in there. I picked the RBO icon pack as an example.

mv com.betterandroid.icons.robo.apk com.betterandroid.icons.robo.zip
chmod 777 com.betterandroid.icons.robo.zip

Copying with ASTRO

You’re done with Terminal Emulator for now. Open ASTRO and browse to the zip file. Tap on it and it should open. Go into the “assets” and then the “icons” directory. You should see a list of .png files.

From here you can do what you want with the images. You can hit menu, Edit, Select All, then menu, Edit, copy and browse to the directory where you want them (I recommend /sdcard, which will put them on your sd card) and hit menu, Edit, paste to copy them there.

The Extracted Icons

Deleting the icons you don’t want in place doesn’t work. You won’t be able to see the application on your desktop anymore or reinstall it because the signature won’t work with fewer files in the archive. This shouldn’t matter, however, because applications like BetterCut that allow you to change shortcut icons work just as well from the raw file on your sd card.

If you’re going to get rid of the icon pack, the safest thing to do is change the extension back to .apk (you can do this with ASTRO now that the file permissions are set) and uninstall normally. Luckily, ASTRO does that too. Just click on the apk and hit “Uninstall.” You can also just delete the .zip file, although there will be a reference in Settings ⇒ “Manage applications” to the icon pack that will need to be removed as well. You can uninstall it as if it were an application.

[Custom theme images via Extreme Themes]

Cupcake Voice Recognition Now Available for Testing

Alex Byrnes — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:22:12 +0000

Since my last article on voice recognition in Cupcake, two things have happened. The Haykuro images came out and Google released the 1.5 SDK. That means it’s time to test out the voice recognition on a real phone. I’ve compiled some example code that comes with the SDK below. You can install it if you have the Cupcake over-the-air update, the 1.5 ADP, or a Haykuro image.

Voice Recognition for Android 1.5

To install, look for Voice Recognition in the Market (Applications > Demo) or scan the QR code at the bottom of the post. Once it’s installed, you just push the button, speak into your phone and Google’s best guess appears on the screen. Very simple, but some pressing questions have been answered.

It looks like voice recognition will take this form for all applications. The application starts the voice recognizer which prompts the user, displays the volume widget, shows the waveform of the recording, and then returns the results to the application. It’s not perfectly seamless but it gets the job done in a fairly small amount of time.

Note that the processing is not CPU intensive on the phone, but it will need to be sent to Google to be turned into text (thanks to Tim H for pointing this out on the last article). You’ll need a good internet connection for this. I found EDGE (non-3G data connection) to be a bit unreliable. About half got sent back with a connection error. That will definitely vary, but the worst case scenario is not good, especially if you’re trying to use this for possibly frustrating operations like speaking commands to your GPS navigation system. WiFi works much better and the results are fast.

Voice Recognition Results

I like the fact that you get good feedback from the volume widget and the waveform as to how you should be speaking. Since it doesn’t adapt itself to your speaking patterns, you’ll have to accommodate it. Also, if you don’t have an American accent, you might have a tough time getting good results. But, it does work, and Google says it’s getting better with practice. And since Google is one of the few companies on Earth with billions of dollars and access to millions of people’s voice searches, I’d say they’ve got as good a chance as anyone of getting this right.

Internally, the voice recognition interface is pretty simple. Developers will get their choice of models, either free-form or web search based, and they get a list of possible results instead of just one. That allows them to implement their own language model. If three responses come back, the application can choose the one most fitting to its cause.

Suppose the application wants a simple “yes” or “no.” It could accept anything starting with a “Y” as yes and “N” as no. “Yup,” “Yeah,” “You betcha”… as well as “yurt,” “yam”, and “yaw” depending on who’s speaking and how Google interprets it. You’re almost guaranteed a good match. In fact, the smaller the search space, the greater the likelihood of a good match, so a yes/no could be simplified to a silence versus response scheme that would work in any language. (In my tests, “yes” worked pretty well, but “no” consistently came up with “snow.”)

The language model is set to free-form on the sample, so results should differ slightly from the regular voice search.

Good luck! If you have funny, interesting, insightful results, please post them here.

Voice Recognition Demo for Android
Version: 1.0
Developed By: Alex Byrnes
Price: FREE
Filesize: 0.11KB

Voice Commands Coming to Android Cupcake?

Alex Byrnes — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:00:34 +0000

Android phones already have voice dialing and voice search. What about voice commands? The signs say voice commands are coming, and soon. The Cupcake development branch features page includes the note “VoiceDialer supports ‘open app’ command”. Also announced in the Android roadmap was the new Input Method Framework (IMF). The IMF supports other input methods outside of hardware keyboards such as soft keyboards (see HTC Dream). We can only speculate as to where voice commands fit into the roadmap, and where Cupcake itself fits in. It is likely that voice commands fit under the umbrella of IMF, and IMF has center stage in the first quarter ‘09 development.

The Cupcake source code has more detail. Voice recognition is provided by Nuance Communications(makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking), but copyrighted under the Apache license, like most of Android. Currently, the only core application to use voice commands is the settings application, although there may be more on someone’s desktop at Google, or in proprietary code.

All this is certainly not groundbreaking, but the implications go beyond everyday phone use because of the way the feature is implemented.

Some background

Most applications in Android, or pieces of applications (roughly corresponding to a single screen), are what are known as “Activities.” Activities communicate with each other by way of “Intents” sort of the way web pages “communicate” by linking to each other. The Maps application, for instance, launches the phone application when you click on a business’ phone number the way it would on Google maps. When one activity wants to start another, it creates an intent.

Every Android application lists the types of intents that it wants to respond to. That’s why you get a dialog asking you what application you’d like to use to complete such and such action when there are two similar applications installed. It means that two applications have said that they can handle the current intent. Pushing “Home” after you install a new desktop manager will do this because both the built-in desktop manager and the new one (aHome, Open Home, dxTop) offers to handle “Home” intents.

Skip here if you don’t want any technical jive. What this means is not only does the new Android include some voice commands, it allows market applications to use them too. This could open up a whole new avenue of voice activated games and applications. Applications could take pictures remotely, record voices on cue, skip calls, and more. The possibilities are endless. The best applications probably haven’t been conceived of yet (as in cameras and bar code reading).

Great right?

Most people’s reaction will be tempered by the reception of other Google voice recognition technologies: voice dialing, voice search, and Google Voice. The first time I used voice search on my phone, I tried to think of the most common, yet distinctive, and therefore easiest search possible so I said, very clearly, AVVRIILL LAAVVVIIGNE . I got “Emerald Limousine.”

Aside from taking you in interesting new avenues, and giving you the occasional chuckle, it’s not very useful. Obviously, until it gets easier than typing a search, most people won’t use it.

But this is not voice recognition, it’s voice command. The application doesn’t need to differentiate amongst every word in its dictionary, it just needs to know if you said, “Pawn to a5” or “Queen to c6.” “Pawn” and “Queen” are very different words. “Pawn,” “Prawn,” and “Palm” are not, and you could be searching for any of them, or any of the billions of other possible searches.

The same goes for voicemail transcription from Google Voice.

However, in our forthcoming, perfect, Cupcake universe, we can expect to glance at a call from across our desks and say, “No,” to make it go to voicemail. Or “skip!” when the newest Emerald Limousine single comes on imeem.

Of course, it’s hard to say whether or not Android voice recognition will be optimized to voice commands. Will the application be able to choose which words it wants the voice recognition engine to differentiate? Will the user be able to create their own dictionary or use their custom spell check dictionary? This, and many other questions, will only be answered by the actual release of Cupcake on a production phone. Even if something exists in the code today, it could be gone tomorrow, or not integrated into the new phone where developers can make use of it.

Fortunately, in this case, the cupcake’s trajectory is looking pretty good.

Are you ready to "talk" with your phone yet?

Interview with PhoneGap Developer Brian LeRoux

Alex Byrnes — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:45:29 +0000

As the number of phone platforms increase, multi-platform coding gets harder and harder. A new open source project called PhoneGap is trying to make it easier while bringing web coders into the game. I asked PhoneGap developer Brian LeRoux these questions:

AAM: Could you describe the purpose of PhoneGap for those who don’t know?

Brian LeRoux: PhoneGap’s purpose is to enable web developers access to native
features of mobile devices with open standard web technology: HTML,
CSS and JavaScript.

AAM: PhoneGap is available for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry. Are there others on the way?

BL: Yes! We have plans for Nokia Symbian, Windows Mobile and the Palm Pre.

AAM: The PhoneGap magic happens when you use WebKit’s addJavascriptInterface to add links between the developer’s Javascript and your Java code. How would you compare developing this interface on Android to doing the same for iPhone and Blackberry?

BL: Good question! The iPhone SDK has essentially the same abstraction of WebKit enabling easy bridging. Blackberry is slightly more complex–we need to set cookies to communicate between the native API’s and the browser instance and then do some JavaScript backflips to hide this implementation.

The Nokia and Palm platforms already support web interfaces to WebKit so all that really needs to be done is JavaScript shim that mimics the PhoneGap API for compatibility. Other developers have successfully built WebKit to Windows Mobile so we’re looking to take the more serious approach of doing a custom build w/ the PhoneGap layer for that platform.

AAM: So far it looks like PhoneGap on Android includes interfaces for GPS, the accelerometer, phone functions, vibration among others. What are the interfaces that developers can expect next for Android?

BL: Contacts API and full Camera support are the next big API’s we hope to tackle.

Another big problem we’d like to solve is Bondi’s OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform) set of API’s. Right now it exists in the form of specification and has a great deal of conceptual support. We’d love to turn those concepts into a usable cross platform implementation.

AAM: Do you know of any developers who are selling software for all three phones now?

BL: There are a number of developers selling apps for the iPhone and Android. The Blackberry store is rather new and, unfortunately, the Blackberry browser has rather poor rendering so it is generally being ignored by the PhoneGap community. We’re hoping they fix their browser (or just get it over with and adopt WebKit) sooner than later.

AAM: With all of this interoperability amongst the major phone platforms, do you foresee multi-platform stores becoming popular in the future?

BL: I think its too early to tell. Perhaps in the future when the vendors have stratified. I would imagine that the Android model would lead to 3rd party platform agnostic stores in the longer term.

AAM: How can open source developers help with PhoneGap? What kinds of contributions are you looking for?

BL: We need leaders to take on the Nokia and Windows Mobile platforms today but we welcome help in the form of any code, patches, tests, documentation, participation on the mailing lists, editing up our wiki, example applications, blog posts, presenting at local mobile user groups — every bit helps. Feel free to contact us and let us know how *we can help you* promote and support PhoneGap. This is a community effort: the vendors and telcos are not going to build an interoperable and open source platform any time soon. If you believe in the web, standards and an open future we’d love to talk.

With PhoneGap you can develope for multiple mobile platforms at once.

Resource Links:

Battle for Mars. Android Game Review.

Alex Byrnes — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:42:55 +0000

Battle for Mars is one of the more expensive games you’ll find on the Android market, but it’s well worth it. The character art is funny and unique, it works well with the controls on the G1, and, best of all, it’s based on one of the best video games ever made, Advance Wars.

Battle for Mars
Version: 1.0.6
Developed by: Larva Labs Ltd.
Price: $4.99
File Size: 1.24 MB

The basic premise is the same as other turn-based strategy games. You create units of various kinds (Soldier, Elite Soldier, SniperBot, TransBot, BombBot, MegaBot, RocketBot etc. as well as sea and air units eventually). Each has a different cost and unique abilities. The opposing side, or sides, have the same types of units and usually about the same ability to produce them. Depending on the terrain and factory/city layout of a particular map, different strategies will need to be used.

Usually, the map is not symmetrical and you’ll have to use a different strategy from the one the computer is using. This is what makes these games fun. It’s a little Bad News Bears against the computer the first couple of times you play a map before you get the hang of it. If you’re like me, you’ll try to “break” the game a few times to see if you can. All SniperBots. Nope. Save up for a Doom Boat and then take them all out. Nope. A war of attrition with footsoldiers, a.k.a. the fire ant strategy. Nope. Good games don’t “break,” and this one won’t either (although the computer is not smart enough to keep you from occupying its one factory and preventing it from creating new units, but usually the game is about over by then anyway).

Different Units You Can Build

You’ll have to develop good strategies using the whole variety of unit types and they’ll be used roughly the way they were intended. Doing a long press on a unit will give you a breakdown of its abilities, and show you the extent of an enemy’s range in the case of projectile bots. Yes, when the maps get tough, you’ll be figuring out where the blind spot is amongst three or four RocketBots, and counting how many turns it’s going to take for an Attack Boat to reach your Gun Boat, but it’s all worth it in the end. Advance Wars afficionatos will be familiar. Usually the bug strikes hard.

I’m sure I’m not doing the developers any favors by saying this game is almost an exact clone of Advance Wars, but it is. If the game is not licensed, we may be looking at a Scrabulous type situation. The units are basically the same with the same strengths and weaknesses, number of squares they can move over different terrain, range etc. Even the little battle animations are almost identical. One side shoots — pause — a few units on the other side blow up, the other side shots… It’s the same thing. The different typs of terrain are the same and the function of each type is the same. Basically, it stomps all over any intellectual property rights the original developers had in whatever country they had them in. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know what those rights may be, but, as with Scrabulous, the winner is… you.

The developers have picked up the ball where Advance Wars left it and squashed it right into our cellphones. And let’s face it, it’s not acceptable to carry around a GameBoy Advance anymore. Plus, they’ve taken away one of Advance War’s more onerous features, the multi-turn capture of cities. This would often make your games stretch into the two hour area for no good reason. For instance, if you only had one unit at the end, you’d be capturing that last city for ten turns.

A Battle Animation

In video games, clones work. There isn’t a lot of development time spent making the game balanced and fun. There isn’t a lot of time spent on the game part of the game, period. What’s involved is adapting to a new platform and putting a new face and new features on the old guts. Battle for Mars has done a good job of that and they started with great guts.

If you like turn-based strategy games, you will like Battle for Mars. If you don’t like turn-based strategy games, you will still probably like Battle for Mars. If you turn your nose up at people playing Stratego in the back of comic book stores, you will still probably like this game. It’s pure Mars-themed fun.

For more strategy tips, see the Larva Labs blog.

Could Symbian Really Squeeze Android Out?

Alex Byrnes — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:00:05 +0000

This smartphone article has gotten a lot of buzz around the office in recent days. (By office I mean apartment I share with my dog, but the fact remains.) Nearly everyone in the office is talking about this article. Fifty percent.

Jason Hiner does a disservice to Android, which upsets me personally, but worse than that, he’s so insulting to the entire smartphone-observant community that he’s got me sticking up for the iPhone.

Some of Mr. Hiner’s claims:

“Businesses will play a similar role in the smartphone business that they play in the PC market.”

This is a simple one. Businesses have to buy PCs for their employees. They usually don’t need to buy them phones, and additionally dictate which phone they buy. (And they don’t generally dictate based on security, which Mr. Hiner revisits several times. The president has phone security. Ralph’s Towing does not.)

Businesses may buy their employees phones, but most don’t. Business’ role in the PC market is much, much greater than their role in the smartphone market. Phone sales are consumer driven. Thirteen million iPhones were not sold last year to businesses. Businesses were not lined up around that ridiculous cube store in New York.

“It wasn’t until iPhone 2.0 when the software added Exchange support and business-friendly features that iPhone sales really took off.”

It also won Invention of the Year and dropped from $500 to $200, but who’s counting? It must be businesses sending their people to camp out in front of the cube for two days. “Johnson, head down to the cube and buy yourself an iPhone…”

“Linux=Google Android (for the most part)”

Android only makes up twenty percent of the Linux handset market sales from Q4 2008. They’ve actually been making Linux phones for a while.

“…Symbian will have to go toe-to-toe with Google Android to fight for the hearts of open source software developers… Due to the current reach of Symbian, the strong open source overtures made by Nokia, and the fact that Android hasn’t been a slam dunk with the open source community, I think Symbian has the advantage over Android.”

Symbian does not have the advantage over Android in any way shape or form other than being first. Android has been out on a commercial phone for five months. Symbian has been on the market since 2001. Android is still an infant by comparison and has a lot of capacity to grow. It is not burdened by incompatible versions of a user interface , a ridiculously difficult development environment , disgruntled developers , and viruses .

Furthermore, I can tell you there’s nothing that will make Symbian less popular with the open source community than charging $1,500 for access to the code.

And as long as we’re talking about money, if this OS is so great, why have they started giving it away? When’s the last time the open source project cost more than the hardware you were going to run it on?

Clearly Symbian (Nokia) is just reacting to the 20 percent it recently lost off its market share and nothing else. That’s where the recent jab at Android came from. That’s where the free phones are coming from. And that’s why it’s open source. It hopes to be on par with Android in a year or two, which is why its CEO not taking any swipes at the big boys on the way down.

“Windows Mobile is maddeningly difficult to use.”

Okay, that one is true. I wouldn’t have said difficult to use exactly. Maybe “extraordinarily frustrating.” Windows bashing unites us all.

I think the worst thing that’s wrong with Mr. Hiner’s article is that he gets the smartphone market all wrong. Everything is going to change in six months, and then it’s going to change again in another six months on and on, and every change will be somewhat radical and unexpected, but at the same time those seeds are already in the ground. Potential counts so much.

Before Apple was known for phones, you might be tempted to say it wouldn’t be any good at it. There were no Google gadgets of any kind before the G1. And yet here we are. Following the trends by looking at the money and a few loosely defined concepts like “unified communications” and “fixed mobile convergence solutions” is like saying that Vista is going to be great because it sounds like a nice view.

Note To Self: Review To-Do Apps For Android

Alex Byrnes — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:01:27 +0000

One of the most common “classic” applications on the Android Market is the to-do list manager. Easy to code and almost universally useful, the to-do list manager is tempting for developer and consumer alike. Unfortunately, there are so many more of these applications than there are good ones, and once you install one, you might find yourself looking for another in short order.

These are the applications currently in the market with more than the bare minimum functionality and good reviews: Astrid, RTM Tasks, TooDo, and 3banana. (Absent from this list is an application called ActionComplete, which sells for $4.99. The description says that it has meticulous attention to detail, but five dollars is too much for any to-do list, meticulous or not.)

Astrid

Astrid Home Screen

I’ll cut to the chase since you’ve got things to do. Astrid is the best to-do list manager available in the market. It’s attractive, intuitive, and it does everything you need it to do without getting in your way. You’ll be happy to hit that little squid icon a dozen times a day.

One of the best features – that I’ve never seen before – is how it checks off a task. When you hit the checkbox, it changes the task font to strikethrough and leaves it there until you exit the application. This is handy because you often hit the wrong task and you don’t want to have to re-enter it. This was a frustration with the built-in to-do lists on Windows Mobile and Palm. Four or five pixels up or down and you’ve got to remember what that task was and type it in again. It’s either gone, or it resides in your gigantic pool of completed tasks.

Astrid also does what you should be able to do with every to-do list manager: open it, type, close it, and it will add a new task. This is what a person does with the vast majority of his or her time with a to-do list and it is appropriately streamlined here.

There are also the requisite features like priority, alarms, recurring tasks, and tags, all of which Astrid does well. I also like the tabbed organization. If a task doesn’t have a due date or an alert, you can ignore those tabs and exit. Saving is always automatic.

Despite its utter dominance of the list-oriented market, I was disappointed by two aspects of the more modern versions of Astrid. Since they came out with the tabs, the application has been a bit slow. Personally, I think speed should be a higher priority than almost any fancy feature for these types of applications. Astrid also claims to synchronize with Remember The Milk, but I couldn’t get it to work, and, judging by the wiki, I wasn’t the only one.

RTM Tasks

RTM Tasks is a newer entry in the market and has very basic functionality. It is notable because it does, like the name implies, synchronize successfully with Remember The Milk. If you’re a big RTM fan, this might be the one to start with, at least until some others get their acts together. You can always switch later by synchronizing with the new one.

TooDo

TooDo Home Screen

TooDo is notable as the Titanic of to-do list managers for Android. It has a plethora of features and very little intuitiveness. Features like the dashboard, contexts (aren’t categories enough?), smart folders, distance intervals (a Geo-notification setting), and owner (there’s also author) are poorly defined and the interface gives us few hints. There is a setting called “Insistent” with this cryptic explanation: “Should a to-do notification with importance higher than Normal loop for ever?” Difficult to tell what you’re going to be subjected to with that one.

To impress upon you, the sheer number of features it’s offering, TooDo will add a persistent entry in your window shade with the following buttons: “Change,” “On,” “Main Screen,” “Smart Folders,” “Categories,” “Contexts,” “Notes,” “Demo mode,” “Go Lite,” “Sync,” and “Purge,” and, in the bottom left-hand corner, the lowly “Add to-do.”

The dashboard, as it’s called, also includes the message, “Go to the “Settings” for disabling,” which is probably what most users will immediately do.

Where Astrid is clean and clever looking, TooDo has “Animations.” This means that the items in each tab will disappear one by one when you switch to that tab. This little cascade is annoying and does not in any way further the to-do list users primary goal of getting things done. All-in-all, it seems as if the developer believed that this was a race to the record books for number of features, useful or not.

I was also not able to get Remember the Milk synchronization to work.

3banana

3banaa Home Screen

3banana is not actually a to-do list manager. It is a note taking and sharing application, but I thought it showed a lot of potential. The interface is clean and simple. You can begin typing right away into a dedicated text box at the top, add tags twitter style with the pound sign, and hit save to keep it in your list. You can also use the camera button next to the text box to attach a picture to the entry. The entry and the picture can then be saved and shared on Facebook or Twitter. I wasn’t able to get the synchronization with 3banana.com to work, where all of this social magic is supposed to happen, but if you create an entry on the site, it works fine from there. Once the synchronization starts working, this could become a fun socially-aware way to make lists, in addition to being a usable and fast to-do list manager on its own.

Android Brings Freedom For All Devices

Alex Byrnes — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 02:20:16 +0000

A recent headline “BlackBerry Storm Transformed into Google Android, Sorta” got me thinking. No, it wasn’t that certain news outlets are click-mongering hope stealers. It was about the future of Android. First, that the idea of a phone having a semi-portable, nameable operating system is a breakthrough in itself. A few years ago, the idea that a phone had an operating system at all was a little strange sounding. “What do you mean ‘Download for UIQ phones?’” Or that you would install something “on” the phone at all. The phone was the phone, the buttons, the screen, the novel type of hinge. “Look at this hinge technology”, you’d say.

Apple Newton

We’re past all that of course. There wasn’t any doubt since the Newton that we’d get where we are today, but there still is this concept of the hardware and the software coming together as a package that should go to the same place the Newton went. The operating system and phone should be considered independent and hopefully, someday not long from now, will be.

There is a perfect analogy to this in the PC world: Linux (and Android is Linux). Linux goes on everything. When that gaming “rig” from ’99 stops being able to run current games, put Linux on it and use it for MythTV, or just Hulu, or checking your email and never getting a virus. Imagine the same system applied to cell phones. Don’t need your old phone? Put Android on it and make an imeem machine for your bedside! Or an alarm clock and imeem machine. Or an alarm clock with imeem and StreamFurious for listening to the news in the morning. You can forget about that recycling program at your local Circuit City Best Buy. Your phone is going to still be useful until something replaces alarm clocks and music. And why shouldn’t it be? You paid for it. It’s yours.

The Palm Treo. Great phone, and a very good OS for the time, but as soon as mine stopped being able to make phone calls, it stopped carrying its weight. Suddenly 6 ounces was a lot for a planner and to-do list. Now we’re getting to the point where the phone is almost beside the point. There is, after all, a machine called the iPod Touch, which, even though I don’t condone it, some people do own. This is an iPhone without the phone part. Yet somehow it remains useful. I know if I couldn’t make phone calls with my G1, I would probably still carry it around. I could still avoid getting lost, play music, and make lightsaber noises just like those iPod Touch users (whoever they may be). All the more reason for operating systems to be portable. It’s not a phone anymore!

And let’s not forget the fact that you may want to put Android on cutting edge hardware too. Take the Blackberry – pipe dream – example. Blackberry has great hardware. It fits your hand. The keys are big and tactile, and it’s got that great thumb wheel. Pop Android on there and you’ve got it all, the phone you want and the OS you love with all the software you bought over the course of years of ownership.

The Android on Blackberry scenario probably won’t happen anytime soon (prove me wrong kids!) but there is still a message here. We Android fans do not yet have great hardware. We have good hardware (G1), and we have the clunky , the fake , and the goodbye weekends!

This is not to say that the market is failing us. In fact, it’s working pretty well in every corner of the globe. It’s that we’re so antsy to have it all. Not only that, but wouldn’t it be terrible if a great OS never had a great home? There would be more than one gadget historian shaking his head in shame.

I say let the next Android come from RIM.

Android and Me » Alex Byrnes

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Astrid

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