David Orban's Blog - Latest Comments in Polished, and less than polished mobile phones and operating systems

Re: Polished, and less than polished mobile phones and operating systems

davidorban — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:52:23 -0000

There are reports of very many new Android based devices hitting the market in the second half of 2009. I will be curious to look at them, and see how both the hardware and the software evolve. Yes, multitouch support will be good! :)

Re: Polished, and less than polished mobile phones and operating systems

pauljacobson — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:50:38 -0000

Hi David

I understand that the current version of Android supports multi-touch. Would this added support affect your views about the HTC Magic (or an Android device generally)?

Re: Polished, and less than polished mobile phones and operating systems

davidorban — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:30:56 -0000

Yep, I very much agree with your points about openness and opportunity. So much so that I wanted to write about them. At the end I decided not to, because they are meta-considerations, which go beyond the intrinsic merits of each of the platforms.

As I mention I want to come back to this topic in a little while, and you can be sure that one of the criticisms against the iPhone will be its closed nature.

An additional area that I didn't cover is the ease of development, or lack of, on each platform. And of course that also matters greatly.

Re: Polished, and less than polished mobile phones and operating systems

Lee Chisholm — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:17:03 -0000

I'm a big Android fan myself, and I actually agree with you on many of those points. For me though, the biggest negative by far is the speed of the OS. I find Android on the HTC devices is currently ridiculously slow. I recently played with an iPhone 3GS and I was thinking to myself "ahhh, this is how a phone SHOULD react to my inputs".

Though with all my negatives, I do still like Android more for a) it's future market potential is huge and I want to support that, b) I like supporting open source efforts, and c) I have more flexibility technically when it comes to unlocking, installing non-store apps etc.