You make a good point.

I think the answer is that the operating system is open, but there's (currently) nothing restricting hardware vendors from making their hardware not open. In other arenas, I'd tell you that it's your own fault for purchasing restricted hardware, but that's obviously a much more contentious position with a cell phone. You don't have innumerable choices like you do with a PC.

The search in stock Android is extensible, with plugins available for it, from Wikipedia, to calculators, to other search engines. If Verizon has crippled the browser, that really sucks. The only thing you can do is not buy it.

Thanks for the well-reasoned post, Tom, and I agree with you here.

I suspected from the beginning that the carriers might do something to these phones, but hoped they wouldn't or at least that there would be an alternative. Clearly things haven't turned out as I'd hoped. The problem as I see it is not that the OS is open, but that the carriers are making it closed.

I have one wish for Google when it comes to this issue: that they declare that if a carrier or manufacturer wants to use Android, they have to give they users the option of using the stock OS. It could be when the user first turns on the phone, or just a settings screen. But somehow, Google needs to give people the option of using the regular OS.

I've disagreed all along with the people who thought that the OS version fragmentation was an issue. I still don't think it is, because at least with every version of the OS there's some consistency, and while you may not have all the features with older versions, you still have a decent user experience.

But I completely agree that this skinning issue is a big problem. So far, I'm disappointed that Google hasn't said word one about it.

I don't know if Google should necessarily say what a vendor can do with the OS, but they should make perhaps more stipulations on the way the carriers use the branding. Remember that if they put too many restrictions in place then it might also affect other areas of revenue for them, such as the marketplace, namely in ad-sponsored apps.

As someone who'd like to use Android in the future, I don't want any restrictions. But I won't be using it in a handset. Nor would I ever expose the fact it's running Android, so there would be no OS branding apart from whatever custom UI I have sitting on top of the base. No app market, etc. Basically just using it as a nice free embedded OS with decent support for all kinds of technologies already baked in.

I think you're going to see feature phones going this way as well.

Acute.

I could have written this: Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With

Hmm, maybe not even open for OEMs...

Skyhook sues Google for business interference. PDF link of the court filing. Basically boils down to Skyhook negotiating with Motorola and "Company X" to use Skyhook in their Android products. Google interfered by issuing stop ships orders claiming the devices were no longer "Android compatible", and in the case of Company X, this was after products had previously been certified and were already out on the market.

What's wrong with an exclusive contract? Google seems to be ok with Verizon signing an exclusive contract with Bing for the Fascinate based on inaction and no such stop ship order given. As far as "proprietary application stack", is Google Location Service open source? Or is it part of the closed off Android stack similar to the Marketplace and several apps? (Honest question, I can't find evidence either way). Also, as pointed out by the court filing, and comments on reddit, the Skyhook api wasn't breaking any Google apps that use location as far as they know, considering the phones were passing all of Google's certification processes.

From what I read in the court filing, Skyhook's side of the story seems to be one eerily similar to maneuvers Microsoft was pulling in the 90s. Show interest in a technology from a small company, talk friendly with them, then create a competing version, embed it in the OS, and squash business deals that favor the small company.

Ultimately we will have to see what the courts say on this, if it goes that far. May just be easier for Google to settle this one out of court.

Since the first release of Android, there has been a hook into the OS for arbitrary location services and it's intended that there be more than one location provider. Android itself provides at least two.

From the filing, it sounds like Skyhook had Motorola strip out Google's builtin location providers. I wouldn't be surprised if they also had them strip out the ability to add additional location providers. In fact, they say that Google has "allowed" another similar location provider to run on Android. My guess is that that other provider doesn't supersede the Android API. Again, this is speculation; I could be wrong.

I would imagine that anything that modifies the public API that developers code against renders the product Android non-compliant.

(Finally posting my summary of good and bad about my experience with Android on the Samsung Captivate. Not sure why I let this sit on my desktop so long.)


Google Maps Navigation - For being a free app, it's very impressive. The few times where the Captivate GPS worked, the navigation was decent, and as expected came up with routes the same way Google Maps does. I have a few quibbles with how it wanted to route me to work from home (mostly because it likes to route up a very hilly residential road with speed limits dropping to 5mph in some tricky turns) but I've yet to find a GPS solution that routes the way I'd expect every time. Voice quality was ok, and good enough to understand street names. Google Streetview integrated is really helpful. I was a bit disappointed to find voice search didn't work for contacts on my phone though. Overall, this was probably the best part of Android for me, and I'm hoping Google sticks to their promise to bring it to the iPhone one day.

Notifications - This one I'm mixed about. Not being blasted with popups is a definite improvement over the iPhone for sure. However, I found myself having to clean up notifications frequently to prevent the icon bar at the top from just filling up. Mail would commonly leave notifications about "1 new message" even if I've read the e-mail on my computer. Gowalla would blast several into there when it checked from time to time, and none were realtime due to the lack of push notifications in Android 2.1. I also wish there was a way to see a small preview without action, similar to WebOS notifications. It's kinda annoying to be driving and have to try and pull down the tray to see what SMS came in, vs being able to see it at a glance on iOS or WebOS. This is mostly a timing issue though, and I may have missed a setting allowing the notification text to stay in the bar at the top longer before it returned to icon view.

Google Listen - Having all my podcasts just download directly on the device was nice. I could set a schedule, and know for certain my episode was ready for me in the morning. Since the iPhone only does a sync when the device is first connected, I sometimes miss the morning sync to grab new podcasts.

Swype - I'm mixed on this one too, mostly because I didn't have a lot of time to adapt. I did however like the idea the keyboard could be replaced, and did start using swype more and more. I'd need additional time to really give it a proper review though. Doing normal hunt and peck typing on swype was definitely worse then the iPhone touch keyboard. I didn't spend much time with the other keyboards to really compare them.


My curiosity is much lower about Android now that I've had a week of hands on time, and overall I am sticking to not trying it again until at least 3.0. I am interested to see what steps are taken to add a bit more polish to the experience as a whole. These are the negatives I saw outside the Captivate issues:

Photo syncing - I've had all my photos with me since my iPhone in mid 2007 and it's not something I want to give up. Apple even chops the size down of each image during sync to help preserve space, while still presenting a good looking image on the device. DoubleTwist was an absolute failure here, with no ability to sync photos. All it offers is drag and drop, and I'm not going to drag and drop new photos every time I add them to my computer. The full Google solution would be to upload everything to Picassa and then let the device have access over the air. This is also not acceptable due to my collection exceeding the storage space provided for free, and the slow browsing speed on the phone as it downloaded them over the air.

Search - For as good as Google is supposed to be about search, it was horrible on the phone. Google Listen just outright failed to find podcasts by name, and overall the Google search options seem more focused on looking online then looking on the phone. With my iPhone I can go into search and in mere moments find any app on the phone, any contact, any e-mail, or any music file. Spotlight is just natural to me after having it in an OS for 5 years and on a phone for 2, and stepping back to a less polished experience here was harsh. I didn't realize how much I depend on good local search until I had the Android phone for the trial.

Battery life- While somewhat device specific, I just generally didn't feel I could trust having the phone survive the day. The AIM issue was specific to that app, but what was worse was being provided a tool to analyze power usage and finding out it's faulty. I also don't want to deal with task killers and other apps just to know the phone will have a charge left. After talking to my coworker with the Evo, he's having a much harder time, backing up the battery concerns of all the Evo reviews I saw. When Sprint calls next time, I'll tell them to take me off the list. (As an update on the Evo, the local Sprint store never did call me, so I guess when they told me in July they would put me back at the bottom of the list, they instead just dropped me off it.)

I don't feel I had enough time to really evaluate Android apps and the marketplace, so I don't have much to say there. Most of the apps I tried were counterparts to ones I use frequently on the iPhone, like Gowalla. I think 2.2 will help bring some better apps to the platform as long as developer interest is there due to both push and the ability to run them from the external SD card. I've got certain ones on my iPhone that just simply can't exist on Android pre 2.2, such as handheld console equivalent games with lots of assets. And adding push capabilities should help cut down power usage, instead of forcing apps like Gowalla to always be in the background to poll for updates.

The iPod podcast syncing can be pretty much solved by the Podcaster app that can now be set to sync automatically at your chosen times (and also be set to only sync when on wifi).

There are higher-quality voices available for download.


There are two background notification types: notifications, which are the things in the icon bar, and toasts, which appear over top of the screen, and go away on their own. So there is a way to do that, even if the app doesn't provide it as an option. You're at least in part talking about built-in apps, so that doesn't push the blame elsewhere; I'm just letting you know that there is another option available to developers.


Or the default Android keyboard, in my experience. I never could adapt to Swype or its clones.


Actually, only the executable has to be on the internal storage. Data can exist anywhere. This is at the discretion of the developer, though.

One thing I wish AT&T would have left in for the Captivate. This is the lock screen on other Galaxy S phones, and it's pretty clever. Standard unlock is pretty much a swipe, but it also adds two other swipe points to go right to missed calls or unread e-mail.

Congratulations to all Sony Android phone owners, today you'll be able to update to Android 2.1 and be only one generation of OS behind (for a few weeks). Android 2.1 was released to the world in early January 2010. Maybe next October lucky Sony owners will be able to update to Froyo, 2.2 on their even newer PSP phones.

BTW Sony, Apple just knocked you out of the top-5 mobile handset makers in the world. So sorry. You used to make nice sets.

Vixy's got a Galaxy... a Samsung Vibrant on the Tmobile network. I think it's on 2.1. Anyone know when/how it'll get 2.2?

Huh? When was that??

He meant "TV sets".

When it debuted , the T68i was pretty nice. And the UI was miles better than anything Nokia had at the time.

That phone wasn't really SE though. The T68i was a firmware upgraded T68 which was released by Ericsson before they merged. You could even upgrade the old Ericsson T68 into a SE T68i just by doing the firmware update.

I've got a T68 somewhere in a drawer because I wanted to use it as a SMS gateway for something but it wasn't really designed to be on for very long periods of time. I would always get a random crash after a 2-3 weeks.

I'm not sure what possessed SE to make what in theory was a high end phone and then leave it stuck with 1.6 for such a long time. As you mentioned, its not even up to date even with 2.1.

I just looked at the SE blog and 2.1 isn't actually out yet. They're rolling it out for Nordic regions on Sunday and then the other regions sometime after that with an unspecified schedule. If you've got a carrier branded version then you could be waiting forever or at least a long time.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I've always thought Sony only brought Ericsson down. But I didn't realize the T68 predated their collaboration.

September. No, wait, maybe October 18th. Or sometime, since the 18th is when Samsung Kies users can install it. And Kies is still not available to download here in the US.

Out of curiosity, does the GPS seem to function on her Vibrant? I wonder if the fix they rolled out sometime after I returned my Captivate actually fixed it, of if the whole Skyhook issue remained unsolved until 2.2.

I don't think she's been using the GPS much, but it would be an interesting thing to try.

So I see that she has to have the Kies application to install it. Cool, there was another reason to have Kies but she didn't want to do the big download of it at the time. This is now a second reason. Thanks!

Is Kies now available for the US? I looked yesterday and couldn't find it. I'd say be careful about going that route if the Vibrant isn't fully supported in it yet, as loading international 2.2 firmware may blow away the settings on the phone to work with T-Mobile. I didn't dig too deeply into how separate the firmware was from regional cellular settings when I had the Captivate.

At some point, 2.2 will be pushed over the air.

And I'd be curious to hear her experiences with the phone. I attribute my bad experiences to buying the device so soon after release (thus I was hit bad with the GPS issue) along with the inability to have it work like my iPhone in regards to media sync/playback. For a non Apple product, the hardware seemed decent. If I were to look at a Windows Phone 7 device, it would probably be the Samsung variant.

She just loves the phone to death. She was especially enamored of the Swype text entry, which was a critical factor in choosing that phone over an iPhone.

Occasionally she gets stumped by things on it, but that'll happen with any phone. Here's an interesting recent stumpy example:

She ordered a customized "skin" for the thing. Plastic vinyl wrapping for the back and the front bezel with a picture printed on it. Front bezel picture is supposed to line up with the digital wallpaper for the icon screen background. The company sent her an email with a correctly-cropped and positioned version of the wallpaper file.

But opening it up in the email app, there was no way to save the wallpaper file. It was an inline image instead of an attachment, and there was no way to save the inline image from within the email app.

I don't know if the iPhone would have a similar problem or not. Probably would. Anyway, I thought it was funny how they send you a file that you're supposed to save on that particular brand/model of phone, and they send it to you the exact way that the email app on that phone won't allow you to save.

No, the iPhone can save inline images in email to the photo album (and from there, set as background). Ditto for images on web pages too.

Do they have a web page where you can get the image, then save it from the android browser? Or maybe cut and paste it to the photo app?

Heh. I should have actually tried it before posting that.




Don't know for sure, I think she used these guys. The email from them didn't seem to indicate there was any other way to get the file. She ended up having to open up the email on her PC and re-mail the file to herself as an attachment, which she could then save on the phone.

In theory she could have just attached the phone to her PC with the USB cable and put the original source image file on there herself (we had already discussed the absurdity of Gelaskins emailing you back a cropped version of a file that you already had to begin with), but when she tried connecting with the USB cable, she had trouble actually being able to open the phone as a USB storage device in Windows Explorer.

It's probably the same issue that I had on the Mac. The phone ships in a mode where it only talks to Kies by default. Go into settings, Applications, USB Mode, and try the other options. On my Mac, I also had to turn on USB Debugging on the phone to get things working.

Looks like my Android 1.6 device is finally going to see Froyo. I'll have to tinker with this once I'm settled in out in California.

http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/bootlance-install-android-os-iphone-2g3g-computer

Android fragmentation! Android fragmentation!

Heh, I saw that. I still don't know how you use Android without any of the face buttons. You could get by without the home and search buttons, I think, but the back and menu buttons are pretty essential...

And where had your AutoAppOrganizer survey ended?