Thursday, 29 November 2007
Hello, Android
« Does OpenDS need a fork | Main | More on OpenDS...and Sun's interesting views on what open source are »I'm totally going to buy one of the new Android phones when they come out. Today in less than 5 minutes I managed to get the SDK, Eclipse plugin installed and create the Hello, Android application. I managed to write an app for their emulator and run it before the phone even came out whereas it took me an entire day just to figure out how to get my palm to work with bluetooth on Linux. Better yet, it looks like they're licensing the important parts under open source licenses. It looks like these will be real open source licenses that we're familiar with already (not just some license sanctioned in a secret meeting by a closed and non-representative body pushed by some VC afraid that open source will screw up his "enterprise upgrade" strategy). Contrast this with the Palm where they freaking make it hard to even do hello world with their horrible SDKs or the iPhone which is a monstrous "all your data are belong to us" plan by apple. I think Android is probably going to do for phones what the IBM PC did for microcomputers. The evidence is there. When something doesn't matter, no one comments on it. When something matters they comment on why and how much it doesn't matter.
Technorati Tags: android open source google mobile palm
[Trackback URL for this entry]
It's not actually open source until they ship the source, which is going to be when the first phones come out in late 2008.
Keep an eye on how much it behaves like HTML or VRML... Android seems less an implementation than a set of specifications, so the key issue will be how predictably advanced work plays on multiple devices.
jd/adobe