Android 3.0 Platform Preview and SDK Is Here

mikejuk writes "Google has released the Android 3.0 SDK, to allow developers time to create the apps that will run on the flood of tablet devices that should be availalble later in the year. The preview includes improved 2D and 3D graphics, new user interface controls, support for multicore processors, DRM and enterprise security features. It is complete with a 3.0 emulator that you can use to try applications on, but you can't add them to the app market just yet."

Re:Any chance we'll get rid of Java?

[Sarten-X]

Not likely, and apart from various forms of trolls, there's no reason to.

Re:This is where Nokia missed the boat

[exomondo]

But it is almost a year and a half later, and in the meantime Nokia has not released any new Maemo/MeeGo hardware, and only 1 major update to the N900 firmware. Even that update only fixed minor bugs and added the QT libraries.

I think they tried to get the community to shoulder too much responsibility for the OS - it's great that it's open source, but there isn't much open source that succeeds without corporate backing and for a predominantly consumer device that corporate backing has to come from the manufacturer. It would be nice to see meego flourish, and it certainly could given Nokia's market share, but consumers have been consistently disappointed by Nokia's high-end offerings, sure the N95 and N900 are great but the N93, N96 and N97 were all pretty awful IMO. Hopefully Intel and Nokia devote their full attention to Meego, if they don't then i see it ending up like Maemo.

Available to the privileged few.

[Microlith]

Google did a bang up job kneecapping open source efforts in the mobile space, convincing the community to chase after an environment that discarded pretty much every existing open source tool in the name of NIH and withholds new versions from the community until their partners are done getting their releases out with it.

Then they sit back and have the nerve to tell us that Android is "open" while users are forced to jailbreak and deal with vendors [motorola.com] that try [samsung.com] to cripple devices so they can leverage later versions as a selling point for the next carrier contract.

I hope that MeeGo takes off with non-asshole hardware vendors, if not the we might as well right off the mobile computing space as being property of Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

Re:Available to the privileged few.

[linuxguy]

Before Google "open" mobile platforms were a bad joke. I wanted them to succeed. But no hardware manufacturer or carrier took them seriously. Some companies like Motorola did build very bad phones based on Linux but they were very closed devices. Google comes along and gives you a platform that is completely open, gives it away for free. Do whatever the hell you want to do with it. Many vendors like Motorola take the bits and build phones around it. Most of these phones are locked. But you can hardly fault Google for it.

If somebody builds a device with Linux that you do not like, do you blame Linus Torvalds for it?

When I was in the market for a new phone a a month or so ago, I narrowed down my choices to:

iphone/iOS
Blackberry
Windows Phone 7
Android

Tell me, which one is the most open platform of them all? For me, I decided to go with Samsung Epic and have not regretted that decision for a minute. It is easy to root the phone and install whatever the hell I want on it, including my own damn Linux kernel.

I am thankful that Google is here. I have a crop of very capable devices running Linux to choose from. Without Google, these options would not be available to us. Give credit where credit is due.

moving to fast

[josepha48]

I think android is moving to fast. In the last year we saw 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and now 3.0. I think they need to scale back to annual releases because phone makers don't or can't keep up and then people end up upset because they are not on the latest version of the OS. Also not everyone wants to root their phone and install some cyanogenmod version or other hacked version. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with people doing that, but the average phone user wants to buy a phone that will not be out of date in 6 months. I also realize that not all android phones suffer this, but there are many that came out with 1.x last year and still have not been upgraded to 2.x and many wont see 2.3. When apps stop coding to the 1.5 version and 1.6 version as many are doing that makes a phone that is less than a year old outdated and then upsets customers. If you are on a 2 year contract then you screwed after 6 months, you will probably not be doing an android phone again and now that iphones will run on verizon this could be trouble for android.