Google Android

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Fair enough. But there are events they can't predict - I still think Nokia buying Palm makes fantastic business sense (webOS with 500 extra programmers working on it could easily be the equal of iPhone OS in every area where it doesn't already match / beat it), and if that were to happen we'd likely see a large chunk of the Symbian share being replaced by that. And nobody a year and a half ago had any idea AppStore would turn out to be such a big deal.

I don't know if Android will have much of a price advantage over iPhone for phones with similar hardware features (i.e, fast processors, lots of memory, and large capacitive touchscreens), though - remember, the iPhone is likely to continue vastly outselling any single Android model, meaning Apple's economies of scale will beat out those of HTC / Moto et al, and Apple's probably making enough money from AppStore alone to fund iPhone OS development at this point (much of which tends to be AppStore-centric anyway; most of the big 3.0 features - push notifications, In-App Purchase, parental controls, clipboard, etc - were designed to help third-party software), so the per-phone software cost is trivial. (and it's not zero for Android users, who still have to do at least some customization even if Google's giving the OS away for free) At the extreme low end they might be beaten on price by domestic manufacturers in China, but those customers aren't likely to be buying much third-party software anyway :)
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
For those looking for a simple offline Chinese dictionary for Android check out * which was released last week.

Supports simplified and traditional characters as well as searching by hanzi, pinyin or English. It uses the CC-CEDICT dictionary.

Its available on the Android Market and is free :)
 
R

rumination

Member
Thanks so much for the notice, but it's not showing up in the Android Market for me. :(

I'm in Hong Kong and I know that your location can affect what shows up in the market. I've tried searching the web and the developer's website for a download of the app but no luck so far. I'll keep looking...
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
rumination said:
Thanks so much for the notice, but it's not showing up in the Android Market for me. :(
Click to expand...
Strange, its showing up here in China and I would have guessed that would be the least likely place!

The Android Market has been a bit temperamental recently so hopefully it will be available soon...
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Fragmentation, fragmentation, fragmentation, that's my big worry - the expansion into multiple devices with lots of manufacturer-specific customizations / hardware specs may be great for Android's visibility, but it's going to create all sorts of headaches for developers. Customers are going to be ticked off when the app they purchased for their G1 doesn't instantly work on a Droid, and doesn't work on their Barnes & Noble reader for several months (or longer) (or ever, if the developer's lost interest). Software written for iPhone that doesn't rely on any device-specific hardware features can basically be expected to work perfectly on every iPhone / iPod Touch model released so far, and assuming (as I am) that the Apple tablet runs iPhone OS that'll just mean that developers have to support two hardware configurations instead of one, but small developers simply won't have the resources to purchase every piece of Android hardware out there for testing / development.

Of course "worry" may be a bit inaccurate, since regardless of what it might mean for the mobile industry, for purely selfish reasons it would be an absolutely fantastic thing for Pleco if Android were to crash and burn miserably - my dream scenario is that in two years, iPhone OS and Windows Mobile 7 are ruling the world and RIM and Google are resigned to fighting over a few scraps. Though sadly that seems rather unlikely at this point.
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
The android emulator is actually rather good. I haven't heard of many developers buying multiple phones for testing. Indeed, many release products having only tested on the emulator. The emulator is not quite perfect (though extremely close), but its good enough that there really is no need to buy multiple phones.

Starting from Android 1.6, there is proper support for multiple screen sizes. For pre 1.6 apps, which assume 320x480 resolution, everything is scaled up for larger resolution screens. This is completely transparent to the app. For apps compiled 1.6 or later, there is a pretty simple way to make an app support multiple screen resolutions/densities. Its not like you have to define a new UI for each possible screen configuration.

For things like hard vs. soft keyboard, this requires almost no effort on behalf of the developer.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Interesting. I wouldn't necessarily rely on that trend continuing as the Android hardware space expands, though - Windows Mobile used to be rock-solid for inter-device compatibility too, but then HTC, Samsung, et al started putting their own elaborate UI enhancements on top of it and now there are a lot more device-specific bugs / usability issues. And Windows Mobile doesn't provide nearly the room for manufacturer customization that Android does.
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
I think its a bit different now with the recent explosion of app marketplaces. If a manufacturer releases a device and customizes it in such a way that a significant proportion of the most popular apps are broken in some way, then it will get bad reviews.

Now, I may be wrong, but I would imagine reviewing a new iPhone or Android device would involve installing a whole bunch of apps, whereas for Windows Mobile maybe just a few very popular ones.

FYI, take a look at how Android allows apps to work on multiple screen configurations:

http://developer.android.com/guide/prac ... pport.html
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That depends on how much awareness there is of Android among consumers - from our perspective at least, we've had a lot more people write us to ask if Pleco works on some specific Android phone model (without even mentioning Android) than we have had people ask us about Android support in general. Heck, a lot of people still aren't aware of the fact that iPhone and iPod Touch can run the same software.

The carriers are likely to push their branding over Google's as much as possible - T-Mobile's ads for Android phones in the US don't seem to mention Android at all - and HTC / Moto / et al are customizing their phone UIs so dramatically that it's not easy to tell from a glance that they're running the same OS, so many consumers may not even be aware that two different phone models are both running Android. They'll just know that they have a touchscreen phone with an application store, and if an app doesn't work on their phone they'll simply dismiss it as not being available for that phone. (and not blame the developer any more than people blame us for not having, say, a Symbian version of Pleco)

Android's multi-screen-configuration API looks similar to a lot of other mobile OSes; the problem with all of these schemes is that they tend to favor static / resource-bound UIs (so all of our resizeable toolbars / customizable buttons / etc have to handle screen scaling on their own) and there's not much they can do for bitmap images. (we have three different versions of every single icon on WM to accommodate 240 / 320 / 480 resolutions) A big part of the reason why our iPhone UI looks so much cleaner than our Palm / WM one is because we were able to design it for exactly one screen size; on Palm/WM, in many interfaces we waste a ton of space because we're laying them out statically and hence have to design them for the smallest possible screen, so people with big stretchy 800x480 screens on WM or 480x320 screens on Palm end up with a lot of needlessly cramped interfaces.
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
Consumers may not know a phone is running Android (although I really think that most of those buying now, do know), but reviewers certainly do and they are the ones who would highlight compatibility issues with the apps. The question is how much attention do consumers pay to reviews...

Out of interest, do you use (or have you used) 9-patch images?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's the question, yeah. And more specifically whether the reviewers they listen to are likely to test a lot of apps - the tech blogs certainly would, but the David Pogues and Walt Mossbergs of the world might not, or at least might not treat it as a major issue. Thinking that consumers might not either, which is certainly a possibility - there's been a lot of talk about how Verizon's ads for the Droid mention a bunch of iPhone limitations that the average consumer doesn't seem to care about, like the lack of open app development or of multiple applications at the same time.

There's something similar to 9-patch images used on iPhone for stretchable button backgrounds; it's a perfectly good system for certain sorts of things, but for complex icons (anything other than straight edges / boxes) it really won't do the job.
 
S

Slimmage

Member
I am not that technically savvy, but I just got my Motorola Droid and can promise that it definitely competes with the iPhone. Android is the natural product for the millions of US customers who are stuck with Verizon Wireless because of their network but ache for a reasonably good smart-phone. I was that customer until last Friday. With a great Droid phone, a really nice HTC device at only $100, and lots more coming next year, I can't imagine Android not being a great market for Pleco.

Mike, maybe you should hire a junior developer to help accelerate development?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It'd be a lot more than a junior developer - to get a full-featured (flashcards/reader/etc) Android version out by the end of 2010 I think realistically we'd need two or three people working on it full-time (none of whom will likely be me, since I loathe Java), and it's very hard to justify that kind of effort to reimplement the exact same thing we've just painstakingly developed on iPhone on another very similar platform that some people happen to like better. (see my many other posts on Android / Symbian / if you go far back enough Windows Mobile for more on how much I hate software porting) And also a platform on which one of the coolest features of our iPhone version - multitouch handwriting recognition - would be missing, at least in the US where Android phones don't support multitouch, and the prospects for several other features like Live Mode seem bleak. (and the prospects for getting text-rendering performance up to the standards of our iPhone version even bleaker)

There are all kinds of really cool things I'd like to do with Pleco - desktop companion software, new and innovative approaches to things like example sentences / sentence learning, grammar, text-to-speech, easier-to-use and more powerful flashcard tests, nifty component-based character input methods, and so on, not to mention lots of new things we'd like to license (Chinese-to-something-other-than-English dictionaries, specialty dictionaries, Chengyu dictionaries, classical dictionaries, etc), and any resources we apply towards porting Pleco to new platforms are resources we're not spending adding features to what we already have. If we'd spent the last year working on Pleco 3.0 instead of an iPhone port we'd be in a whole new realm now features-wise.

In theory, porting ought to more than pay for itself in extra sales, but Pleco's a special case because so many people base their hardware purchasing decisions on what can run it - with Windows Mobile at least we found that our sales didn't really increase as a result of offering a WM version, sales just gradually moved from Palm OS to Windows Mobile, so now we were supporting two platforms instead of one but not really making any more money at it. I'd like to think iPhone might be different, and if it pushes us into a new stratosphere sales-wise that would certainly improve the case for Android, but if all iPhone does is cannibalize Palm/WM sales and grow our overall sales by a modest amount it'd be very very tough to justify an Android version. Particularly with the increasing likelihood of iPhone showing up on Verizon in 2010 in conjunction with their LTE rollout.
 
G

gato

状元
iPhone's exclusive with AT&T may end next summer.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09 ... _year.html
Apple expected to offer iPhone on new U.S. carriers within a year
Apple's worldwide single-carrier exclusivity model for each nation is seen as fleeting, as a new report suggests the iPhone could be available for carriers other than AT&T in the U.S. within a year.
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
Even the Hero has multi-touch, though its only from the just-released 2.0 (Droid has this), that the SDK supports it (including Pinch and Zoom):

http://phandroid.com/2009/11/03/motorol ... ulti-touch

You can expect all Android devices released from the new year to come with 2.0 or later, and most of the existing devices (including the Hero) to be easily upgradeable to 2.0. So, by the end of 2010, you can expect some percentage in the very high 90s of android devices supporting multi-touch. I would be very surprised if there is not a freely available handwriting recognition IME by then - so you wouldn't even need to write one.

As for existing users migrating from one platform to another... In the case of moving away from Palm or Windows, its a pretty easy decision to make, because both are, IMHO, very poor mobile OS experiences. On the other hand, I can imagine a lot of people would hate to move away from iPhone OS or Android, because they are more than happy with what they have and they've probably already purchased a bunch of apps (like Pleco) tying them to the platform.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
But not in the US - it's specifically disabled, likely over fears of Apple patent lawsuits or due to some un-discussed agreement between Apple and Google. http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/04/some-more-perspective-on-the-droid-and-multitouch/

As far as migration, given the choice between putting out two very good products for Android and iPhone, or putting out one product for iPhone that's so good that it compels even people who are very happy with their Android phones to switch (perhaps picking up a cheap first-gen used iPod Touch on eBay in the meantime), I'd eagerly choose the latter - the goal here's to write great software, not to have it run everywhere.

But as I've said, Pleco for Android might happen if iPhone sales suggest it'll be able to pay for itself rather than simply draining sales from other products. So ironically, the best way to get Pleco ported to Android may be to buy an iPhone :)
 
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westmeadboy

榜眼
That link explains that the Droid DOES support multi-touch. Its just that the browser, maps app and soft keyboard do not. But US Droid users are indeed enjoying third party app multi-touch functionality. This is all that matters in terms of multi-touch for Pleco.

Any Android 2.0 device with multi-touch hardware capability will definitely support multi-touch. Its in the SDK.
 
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