Android (Re: Qtopia Vs. GTK or both?)

[Arnout Engelen]

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 12:25:26AM +0400, t3st3r wrote:
> as far as I understand, Android just a java-based crap which ONLY uses 
> Linux as low-level engine, without any native apps or UI frameworks like QT 
> or GTK.

Let's not start a language war yet again :). Indeed it looks like they 
wrote their own window manager, ui toolkit etc. with a Java API instead
of going with the `standard' linux libs. I suppose this way they hope to 
have more control to tune them to the needs of a mobile environment. 

> Hence it is pretty useless that it runs Linux and I see no real reasons 
> why Android will be better than "dumb dialers" running proprietary OS + 
> J2ME on top.

Supposedly, the whole stack will become open-source. If there will be
'non-tivoized' devices (where you can actually replace the stack with a
modified one), this gives you the opportunity to modify and extend the
framework. 

I think that has huge advantages over proprietary phones with J2ME. Even
in its current form, it looks like Android will provide application
writers a much better way to integrate their apps compared to J2ME - and
if not, you can hack hooks in yourself :).

> Linux has quite little use if there will be no real fully-featured apps 
> to use it's power 

The fact that it runs linux, in and of itself, is not what makes this
interesting. Indeed, there are many more phones running linux under the
hood (like the motorola	platform) - but without a good hackable
userspace this isn't of much practical use.

What makes Android potentially interesting is that the application
framework is also OSS.

> and Dalvik VM is actually, proprietary.

Hmm, do you have any references to support that claim? That'd suck,
Dalvik looks pretty interesting (also for Openmoko).

> being able to run Android\J2ME apps in addition to lightweight, fast and 
> featured native apps is a benefit which can turn device into a powerful 
> competitor on "smart phones" market.

Indeed. It appears they have a very developer-friendly SDK and emulator
environment. That's a huge advantage imho. For me, Android looks
potentially interesting, but not before until they've lived up to their 
promises in terms of open-sourcing it, and 'non-tivoized' devices actually 
materialize.


Arnout