Question for PPL with Android Experience - General Questions and Answers

I have a HTC Touch Cruise and it is dreadfully slow. I was waiting for the X10 from Sony and thought that would be the new phone I will go with. First it is large, beautiful screen and fast. Secondly, it is on Android which I hope is better than WinMo.
However, a colleague just showed me his iPhone and it is sweet. I never really played with one before because I do not like apple's prison policy, but looking at this it is nice:
* FAST - it runs fast
* Plays movies and music beautifully
* Controlls his popcorn device remotely.
* Accesses his QNAP NAS wirelessly to stream movies and music
* The games he has are GREAT for himself and the kids (Risk, air hockey, monopoly, fighting and shooting, etc)
* The video podcasts and the TV shows he can watch is nice way to spend your traveling time
Even though I dislike the apple prison and the lack of multi-tasking in the devices, they look great and are full of features.
Since I do not have an android device yet, I cannot really see the Android marketplace to see what they have available - cuz the webpage does not show much .
I know not all companies have software for android yet ( For example, OptionTrading/Stockbrokers - ThinkorSwim.com & Audiobooks - Audbile.com), but is the rest just as possible with Android Phones?
But how much can the new Androids do? How many applications are already out there for them?
Does Android sych with iTunes?

Related

Will we ever see powerful applications on Android?

Now don't get me wrong there are a lot of brilliant apps on the market but it's rare that you find anything worthwhile. A lot of the "apps" are just rubbish soundboards or quotes or themes or other garbage. Why aren't there any media players or a PSX emulator or a N64 emulator even? They've been out on the iPhone, WebOS, Windows Mobile and even Symbian has it. Don't get me started on Maemo. I know Android is java based but surely it can't be that difficult to get any of the above working?
For example the HD2 can play DivX and has a working PSX emulator. All the Desire/N1 has is yxflash for playing DivX which is a pretty poor media player if you ask me.
This has all been discussed in the past. Search and you'll find the answer.
supremeteam256 said:
This has all been discussed in the past. Search and you'll find the answer.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Android is changing every day. The outlook and future of Android is being shaped every day. I amn't looking for an answer, i'm looking for a discussion so please get off your high horse.
I amn't some noob asking stupid questions, I know Android runs through Java and this is why intensive apps aren't as numerous. That's not the point of this thread though.
abc27 said:
Now don't get me wrong there are a lot of brilliant apps on the market but it's rare that you find anything worthwhile. A lot of the "apps" are just rubbish soundboards or quotes or themes or other garbage. Why aren't there any media players or a PSX emulator or a N64 emulator even? They've been out on the iPhone, WebOS, Windows Mobile and even Symbian has it. Don't get me started on Maemo. I know Android is java based but surely it can't be that difficult to get any of the above working?
For example the HD2 can play DivX and has a working PSX emulator. All the Desire/N1 has is yxflash for playing DivX which is a pretty poor media player if you ask me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There are media players. Plenty of them. Maybe you should look. And why would you want an N64 emulator? I don't even see the point in the NES emulator on the market now. Personally, handheld consoles are only things that should have an emulator on a mobile phone - especially on an all touchscreen one. MAYBE an N64 emulator would be cool on one with a physical keyboard. Also, have you EVER opened up the market AT ALL?! There are plenty of useful apps.
WTF is with all you people who expect Android to be the best even though it is practically brand new? How about you sit down and just wait for a little bit, ok? All these posts down-talking Android are just annoying. You haven't even let it develop yet, you just assume the first cake baked will the better than the rest.
And if it's so easy, go do it. Don't complain because someone hasn't met your wants yet. Suggestions work better than hammering. You grow a tree by planting a seed, not cutting it down.
r3s-rt said:
There are media players. Plenty of them. Maybe you should look. And why would you want an N64 emulator? I don't even see the point in the NES emulator on the market now. Personally, handheld consoles are only things that should have an emulator on a mobile phone - especially on an all touchscreen one. MAYBE an N64 emulator would be cool on one with a physical keyboard. Also, have you EVER opened up the market AT ALL?! There are plenty of useful apps.
WTF is with all you people who expect Android to be the best even though it is practically brand new? How about you sit down and just wait for a little bit, ok? All these posts down-talking Android are just annoying. You haven't even let it develop yet, you just assume the first cake baked will the better than the rest.
And if it's so easy, go do it. Don't complain because someone hasn't met your wants yet. Suggestions work better than hammering. You grow a tree by planting a seed, not cutting it down.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Whoa whoa, calm down
I wasn't putting down Android at all, i'm just curious as to why there seems to be so few "heavy" apps like N64/PSX emulators and the like. There are no GOOD media players, by that I mean a media player that plays DivX and plays it well. The only one I know of is Coreplayer 2.0 and development for that seems to be very slow. There are useful apps but there are far more useless apps or just pure rubbish strewn in the market. Far too much actually.
I never suggested developing these apps are easy but I don't even see many attempts at developing apps like that. There isn't enough variety in apps, for every app there are ten more trying to copy it. I just don't feel that i'm using my phone to it's full potential.
At least we're free to have/develop Apps like Emulators and Media Players, unlike a certain Fruity Smartphone.....
chrism_scotland said:
At least we're free to have/develop Apps like Emulators and Media Players, unlike a certain Fruity Smartphone.....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol @ fruity smartphone starting with "i"
abc27 said:
I know Android is java based but surely it can't be that difficult to get any of the above working?.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Time for a technical reply
I put several emulators on the market (search 'shagrath') and believe me, this is not so simple. The current state of native development on Android is very early. Meaning you have to implement a lot in Java (not really a big deal, but you can't reuse code done by other people in Qt/GTK/SDL/whatever), and there's no real APIs to access video hardware in a fast way, except OpenGL, which can be ok on some devices, but slow on others (N1 i'm looking at you)
I'm sure this has something to do with Google making things right before opening up better APIs. After all, the goal of Android is to support many hardware components/SOCs (system on a chip), while keeping compatibility of older Android apps. On the other side, the OSes you mentioned are all based on a single combination of hardware/software or so (except WinMo maybe ?). Better, a lot of them are breaking compatibility in their newer versions (Meego, WinPhone7, Symbian^3), because you can't keep crappy APIs forever
So, in a nutshell, a really good video player will not come before Google ship new APIs (I guess the CoreCodec guys have done all they could and are now waiting for them)
PSX and N64 support has more to do with motivation and code resources, because we have access to OpenGL on Android. I've yet to see a good Mobile PSX emulator other than Fpsece on WinMo (which is closed source, and will likely never be ported elsewhere). And both PSX and N64 emulators on Maemo are slow.
I haven't read through the whole thread but a few of the Samsung Galaxy line of phones are suppose to come with a pretty good built in divx player for android phones. For a general media player the music app for the Motorola Cliq XT is one of the best I have seen for Android.
Well there are emu's for:
NES
SNES
GBA
Genesis
GBC
We(Android community) have Quake 3(runs quite smoothly on small maps) and Quake 1 running, as well as doom (zdoom to be specific if memory serves me correctly). N64 emu is currently being developed by scottgl. We have web servers, DLNA servers, remote RDP clients (although no servers to the best of my knowledge).
I do agree that there has yet to be a really strong video media player on the Android, again as mentioned above, that’s due to API support (or lack thereof ).
I fail to see your problem, Android has plenty of great apps! Unless you think the omission of a few thousand fart apps means no great apps......
Maybe money is the issue?
In my view Android does currently lack large quality applications in some areas particularily media players. Many of the apps have an amateurish feel to them ( no offense guys but that's my honest opinion).
I suspect a significant factor is the difficulty in making money from the Android Market. Developing large scale polished apps takes a lot more time than the average hobbyist developer has available and since it's considerablely more difficult to make a decent income (compared to the Iphone market) we end up with a large number of lower quality apps as the developer/s stops after a while without a financial incentive.
IMO. The lack of some sort of quality control mechanism and easy moneyization ( E.g. charging apps to the Carrier bill ) may prove to be one of Android's achilles heel
abc27 said:
Now don't get me wrong there are a lot of brilliant apps on the market but it's rare that you find anything worthwhile.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Depends on what your definition of "worthwhile" is. Frankly, I've had a G1 for two days and it has been better in many areas than my iPhone 3GS (which I still own!).
abc27 said:
A lot of the "apps" are just rubbish soundboards or quotes or themes or other garbage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, that's just not true...
From what I've seen (which hasn't been much yet), Android is indeed lacking on the media front. However, there are two things to consider here: (a) The iPhone makes a really good iPod, and (b) Most Android devices do not double as dedicated music players; they are meant to be smartphones through and through, which sacrifices many things on the media front.
This was a problem on practically anything that wasn't the iPhone, but as someone mentioned here, Android is in quite an early stage of the game. It literally just got "decent" after Eclair, which was released, what, last year?

T-Mobile G2x, stock android?

so i was reading this article
http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/articles/T-Mobile-G2x-with-Google
and it says "Powered by a stock version of the Android™ 2.2 operating system", does that mean there's no bloatware and it's just like the Nexus? if so, there seems to be no greater phone than this one.
The G2 is stock android and it still has some bloatware not a lot but its still there. This will probably be near stock experience just like the G2!!
Seems like a great phone tho!!! But im sticking with my Nexus, there is nothing like a google supported phone!
Edit:
These are all the apps that will be preloaded on the device
* Need for Speed™ SHIFT HD, developed by Electronic Arts (EA), is an award-winning, authentic racing game that combines the true driver's experience with real-world physics, pixel-perfect car models, and a wide range of authentic race tracks.
* DTS Ultra Mobile™, which includes two innovative audio technologies – DTS Envelo™ and DTS Boost™ – for a premium surround sound experience. When listening to music or playing games on the T-Mobile G2x, customers will enjoy rich, enhanced sound that adds depth, dimension and volume levels that are robust without distortion.
* A demo of Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance - N.O.V.A., developed by Gameloft, is a fast-paced sci-fi action game in which players operate as Kal Wardin, an elite soldier established to protect humanity from alien threats.
* T-Mobile TV, offering live and on-demand TV including news, sports and full-length entertainment, plus full episodes of your favorite shows.
* Zinio eReader, the largest online newsstand, enabling customers to shop for, search inside, read, share and save digital content in new ways with more than 75,000 digital magazines from 26 countries.
* T-Mobile Video Chat powered by Qik™, enabling video conversations with friends and family through T-Mobile's network and Wi-Fi.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/22/lgs-t-mobile-g2x-announced-available-later-this-spring/
Stock Android but I prefer by updates being handled and maintained by Google especially with open sourcing kernels etc.
Although, LG does look really good in the Android game. If they live up to updating their phones in a timely matter. They're definitely going to gain the respect from the Android modding community.
bcl0328 said:
so i was reading this article
http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/articles/T-Mobile-G2x-with-Google
and it says "Powered by a stock version of the Android™ 2.2 operating system", does that mean there's no bloatware and it's just like the Nexus? if so, there seems to be no greater phone than this one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I owned a G2 and it looked like stock android but it totally wasn't. Cyanogen actually commented on this issue when porting CM6 to the device, he said it was not stock android and had lots of htc elements in the build. You will only find stock on the n1 or the ns natively
JD
Sent from my Google Nexus Magic Wand S

Remote Play from PC,Gamecube,PS2...etc to android?

Hello, I've been looking for a way to do this for months but haven't had any success, so I decided to finally post my question here.
The PSP has a homebrew app called PSPdisp , that could remote to a PC in real-time, lag free. http://www.jjs.at/software/pspdisp.html
Is there any way to get something like this in android where we can view and control our games from the EVO without lag or stutter? I'm sure we have the speeds to do it Evo's 4G speeds are about 8Mbps on average (in my area), and my home connection is 16Mbps
This would be great for playing emus not available or not capable of running on android.
I don't know how hard this is to accomplish, looks like a very fast vnc server to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q1b1iNgl8M
Not exactly mobile cloud gaming, even though we aren't too far from that either (see Onlive)
Something more like StreamMyGame, I want to have my PC running a emu, lets say dolphin running Legend of Zelda WindWaker, while VNC'ing (if thats a word) to it over the great interntz to the SuperSonic or Xoom. You know it just streaming video to me and me sending it commands with every button press.
Heres a vid on some of its features http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZd3h...layer_embedded
I'd even be willing to commission or "donate" to someone to port the homebrew app to android if its allowed on these forums. The source is available.
Glad you took my advice and posted this in here buddy. I'm bumping this for you since I'm interested as well.
~ d3rk
I doubt if lag free mobile streaming will be produced within the near future
Am using Teamviewer for other stuff though and that piece of dontmakemesayit is the most stable one I've found. Lags like hell and sometimes there is like 5-10 second delays before the screen updates, but at least it doesn't crash or lose connection completely
Yes, I have tried just about every Remote Desktoping tool in the market I can think of, but none are fast enough, I think the psp homebrew works because the dev made a video card driver that mirrors/clones the screen to the psp.
...I hope some great dev answers this call...
I'm looking for this too. PSPDisp is really great. I hope something similar like PSPDisp go to our android. Playing PC Games or other consoles emulator(Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube) on android sounds fun
I just wish they made a ps2 emu for android. I just want to run vns on it so I really do not need a lot of power...

GTab Dreams

We all know everyone dreams of a supported Gingerbread or Honeycomb setup. What expectations do people have for tablets? There are many possibilities for these things. If you could design you own OS or launcher replacement what would it look like? For me I would really like to see a nice selection of themed home screens. A home page, sports page, a movie page, a music page, a games page. Id like to have an all sports page that had all sports tabbed at the top like most sports web sites. Then some scrolling sports scores. Then some sports news below that. Also be able to click on a game and get a nice run down of the game like when you view a game on nfl.com or yahoo's site. I know there are a lot of world news and rss feed widgets and apps but i would also like to see something more streamlined. I would really like to be able to scroll through my media better. Movies with their IMDB image and description would be amazing. Also to be able to scroll through my music with the album art and a nice description too. And I would also like to be able to have something that managed emulator roms. It would be nice if the roms had a cover image and description too. Then if you click to play that rom it would open the correct emulator for it. Remember, this is just what I dream of, what I wish my GTab could be. What are your wishes or dreams for your GTab? Please share.
I wish...
I wish that my little Gtab would bring world peace!
Did this just turn into the Miss America pageant?
If one expects electronic devices to be like dreams expect them to be shattered because before you know it "the next best thing" is always around the corner. That being said I would like android to be more like windows os in terms of having a wider compatibility range (i.e. audio video support, driver support etc. etc.) I don't expect much out of these devices except to perform well & consistently. The customization part is just fluff but does add to the visual appeal.
This is something IMHO where the iPad shines, not very many bells & whistles but works great out the box.

OnLive viewer App..works great on the EVO! (caution...time vampire..)

Found this earlier while on the Nook Color forum...Apparently the app was ripped from a HTC Flyer. Anyway, It's pretty sweet to watch the Arena mode live games that are going on all over the planet...The brag videos are cool as well. Curious how the latest FPS runs on a fully optimized pc and server? Be sure to check out (finally) all the Duke Nukem greatness.... http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1138194 You do have to create an account (free), It's WiFi only, of course, and maneuvering thru the panes and choosing options is a little dicey on a 4.3" screen (better on a tablet like the Nook), but once you choose a game to watch, It works wonderfully. Apparently there will be a player app coming soon. Those with Roms that support HDMI out should DEFINITELY get this...Check it out.
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk
I installed it as well on non-rooted Android 2.3.3. I thought the video was a touch dark, and had a touch a video lag/drop frames/skipping. Though, those could be the phone or the connection to OnLive. Overall, none of it was anything to ruin the experience.
There is a preference on the phone that lets you set the data cap for bandwidth of either HD (3Mbps) or SD (1.5Mbps).
I did notice not all the games on OnLive were available to spectate such as Bordlands, NBA2K11, and Mafia II. This could be some kind of licensing issue.

Categories

Resources