[OT?] Android phones

[Christopher Browne]

Durn Android mail client topposts ;-(

There's bits of unfairness to how the issue is perceived.

Yes, there are 4 versions of Android in the wild.  But the last 2
versions are only just over 2 months old, so it's hardly fair to bash
deployers that have multi-month marketing flows!  It takes time to
announce things, let alone pushing phones thru the assorted flows
reasonably required by carriers:

- They need the phones certified by FCC (US)/DOC (Canada)
- Phones need to be tested by the carrier
- They need to negotiate pricing and such with sources
- They need to arrange the logistics of deliveries of phones, and if
they're aggressively hawking "latest and greatest," they're fighting
with other carriers that would like to be first instead
- They need to set up all the "branding stuff" that is *always* done
with phones, including:
 - Setting up custom firmware with logos and such
 - Having the hardware vendors "paint on" (or silkscreen, or whatever)
logos onto the plastic

There's enough work involved in this that it's a risky endeavor to ask
to get some software release pushed in that was only released by
Google 8 weeks ago.

2.1 was only released in mid-January, and even 1.6 is only 6 months
old.  For most kinds of software, 4 releases in well under a year is a
*lot* to try to manage.

Few OSS projects attempt remotely similar...  Think about release rates...

- Ubuntu tries twice yearly, which is way way less.
- Ditto for Fedora.
- Debian is closer to every 2 years :-).
- I think of Postgres - about annual.
- GNOME does roughly semi-annual releases, as does KDE.

Four releases in a year, with FroYo being close to making #5, is a
daunting gauntlet to run for everyone involved, including the poor
carriers trying to deploy phones.

Now, I'm not *very* sympathetic to carriers, overall - they tend to be
rich, paranoid, control freakish sorts of organizations, with plenty
to dislike.

But to claim there's no challenge in tracking "bleeding edge" versions
of Android is silly.  I find it fairly remarkable that Verizon is in
the position of being able to push 2.1 onto some of their deployed
phones now.  To make that work (and it hasn't yet - the process is
only just beginning) required some "pushing of heaven and earth" on
the parts of both Verizon and Google.

But there's also plenty, plenty, plenty of reason for Google to press
to "push heaven and earth" to get 2.1 deployable on substantially all
of the deployed user base, because that would, indeed, substantively
undermine the validity of the arguments made in that referenced
article.

FYI, I picked up a T-Mobile G1 on the weekend, as my Palm Treo's
screen got cracked up last week.  The G1's running version 1.6, and
the reason to find it interesting (versus more "domestic" models) is
that it allows me to be agnostic between (Rogers, Wind, Mobilicity) as
carriers.  Am liking it a fair bit; it's a *huge* change in that it's
basically 5 years newer than my last phone :-).

The ecosystem is rather more open than Apple's, which seems a good
thing.  (It's still apparently safe for people whose idea of an
"application" is a menu for selecting pictures of "bikini babes" :-).
That is a mighty lame cheap shot to throw at Apple, of course!)

A notable difference versus Apple is that there is a viable set of
applications that present very different user interfaces from what
"comes standard."  Apple has a clear history of being doctrinaire
about what The Right UI On Our Machine should look like.  There are
some interesting alternative UIs emerging on Android, which seems like
a good thing.

My worst problem at this point is getting the huge population of
passwords from GNU Keyring to something like KeePass.  I'm not finding
answers that don't involve losses of parts of the data :-(.  Oh,
well...  It doesn't have to get fixed instantaneously.
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