Folks, check out these new stats from Nielsen Wire!
It tells us, that 71% of all Android users want to have an Android phone as their next phone. Though the iPhone users are even more loyal, their 89% number is quite normal for Apple users in General. However, there is not just one phone with an Android OS – there are a lot by now! Therefore, it is hard for Google / Android to provide the very same user experience on every Android phone.
Note: you might want to read the instructions of the author carefully, before putting this on your iPhone. However, the droids are conquering the world!
I am not really an open source developer, though I truly believe in that concept, I just don’t have enough spare time to put into it. Damn I don’t even have enough time to blog right here. Anyway, I was wondering if there are readers of you who develop Android application for the sole purpose of open source licensing. Apparently there are 357 open source projects for the Android platform existing by now. Most of them are not finished yet, but still, this is quite a number. I hope this number grows significantly this year. It will give the Android platform more exposure, more functionality and therefore, grow the platform to a level where it is widely accepted.
Are you an Open Source Developer? Leave a comment!
I just read that article Nexus One: Failure or a Late-Bloomer? I am bit confused by the article and wanted to share that. If I am wrong in any point, please feel free to correct me. The author says:
Slow and steady may work for the tortoise against the hare, but sluggish sales of Google’s Nexus One smartphone has the blogosphere calling its approach a failure.
First of all, the “blogosphere” (oh god, I hate this word!!!11!!!eleven!!!) does not care about sales. The real blogosphere one at least!
Secondly it is talking about:
it took Apple [...] 74 days sell one million units of the original iPhone back in 2007. [...] Google, meanwhile, has sold only about 135,000 Nexus One units, according to Flurry.
I don’t know where Flurry has their numbers from, but when I went to the Android Developer Labs 2010 two weeks ago, the official Google/Android representative was saying during their presentation that they are currently shipping 60,000 phones a day! I call that a success.
Today we had the last even of the Android Developer Labs ADL 2010 in Hong Kong – hosted by Google for free! I attended and I was more than surprised about how many Android developers and interested people actually showed up. Traditionally, the development community in Hong Kong is very small. Check out a part of the long registration line here:
And that’s actually after half of the participants already checked in. The venue was considerably crowded and I would say nearly 80% of the available seats were taken.
Below at the left side you can see a banner of the Hong Kong Google Technology User Group. Seems to sound like a nice idea, if you want to know about that, check it out here: Hongkong GTUG
As I didn’t follow previous ADL events I didn’t know that every registered participant gets a free Nexus One. To my surprise, Google had a big box with loads of N1 devices and I got another one – for free! Check out the developers lining up for the free Nexus One:
Below you can see all these dudes with white Nexus One boxes.
Nice event Google! The best step is definitely to give developers free phones. You can have the best simulator / emulator, but it is always a different experience when you run your application on a real phone. This is very important proper mobile application development. You need to use your application on a real phone – only then you figure out what you actually did wrong. Google definitely understood this. Thanks Google.
It is done. Google Earth for Android has been published. I just ran it on my Nexus One and it seems to work fine. Very smoothly, nice 3D graphics and all the layers in there with your favorite restaurants. Zooming in and out as well as panning in the 3D world works totally fine. Besides that it is not doing much, but it shows your current location on the earth, of course. Still, well done Google!
Though the Nexus One does not seem to be a best-seller, it seems it found its way into Linus Torvalds’ hands. You know, the “Finnish software engineer [who is] best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel and git revision control system” (Quote from wikipedia).
I already wrote some stuff about the Nexus One and even about unboxing my device. Now Linus has one too and guess what he wants to use it for? He didn’t get it for the phone function or messaging because that would be too distracting during work. Well, he is right. It seems his favorite is “Google Navigation”; perhaps I should check that out too, some day?
I just read that article on the Android Developers Blog about Live Wallpapers.
The interesting fact in there – which many people might not know – are the possibilities what we developers can do with such live wallpapers. Just imagine you have a massive screen in the background of the phone desktop where you can do pretty much everything with. Kind of like a separate application, but the user will always see it behind his normal icons.
It is a very neat concept which you won’t find on the iPhone (afaik, you might want to correct me if I am wrong). Developers like you and me could show most recent stock info on there (check out Google Finance APIs), a list of the latest Google News or something else. You are only limited by your own imagination here. So hack attack and get freakin’ going!
Perhaps you already read this notification on the Android Blog about the Android Developer Labs World Tour. Google’s Android team will go on a trip and tour the world and host developing sessions in quite some cities all over the world. So if you are interested to get direct info from the Android team and your hands on new hardware (probably the Nexus One) just register at the end of this article.
Share your Developer Labs Tour with us!
If you are participating in one of these sessions would you mind taking one or two photos and share them with us? I am sure, that there are quite some developers out here who are not living in one of the mentioned cities and cannot go to such sessions. I will be attending one at least will share my shots with you guys. So if you would like to share yours as well, check out the following short instructions on how to let me know of your shots.
Like mentioned before, I ordered a Nexus One. Just 5 days after ordering the phone, it arrived here (in Hong Kong). The phone’s box looks kind of like an Apple product box. Plain white, not much written on there and a bit stylish. However, it doesn’t reach the Apple “stylishness”.
It still looks nice and delivery via DHL was no problem at all. I could track the package since it started shipping from the US. Google Checkout showed that the package was sent out from “Google Phone Webstore” and then the DHL tracking stepped in and everything was easy going. Anyway, I hope the phone is charged soon so I can start playing around with it
Here are some unboxing photos in chronological order:
As you can see, the phone comes with:
Battery
US Power Cord
Micro-USB cable
Phone bag with little Android
From the last picture you can see that there are three little contacts. Though there is no docking station delivered with the device I guess this is for a future docking station (probably provided by HTC or other accessories manufacturers).
