c0rt3x | # 181 | 2009-10-21, 19:07 | Report

Google needs the attacks, you can't honestly say Nokia is worse!?

DaveP1 | # 182 | 2009-10-21, 19:52 | Report

Nokia sold me an N810 that is supposedly open but can't be upgraded to the supposedly open Maemo 5. I knew what I was getting into but I'm sure some people didn't and Nokia never advertised the fact up to and including when they stopped selling them on their web site.

OTOH, Google sold me Google Notebook that they then canceled. I knew what I was getting into because, like any cloud service, nothing is guaranteed, so I was using it as a backup to data I had elsewhere but I'm sure some people were putting their life in there. Of course, unlike Nokia, Google didn't charge me anything other than a bit of privacy. Also Google provided a long warning that they were shutting off the service and nearly a year later they are still hosting the service on their servers for legacy users.

So they are both bad in some respects but it has nothing to do with the N900 and the Motorola Droid or with Maemo and Android.

GeneralAntilles | # 183 | 2009-10-21, 20:00 | Report

Says who, exactly? TI should be releasing the PowerVR drivers this week and Mer should be integrating them soon after. "Open" doesn't mean Nokia has to provide neverending software upgrades, it just means you're free to scratch your own itches.

DaveP1 | # 184 | 2009-10-21, 22:12 | Report

I understand and agree with you. An informed user can deal with Nokia's hardware and software strategy. An informed user can also deal with Google's which was my point.

I don't see the fact that Nokia is producing the N900 or Google is maintaining Android as pertinent to a discussion of the N900 versus the Motorola Droid. A valid point would be whether the N900 or the Droid will be upgradable in the future to Maemo 6 or Android 3. Another valid point would be the relative openness of the OSs when it comes to adding apps. OTOH attacks on Google do not add to my understanding of the relative merits of these devices.

cb474 | # 185 | 2009-10-22, 02:18 | Report

Well, that is complete a caricature of what I was saying, so it's not a serious response.

First of all, I was not knocking Google's overall universe of products and services. It's very impressive and should be appreciated, undertstood, and feared by all of it's competitors. Indeed, it's so strategically ahead of all it's competitors that I have consistently said, if you read all my posts, that I think Android will be the dominant mobile platform eventually.

My criticism of Google/Android is twofold. First, as others have argued, Android is not a completely open platform. This intrinsically poses limits on the options users will have and this will only increase in the long run, as users get more and more locked into the Google universe. Second and related, as we ought to all know from the Windows experience, once a platform becomes so dominant that it essentially has a monopoly, the limitations only increase and the possibility for competition falls by the wayside. This would be true for any platform, it just happens that Google/Android will be, I believe, the dominant mobile platform.

Now, if there has to be a dominant platform, I think it would be better that it be something more open like Maemo. Maemo's openness would allow for more choices and more freedom over what you do with your device, as the available products and services grow. Yes it's nice to have a slick highly integrated set of services like Apple offers or Google, but that always involves giving up a lot of choices (look at Apple's capricious review process for the app store, that has not gone without imposing limits on political speech). Also, Google's massive and ever growing data base of user behavior, cross referenced by IP address and no doubt every other way possible, should frighten anyone who remotely values their privacy. Google may be using it for purely commercial purposes, but history shows, it's only a matter of time before governments and other entities abuse access to this kind of information.

So I think these issues are worth considering, when comparing the Droid and the N900 and deciding which platform one wants to get invested in.

I also think we're probably living in the hay day of platform options right now. The market will narrow and we'll all look back at this time wistfully.

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Last edited by cb474; 2009-10-22 at 02:24.

qole | # 186 | 2009-10-22, 07:52 | Report

"Do you remember the time when Maemo and its children and variants had competition? From vendors trying to push closed solutions? It certainly made for some lively threads!"

c0rt3x | # 187 | 2009-10-22, 12:26 | Report

Everyone claiming slimmer is better easily forget why the N900 was thick in the first place. Does the Droid have (loud) stereo speakers? Does the Droid have a FM transmitter (or FM radio at all)? There's much more functionality in the N900, which the Droid simply lacks (due Android restrictments and lack of support, you have to agree about that Android is still an immature OS).

Even if Android's limitations won't be considered, it'll still be an inferior OS, due its Java layer on top of the Linux kernel, which leads to inefficiency.


In my opinion, the biggest competitor to the N900 (quality wise, not PR wise) is Samsung's future LiMo-lineup, but it looks like the N900 will still be (although slightly) superior. Android is nothing than a combination of Google and PR; it's a shame that it's even considered as an alternative to Maemo. Because of this, LiMo has been left in the dust, which is quite undeserved.

johnkzin | # 188 | 2009-10-22, 13:08 | Report

Actually, I haven't noticed any speed problems compared to my N800 or N810. Dalvik (not Java) runs quite fast. One of the differences between Dalvik and Java is ... Dalvik removes a ton of things that slow Java down.

Sure, a virtual machine language will always be slower than a native machine language, but that doesn't mean it's going to be noticeably slower (noticeable to the user -- which is all that matters, since we're not doing number crunching or protein folding, nor anything along those lines).

The idea that Dalvik somehow makes Android inferior is just silly. It's actually a strong point for Android, making for one app store no matter which underlying device platform you're running it on, yet with runtime speeds that are more than capable of keeping up with the user.

Enyibinakata | # 189 | 2009-10-22, 13:35 | Report

Well SAID !!

I'm astonished of the ignorance of a lot of people here. Dalvik != JavaVM, its a bastardised version of it and is highly optimised. Android also allows for native development thanks to the newly released 1.5 native dev kit NDK.

Actually Java syntax compatibility is a huge advantage as it allows for RAD and there are millions of Java developer out there which is why Android mkt place will continue to grow.

Maemo is great enough as it is no need to pull Android down.

tannin | # 190 | 2009-10-22, 14:07 | Report

Slightly old info, circa ~1.5, but from an android dev at a google presentation earlier this year, dalvik has some optimizations, but also some serious drawbacks compared to c. For example, the GC takes 100-300ms to run, which means you have to take dramatic steps not to alloc/dealloc memory while maintaining framerate (meaning java collections really can't be used).

The NDK is only callable through JNI (and JNI calls are 30% slower than local calls), and doesn't have access to the main API, so you're still working through java to an extent.

Choosing java as your primary programming language has advantages, but you'll never match truly native c for speed, and given the limited battery/clocks on phones, it makes it an odd choice. I guess allowing generally less-skilled masses to write apps outweighs the performance implications, but it's why I'm torn between the Droid and something faster,