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Dear Palm, it's just not working out

jwz.livejournal.com

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Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#21

Post by blasdel »

pavlov wrote: post #16
blasdel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N900 is full of cool hardware but it's 2cm thick , will cost $700+, and is unlikely to ever be available subsidized in the US. Edit: http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/nokia-n900/ - An early review Nokia is doing a full rewrite of Maemo for the upteenth time after buying Qt — the software platform is constantly going in different directions. They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they goin…

They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt? I don't see the contradiction there. Mozilla and Qt are at different levels in the GUI stack. (KDE is a Qt-based desktop, yet it runs Firefox just fine.)

You have 256mb of RAM to work with, most of which you would like to use for rendering webpages. Do you really want to blow a huge chunk of it on something that just gets you an inconsistent look-and-feel? A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.

Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#22

Post by gtufano »

TwoSheds wrote: post #10

Why does everyone think Droid is the only hope? Nokia's Maemo-based N900 looks promising as well. Their latest Symbian/series60 phones (e.g. E71, E75) are also pretty decent nowadays, although I would compare those to Blackberry rather than the iPhone.

N900 is a great platform, free as everyone is asking. The point is that is not for US because of the subsiding US people is looking to have. 700$ is the same price of an iPhone, the two are on the same league (more or less depending on the feature) but it seems that the marketing of 199$ + n hundreds $ in 2 years contract wins. The only reason I can imagine (not being in US) for this being reasonable is that there is no reasonable dataplan without phone "embedded in". S60 is OK from the user point of view (barring the UI from 1990), phones are cheap given the features, but programming for it is a nightmare...

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#23

Post by blasdel »

dcurtis wrote: post #18
blasdel wrote: post #6

It's too bad, I thought the Pre's card metaphor, along with its pervasive notifications and multi-input open-API contact/message/lifestream datastore was the best hope yet for a great multitasking handheld. The Verizon Droid is the only hope for an iPhone competitor at this point. It looks like it fixes all the hardware issues with the previous devices: * shipping the latest virgin Google build — no carrier or manufa…

WebOS, with its cards metaphor, is extremely impressive. The Pre is not. When Palm gets the hardware fixed/updated and the software optimized, I think they will have a very good Blackberry/iPhone competitor. The interaction and interface design in WebOS is great, and in some cases better than the iPhone. And RIM has shown that it is incapable of developing a good UI for touchscreen devices. All the things you list ab…

The only thing that really sucks about the Pre's hardware is the build quality. The battery life sucks because the software is too slow, wasting CPU.

You're right that I list only hardware features, save the point about the unmolested software. Android is kind of mediocre -- it's way too much like the Sidekick platform with a Windows Mobile strategy. I think it can get a lot better, but only if it gains a lot of users on good open hardware, where they normally get continuous updates direct from upstream and can try out experimental software on their own. It's the same with Apps -- Verizon selling millions of these without locking them down in their usual capricious manner could really get some high-quality shit in the app store.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#24

Post by blasdel »

davidw wrote: post #20
blasdel wrote: post #6

It's too bad, I thought the Pre's card metaphor, along with its pervasive notifications and multi-input open-API contact/message/lifestream datastore was the best hope yet for a great multitasking handheld. The Verizon Droid is the only hope for an iPhone competitor at this point. It looks like it fixes all the hardware issues with the previous devices: * shipping the latest virgin Google build — no carrier or manufa…

Oh come on. It's easy to piss on stuff that could be better, but Android is actually a fine platform to develop for, and plenty of applications are showing up. Sure, not as many as iPhone, yet, but there are some pretty cool ones out there. And it's not "the only hope" - there will be more Android phones out, and the whole thing will only continue to improve.

There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming)

That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) makes it particularly hard to just implement things yourself in 'userspace'.

People have been saying "there will be a glut of Android phones out in a few months" for well over a year. This is the first Android hardware that isn't obviously a pile of shit -- it's actually better than the iPhone in many ways! Now we get to see if the software can live up to it.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#25

Post by davidw »

blasdel wrote: post #24
davidw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. It's easy to piss on stuff that could be better, but Android is actually a fine platform to develop for, and plenty of applications are showing up. Sure, not as many as iPhone, yet, but there are some pretty cool ones out there. And it's not "the only hope" - there will be more Android phones out, and the whole thing will only continue to improve.

There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming) That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball byte…

> That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!)

It's pretty evident if you think about it: they wanted something open source under a liberal license (Apache/BSD rather than GPL), and so did not want to touch Sun's Java implementation. Therefore, they did their own thing, which is a much solution than hassling with Sun about licensing. I suspect we'll see performance improvements with time; it's not as if Google doesn't have the resources to create a JIT if/when they want.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#26

Post by jodrellblank »

wavesplash wrote: post #12

JWZ isn't being dramatic. The slogan should be "Plam Pre: your life, just slower". I had a Pre for a month, returned it on day 30. It was like living in molasses. Plus the hardware was way way too cheap (fragile plastic screen, sharp edges on the keytray, poor fit between the sliding halves). I was afraid to use the phone for fear of breaking it. You could hear the plastic crunching everytime you typed on the keyboar…

I was afraid to use the phone for fear of breaking it. You could hear the plastic crunching everytime you typed on the keyboard.

O/T: I'd like a concise term for this "author switches from 'I' to 'you' and ends up suggesting the reader's involvement where there couldn't have been any. (This reader couldn't hear the author's phone crunching).

It's like the reverse of the "royal we". Maybe the "common you" (meaning: I).

Hopefully after this drawing of attention to it, you will see and hear it everywhere and you, er, I can promptly forget about it.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#27

Post by NikkiA »

blasdel wrote: post #13
TwoSheds wrote: post #10

Why does everyone think Droid is the only hope? Nokia's Maemo-based N900 looks promising as well. Their latest Symbian/series60 phones (e.g. E71, E75) are also pretty decent nowadays, although I would compare those to Blackberry rather than the iPhone.

The N900 is full of cool hardware but it's 2cm thick , will cost $700+, and is unlikely to ever be available subsidized in the US. Edit: http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/nokia-n900/ - An early review Nokia is doing a full rewrite of Maemo for the upteenth time after buying Qt — the software platform is constantly going in different directions. They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they goin…

They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt?

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/08/nokia-helps-...

Says that they did the easy thing, mostly, and wrote a Qt backend for Cairo.

It also states that Firefox/Qt was usable over a year ago, but needed some more work on stability before it would be ready.

I don't see it as being a major obstacle to them at this point...

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#28

Post by scythe »

paulbaumgart wrote: post #4

I haven't tried the Pre myself, but if jwz's experiences aren't unique (most likely), it's really a shame. The specs don't look so bad- is it webOS dragging it down? It looks like Motorola's Droid is the best hope at this point to drive some innovatin' by competing at the level of the iPhone. Or is there another contender I've missed? Is the HTC Hero/G2 worth looking at?

If all webOS applications are coded in JavaScript (so I've heard; didn't look into it too much), the VM overhead could well be dragging things down. Even V8 is ten times as slow as Java or C#, and v8 isn't even available for ARM.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#29

Post by pavlov »

blasdel wrote: post #21
pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt? I don't see the contradiction there. Mozilla and Qt are at different levels in the GUI stack. (KDE is a Qt-based desktop, yet it runs Firefox just fine.)

You have 256mb of RAM to work with, most of which you would like to use for rendering webpages. Do you really want to blow a huge chunk of it on something that just gets you an inconsistent look-and-feel? A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming. Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is be…

A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.

What does Mozilla have to do with file picker dialogs? Firefox uses native dialogs on the platforms it runs on, and so does Nokia's Gecko-based browser on Maemo.

Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?

What's preventing them from switching to a WebKit-based browser when it's ready for production? Why should they have tried to squeeze that into the Maemo 5 dev cycle, when they already have a fine browser?

I don't understand your argument at all, because OS and device vendors switch browsers all the time as new alternatives become available. Mac OS X 10.2 still shipped with Internet Explorer 5 as the default browser...

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