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The mobile phone superpower you have never heard of

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: The mobile phone superpower you have never heard of

#11

Post by dhimes »

runjake wrote: post #10
Duff wrote: post #5

I think the relevance of technology like this is driven by the price floors of smartphones vs. not-so-smart phones. A pre-paid phone somewhat similar to the once $300+ Motorola Razr is like $20 at Wal-Mart. If a low-rent Android device is priced similar in a few years, skinnyed down mobile software won't matter.

RAZRs were just over $500 when they initially came out in 2004. I went into an AT&T store for an unrelated issue and there was literally a line out the door for people willing to pay out insane amounts of money for a status statement. I had a Nokia 3620 or something that would stomp circles around the RAZR, & I paid hundreds less.

I paid around $50 for my RAZR in 2006 (with a contract). As a phone, it's superior to my iphone 4. Doesn't do the other smartphone stuff nearly so well, though.

Re: The mobile phone superpower you have never heard of

#12

Post by juhanaj »

trotsky wrote: post #4

I don't really understand - they've got an application that will run android apps on feature phones and possibly dumb phones? It is really hard to understand how that could work very well at all - wouldn't those phones generally lack the ram and cpu needed? Would they be replacing all the UI widgets etc with simpler ones and adjusting how much is shown on the screen at once? Maybe it's actually a porting tool - that…

It's not meant to be run on dumb phones. http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/myriad-alien-dalvik-runs-...

Re: The mobile phone superpower you have never heard of

#13

Post by jerf »

trotsky wrote: post #4

I don't really understand - they've got an application that will run android apps on feature phones and possibly dumb phones? It is really hard to understand how that could work very well at all - wouldn't those phones generally lack the ram and cpu needed? Would they be replacing all the UI widgets etc with simpler ones and adjusting how much is shown on the screen at once? Maybe it's actually a porting tool - that…

If I had to guess, I'd guess that the Android apps in question are implemented via a layer like Wine, and what it really gives you is an ability to target both a feature phone and an Android in one build target, rather than actually running in-the-wild Android apps on a feature phone, which even if it can technically do is probably not a desirable experience. Still, for some set of Android apps out there, what takes the CPU is mostly the graphical geegaws the core framework provides, and one could provide less processor intensive core framework geegaws just as Windows widgets have changed over the decades and you might salvage some useful apps that way, too.

Re: The mobile phone superpower you have never heard of

#15

Post by runjake »

dhimes wrote: post #11
runjake wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAZRs were just over $500 when they initially came out in 2004. I went into an AT&T store for an unrelated issue and there was literally a line out the door for people willing to pay out insane amounts of money for a status statement. I had a Nokia 3620 or something that would stomp circles around the RAZR, & I paid hundreds less.

I paid around $50 for my RAZR in 2006 (with a contract). As a phone , it's superior to my iphone 4. Doesn't do the other smartphone stuff nearly so well, though.

Yep, they rapidly dropped in price after the initial launch.

Here's an article about it, entitled "The Great RAZR Swindle":

http://gizmodo.com/#!210353/low-end-theory-the-great-razr-sw...

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