To answer your question about using a phone for develoment, I use a ZTE Racer - cheap but fully up to the job.
However when it comes to findout out why a program crashed the emulator with logcat output is for superior from proving information about the state of variables, etc, than any real phone. Just my thoughts.. On 09/06/2011, Davide Ronchi <id...@idave.it> wrote: > Hi all. > > I am about to start an Android development project. I would like some > advice before starting with the project. > > First of all, I have done some research on which phone would be the > best to do Android development. I have seen many suggestions, but most > people seem to point at the Google Nexus One (or its UK equivalent, > the HTC Desire). I was wondering if there is anything more recent that > is as good as the Nexus One. I have seen people suggesting the Nexus > S, but I'd rather not use a Samsung phone for the reason I'll explain > below. Also, the HTC Desire S seems to have a signed bootloader, and > I'd like to be able to tinker with the OS if I will need to during the > project (this is not a commercial application, it's more of a research > project, so it's ok if I need to modify the OS). The HTC Desire HD > seems more like a modern alternative to the Desire, but I have found > no one suggesting it as a good, modern developer phone for Android. > Any other suggestion? > > For this project I will need to triangulate the user's location using > GSM cell info. Problem is that sometimes, we will need to triangulate > the position *after* the phone has lost signal (i.e. the user has > gotten into an underground transport system). I was thinking of two > possible strategies to do so: > 1. write an application that stays in the background and uses > LocationManager + LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER to receive location > updates from the network provider and then use the latest known > location > 2. log all the cell IDs I see and use the last few ones (together with > their known location) at a later time to triangulate the user's > location > > Strategy #1 has the obvious advantage that it is supported by most > Android phones and works reasonably well for what I need to do. > Problem is, it will drain the user's battery. Even if it is relatively > cheap to use Network Location instead of GPS to locate the user, I > need only to locate the user when he/she enters the public transit > network. If the user goes out of town, my application will keep > querying the location provider for nothing. > > Strategy #2 works reasonably well for my purposes, as I suppose the > phone will see a different set of cells depending on the entry point > (and therefore it might not even be necessary to do the actual > triangulation, I could build a database of (Station Name, Set of > visible cells) tuples and consult it without even bothering > translating that into actual coordinates. Also, logging the cell > information is something that can be done substantially for free, as > the phone already has that information and I am only reading it and > discarding it if I don't need it. Trouble is, in this case, that I > have seen that the function for doing this on Android don't always > work well on all phones. I know, by reading previous posts on this > forum, that Samsung phones don't support getNeighboringCellInfo(). > Also, many *other* phones don't support that function. > > I was wondering: is there anyone here who knows of a current phone > that supports getNeighboringCellInfo() *for sure*? > > Thanks, > Davide > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
