I bought a Galaxy Tab for the professional angle, I'm working on Android software part time and as Romain Guy said at the Android BOF at Devoxx, all the Google dev team use hardware for development rather than the emulator. It's been useful to get something that is a different form factor to a phone, as well as being 'not vanilla' - although Samsung seem to have turned the web browser into something really buggy so I now use Firefox instead which is a good experience (though no Flash as yet, I'm not sure that's a minus).
I'm not sure how easy it will be with current Android to write something that will run on (say) 1.5 but take advantage of 3.0 features. I've been playing with the hot spot API which is not in the developer API but can be got at with certain tricks and the experience has been revealing. First of all I got my code to compile by putting a stub class in the classpath ahead of Android - this got my code to compile but the runtime choked on it immediately stating that a method I was referencing was not available. I think the only realistic way of achieving this kind of graceful degradation is to write proxy classes that use reflection. In this way, the proxy class can establish which API methods are available and make use of the ones available without causing the runtime to spit out your code. This is the approach I used with the hot spot API and it's been quite successful - I can deploy a home page widget to a 1.6 phone and it will report that mobile hot spot is not supported, rather than just blowing up spectacularly or (if I were to publish it) not appear in the app store to pre-2.2 phones. Contact me if you want some code samples, I'll zip up the project and send it to you. On Jan 10, 12:30 am, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > At Las Vegas the 10" tablet Xoom by Motorola received much of the > spotlight. So far, I've resisted in wast^H^H^H^Hinvesting money for > buying an Android tablet such as the Galaxy - I don't personally need > it, but I professionally need it to understand the application model, > etc... Of course, I can only afford buying one and my residual doubts > are about the form factor. The Xoom is just like the iPad, thus a > segment whose success is sure; but maybe smaller form factors have a > meaning too. What do you think? Apple is supposed to release the iPad II > in a matter of weeks and if only another 10" is released, this should > remove any residual doubt IMO. > > PS The Xoom is supposed to hit the shelves in Q1 2011, but at Las Vegas > Motorola only "demonstrated" a mock > (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/01/motorola-announces.ars). > > PS2 Reading around, I'm a bit worried again about fragmentation. Xoom > will run on Android 3, but will it be possible to keep a single > application that is still backward compatible (say, with 1.5) on regular > phones and at the same time take advantage of the Android 3 features > required for a tablet? > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici -www.tidalwave.it/people > [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
