23. jan. 2012 13.15 skrev Hui Zhang <[email protected]>: > Hi all, > I am considering one important question: What is Mer's advantage over > Android? In technical point of view, in marketing point of view, etc... Any > are appreciated:) > > In 2012 Q1, an important task for me is to convince TV vendors (even > chip vendors such as MSTAR and MTK) that Mer can replace Android well. > If I can say something about Mer's advantage, it will do great help.
A very big question :) On technical point of view, we have advantages such as: * Our source code is always available and accessible, so you and your company can see what direction the Mer stack is going in and influence it. In Android, not even partners in Open Handset Alliance (except maybe the people doing a lead device) gets to see the source code before release. In practice, this means that any contributions you may do to Android will likely never get merged as the source code that exists externally may have moved on significantly internally. * Ability to use most open source software and libraries out there with ease, as we are implementing a full set of POSIX APIs as we use glibc. Android's bionic only implements a subset and doesn't implement things like C++ exceptions. * Mer is designed to be a core for many different kind of mobile devices, while Android is built with focus of being for handsets - just remember the difficulties with Honeycomb and enabling tablet usage. * Mer is optimized for ARM using the Linaro GCC 4.6.2 toolchains and deliverables, giving bleeding edge performance optimizations, while Android is currently is on 4.4. * Mer is flexible, you can pick and choose what components you'd like to include in an image - and is meant to be ultraportable to many different kind of devices. The idea is that you can with ease switch hardware adaptation, or UX and spread across many kind of different devices. * Mer supports multiple application stories, C, C++, HTML5, QML, JavaScript, etc. * Mer can take full advantage of graphics acceleration through GPU, especially with Qt5's scenegraph work. As well as multiple graphics backends, X11, wayland, DirectFB, etc. * Mer tries to make life easy for vendors wanting to make Mer products - as well as having a organisation that allows people to work together without the project giving preferential treatment to certain partners, or abuse influence to gain preference in the OS to a certain company's products, both chipset, internet services or phones. We also support easily ramping up bigger and multiple teams to do parts of Mer-based products. * Mer is a cost-saver, it enables you to take full advantage of a mobile Linux distribution without having to maintain a big team to have it maintained for you - just share the work with others. Some might say that it not being Android is an technical advantage - but I think it's also useful to look at the disadvantages. Things that are good about Android but at same time bad for the ecosystem in general: * Low footprint due to bionic libc usage, but it makes it incompatible with much of current open source software * Good hardware integration with many boards, but it makes life difficult for anyone wanting to do anything besides Android based products, as it's tied to the special libc .. hope that helps a bit. The good thing about Mer is that it's a quite small stack for running Linux/Qt/HTML5 on a lot of different devices. And that it allows a lot of flexibility in how you make your product(s) including how to easily save effort in development as you can use same methods and cores even if you're making a small STB or a full smartphone. BR Carsten Munk
