On 1/24/12, Carsten Munk <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
>
Agree. As far as openness is concerned, Mer is better than Android.
> * 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.
Agree. As far as compatibility to linux community is concerned,
Mer is better than Android.
>
> * 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.
I don't quite catch this. What difficulites with Honeycomb for
tablet usage?
And as for TV, googleTV was announced May, 2010; And In 2011,
Serveral companies such as LG took android TV into account.
In this point of view, what does Mer provides?
>
> * 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.
I think Android can also use Linaro GCC4.6.2(or more advanced
toolchains than 4.4). Do you think that there exist some difficulites
for android to use Linaro GCC4.6.2 or alike?
>
> * 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.
Maybe android also can do this...? I don't quite understand.
>
> * Mer supports multiple application stories, C, C++, HTML5, QML,
> JavaScript, etc.
Yes, If Mer can do well in supporting HTML5 apps, that's very good:)
>
> * 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.
As for multiple graphics backends, it is Mer's compability advantage;
But how to understand "Mer can take full advantage of graphics
acceleration through GPU"? I think android's graphics acceleration
have already done a good job:)
>
> * 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.
Yes, agree this:)
>
> * 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.
Yes, it's right:)
>
> 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
Yes. Now a lot of people agree, they need something other than
Android, they need a good replacement for Android.
>
> .. 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
>
>
>
