On 2011-08-10 20:08, Larry Colen wrote:
I'm not so sure that Android is the right choice. I also don't know as if camera companies would want their firmware on a standard OS where users could have a chance of reverse engineering and adding their own improvements. How many of the features in the K-5 rather than the K-r are software only, and could be added to the cheaper platform if someone had a decent chance of reverse engineering, or rewriting the firmware?
You mean like "jailbreaking"? The phone companies have the same problem, but they're moving forward with Android because they need an alternative, any alternative, to iOS (since Apple won't license it to them at a price they view as reasonable, or at all) and the market window is too narrow to create their own replacement. Some would argue that they've already missed the bus and ceded the market to Apple due to lack of foresight, being left with playing "catch up".
And, frankly, talking about Android as if it's a monolithic thing is senseless. As you note, it has to be customized to every platform, and lots of the customization goes in binary-only, non-GPL packages for every one of them. That's life in the embedded software world. "Pico platforms" don't have the resources to be as profligate as desktop apps have become. It's not so much the compute power as the memory, storage, and bandwidth to both of them plus the network. But they're getting there.
And every model has it's own hardware specific "fancies" determined by what was a cheap, off-the-shelf, easily integrated circuit at the time the model was designed. But those are the features that set the model apart from its competition (at least theoretically) and absolutely /must/ be supported by the phone's firmware.
The analogy it reminds me of is that Android is trying to do for phone software what the IBM PC did for commodity hardware: define the extent and form of the commodity. The PC did it by publishing the BIOS source code and hardware/software interface specs, and /de facto/ establishing a public programming interface for the software that would ride atop the hardware and BIOS.
So Android gives implementors leverage, but it doesn't come close to solving the whole problem for them, at least if they actually want their product to be obviously differentiated from its competition.
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