Droid/Android

[Trent Shipley]

Craig White wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 15:27 -0700, Trent Shipley wrote:
>   
>> Well, it seems like the list has come down to two major desktop distros,
>> Ubuntu and Fedora and as far as I know neither is commercial.  There was
>> a time when Mandrake, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, and others were all looking
>> at the desktop as a potential market.  The survivors seem to have headed
>> for big servers or special cases.  Meanwhile, a lot of activity has
>> opened up in sub-desktop consumer Linux, most notably with Google's
>> Android and Chrome.
>>     
> ----
> I think that Android and Chrome serve different purposes than the main
> stream Linux distributions - they are intended for lighterweight
> hardware, smaller cpu, smaller screens etc. and thus far, telephone and
> similar devices and netbooks have been their target.
>
> There clearly is a need for both lightweight desktops and full featured
> desktops.
>
> Any distribution looking to sell a Desktop OS is going to have to ramp
> put the technical support for it because people will have questions and
> expect answers. 
>
> I gather that some of the early release images of Chrome have been
> dominating the torrents lately.
>
> I would like to point out that I just got a Moto Droid the other day and
> it is an extremely complicated device and I'm still discovering things
> about it. 
>
> I thought at first it was curious that before the dude at the VZ store
> would hand me the telphone, he downloaded and installed 'Advanced Task
> Killer (Free)' and wanted to show me how to use it. I didn't need the
> demo, I understood what it was for but apparently at some level, VZ made
> a decision to teach people how to use these things because they are also
> holding classes on Android (one of my friends bought one and was very
> grateful for the class he went to).
>
> But I will point out things I didn't realize until after I got the
> Droid...
> - Evolution calendars sync rather well with Gmail calendars 
> - Evolution contacts can mount Gmail contacts and contacts can be moved
> or copied back and forth (beware that certain punctuation like $/\& can
> cause problems) Not all fields work...but enough work
> - Evolution task lists however - fahgettabouddit
>
> It occurred to me that in this case, I was lucky because Linux desktop
> essentially already integrated support for Gmail while on Apple or
> Microsoft (especially Outlook), there are extra hoops. I also found when
> doing my google search thing for this, that the KDE PIM stuff can sync
> with Google but I don't use the KDE PIM stuff very much.
>
> Craig
>
>   
I'm stuck with a Blackberry, which is OK.  It sounds like your (Craig's)
experience jives with the reviews,  "Droid is a phone geeks will love." 
That means it's a niche product.  OS X is the best consumer OS I've
worked in.  I bet the iPhone still beats the Droid for *typical* user
experience ... except for the network thing which Phoenix iPhone users
I've known hate.