Droid/Android

[Joshua Zeidner]

   anyone try this?  http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Android

 -jmz

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 5:45 PM, Trent Shipley <tshipley at deru.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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