RIM Changes Stance On PlayBook's Android Support 112
hypnosec writes "It hasn't been long since the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion announced that its QNX based tablet device, the PlayBook, will be supporting Android implementation on it. However, it has been revealed now that a sizable portion of Android apps will be cut off from running on the moderately successful tablet device. The news thus leads us to a situation where Android developers might not be interested anymore in coming up with new apps for the QNX powered gadget. The Android apps that won't be working in the PlayBook include Android Live Wallpapers; apps that contain more than one activity tied to the launcher, the Android text-to-speech engine, and Android cloud-to-device messaging service, amongst a few others."
It's what they can do (Score:2, Interesting)
The limitations are pretty obvious, ya know? Without access to the closed source bits of Android RIM isn't going to be able to support some parts of the Google APIs and unless they want to turn the home screen over to Android, in which case it becomes an Android device that runs RIM apps, wallpapers and home screen widgets are probably out.
Of course this throws the hybrid model of Android into sharp relief. It ain't Open Source and it sure as heck ain't Free Software.
Is there a new problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, it sound like the opposite of open to cull features, but is this a question of even less software freedom or just about different non-free features?
I recently had my first encounter with Android and motherfuck! There were icons on the thing that I could not remove. That's not like any gnu/linux I've known.