Gaming on the Android platform has generally been terrible because of frequent, experience-killing pauses, and generally poor performance. The concurrent garbage collector offers to improve the former (including every existing game), while the latter is being dealt with by a much wider gamut of usability from the NDK, with optimized, efficient, lifetime-controlled native code that has the ability to manage and capture events, handle sound, etc.

Those two things are HUGE, and will help make up for the massive quality gap between Android gaming and entertainment relative to the iPhone. I seldom pull up a game on my Nexus One, but when I do it is generally a disappointment. Gingerbread will start the change away from that.

The success of Android has been driven by the fact that Apple held onto their exclusive deal with AT&T too long.

Oh bulllllshit.

Android has seem similar gains around the world, where the whole weak AT&T excuse (you know, a carrier that covers virtually 100% of the US population) has no relevance. In Canada the iPhone had a brief period where it shone, but now the Android devices are coming on very strong.

However comparing Linux/Windows on the desktop iOS/Android on smartphones is asinine. Windows was never locked down or exclusionary even remotely to the degree that iOS is. It was an open, free market for virtually everyone.

why add support for something that's going to cause a bad user experience?

Just wait until the dogpile forming on the Flash->HTML5 conversion toolkits have their way on the net. Soon your iPad will be grinding to a halt trying to running a bunch of evading monkeys.

No, seriously, it will. If you think HTML5 can drag your machine to the depths of hell, enjoy some of the HTML5 showcase apps. Of course, don't try the games because most of them rely upon keyboard inputs. Try that new Arcade Fire HTML5 video and see how that works out for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU

There's my quick and ugly Flash demo. There are speed slowdowns of videos encoded to target desktops (which are most Flash videos, while most HTML5 videos, knowing that the target is primarily iOS devices, target much lower complexity profiles and bitrates), and it is not an elegant experience, but I enjoy having the option of enabling it whenever I want to.

I have written complex javascript applications and can tell you objectively that javascript on the Droid (recently updated to Android 2.2) is orders of magnitude slower than the iPad.

Every empirical metric says that you are very, very wrong. The V8 engine in Froyo demolishes iOS.

Do smart phones really have a routable, unique IP? I always presumed that my smartphones were behind a mega-NAT.

It is hard to believe, but early in the era of the internet, we didn't have NATs, and the prediction was that we would exhaust the supply much, much quicker (along with the whole "everyone's toaster is going to have an IP address" predictions). Then NAT was invented, corporations installed it, and suddenly instead of megacorp needing a /16 address, they needed just a /28 or the like.

It's humorous that this keeps getting brought up.

For about a week-long period Verizon had a "two for one" special. Of course, the "two for one" included the requirement that you buy two contracts, weighing it at some $2500 of total spend per device. So, not really.

Seriously, the "freebies" myth has never been true, because a smartphone is never free. The pittance $99 or $199 that someone pays for an iPhone barely differs, and of course is ghetto cheap compared to the $550 I spent on my Nexus One. I guess I'm with the Elite.

Got to love it--some research

There is absolutely NOTHING demonstrating that this qualifies as "research". Quite the contrary in fact -- Yankee Group has a long and ugly history of PR piece "surveys" that can only possible yield a desired outcome.

Do you have any idea what the methodology of the study is? I suspect not.

As soon as the iPhone is available on other carriers, it's really over for Android.

In the rest of the world everyone carries the iPhone. They also carry everything else. In my country, Canada, the iPhone got a good lead but now the carriers are push and are far more interested in Android devices.

In the US it's always held like the iPhone would own the market if only they weren't limited to AT&T. I find that remarkably simplistic -- AT&T, tied for the largest customer base, completely ignored Android, and then went out of their way to gimp it, all while very, very heavily promoting the iPhone. If AT&T weren't so strongly committed to the iPhone, I doubt it would have the presence it has, more providers or not.

Though of course the tension grows between AT&T and Apple, and AT&T is now fielding the Samsung Galaxy S, a phone that elevates their Android offers manyfold.

I sent a query to the Yankee Group shortly after seeing that CNN article. The results are unbelievable: There have been various prior studies that found quite different numbers.

Even if you ignored prior studies, it is a basic human tendency to justify what you've purchased, making excuses for one's decision even against overwhelming evidence. Even if Android phones were shocking their users, I would still expect at least 2/3rds of users to claim that they love it.

And of course Android has been getting pretty damn decent. The majority of phones are running 2.1 now, and while 6 months ago you were a second class citizen with an Android phone, nowadays most major apps are doing parallel releases given the growth of the Android ecosystem. If Android made it through the ugly months, with mediocre hardware, quirky OS', and no software support, I find it hard to believe it would do so poorly now.

So my query to Yankee was whether that sentence in the CNN article was correct, and also what their methodology is. They didn't respond. Does *anyone* know what their methodology was?

I can say right now that the 20% thing, if quoted accurately, guarantees that their survey is completely tainted and is utterly worthless. Maybe they posted a voluntary survey at mac.com or something.

But nonetheless, every Mac/Apple/iPhone site and fanatic is posting the results to assure themselves that they're richer, prettier, more intelligent, etc.

Although to be fair, its an antenna that - when held a certain very specific and unusual way - is a little worse than the 3G, but when used in any other conceivable way is vastly superior.

Do you have actual metrics to back that up?

Straight from the horse's mouth, Steve said that the iPhone 4, with the "vastly superior" antenna, drops more calls than the 3GS. Clearly the holding technique isn't quite so unusual.

Apple's demonstration was unbelievably deceptive: They are implying that the problem is a death grip problem (which is actually usual). Steve went on to say that the 3GS had less dropped calls because people used a case, even though a case does absolutely nothing to stop the downsides of a death grip. The 3GS already, for all intents and purposes, HAD a case, so third party cases are irrelevant.

The problem is the external antenna, and a very casual, non-death grip causes the serious reception issue. There's a reason why no one else uses an external antenna anymore. Well, except for Apple who thought it looked cool. Only not so cool in a bumper.

I doubt you would. I have a 40 GB Fujitsu MPG3409AT-E hard disk from 2001 that is still running yet the so called best Seagate Pulsar - the "first enterprise-ready" SSD failed after less than a year of database usage.

So with your sample size of one you are prepared to make absolute statements about an entire technology?

Bottom line: Do not trust SSDs.

I generally don't trust any storage device, be it magnetic disk, SSD, backup tape, or burned DVD. I take the risk (and yield the incredible benefits) of SLC SSD because I already have reliability systems in place if one or more of them fail on me.

User privacy is why they curate their market?

Yeah, guy, Steve Jobs said it at D8. Feel free to do a search.

I believe the privacy angle you're referring is in

NO IT ISN'T.

Listen, I realize you might have a problem with threaded conversation, and you seem to be trying to mesh every comment with the submission, but that just isn't how it works. See, I was replying to someone who made a command, and this thread carried on from there.

Judging from your statements, it appears you didn't read the article

Are you new to Slashdot? You understand the conversational nature? You might want to get acquainted with theads and conversations.

The article is about hacked iTunes accounts with a stored credit card and the fact that hackers used them to purchase apps.

Fascinating. So you have inside knowledge on what happens? No, I don't think you do.

You seem to be confused, and should probably re-read the article. These apps are not scams, they are actually simple book apps, in and of themselves, unremarkable.

Did I say otherwise somewhere? If so, I apologize, but I'm quite sure I'm made no insinuation that these were any sort of exploit.

Instead they were just garbage fillers, used as a target for an exploit (the mechanism of which we have no idea of, though curiously lots of people are trotting out the Apple-can't-be-to-blamed simple passoard canards et al...which is curious because on any modern system you simply can't do dictionary attacks. Anyways...). I replied to a guy who made some argument for Apple's curation claims, and my point is simply that these "unremarkable book apps" have been widely noted as being trash (which is why it earned attention -- no one would seriously buy it). Curation indeed.