Really? and there was me thinking it was precisely so they could win a case brought against them by Oracle which they did.
You're not informed about that case, which was precisely about Oracle thinking that Google didn't have permission to make their own implementation of the Java APIs without giving them money.
The reason they went their own way has nothing to do with the GPL (only OpenJDK is GPL'd and at risk of patent suits because Oracle refuse to grant it protection) and everything to do with ensure their project couldn't have terms dictated by Oracle.
A GPL project enjoys patent protection and can have no field of use restrictions by virtue of the GPL itself. As for the fact that Google dislike the GPL, hear it from themselves.
Android doesn't use the JVM, it uses the Java language however. They've also never said they don't care about Java compatibility. You just made that bit up, because you're trolling, or stupid.
It's not them who said that. Google have always said clearly that Android development is based on the Java language. When the Oracle vs Google case was going on, it was a lot of people here on Slashdot who were saying that Android makes no use of Java the language, and that Google didn't need to copy the Sun APIs because they didn't care about compatibility with a language that they did not use, and whose ecosystem they did not take any advantage from. Not that I support Oracle's crazy stance that APIs can be copyrighted, it's just that I can't stand knee-jerk reactions to defend a company.
(By the way, so much for “Android does not use Java and does not care about Java compatibility”.)
A future-proof data signal (e.g. Thunderbolt, which can carry a signal fast enough that it won't be obsolete within a couple of years of release), that doesn't need to be supported by endpoints but can be detected and used if it is.
Micro-USB has the USB 3 signals. If you plug a Micro-USB 2 cable into a Micro-USB 3 receptacle, it will work at USB 2 speeds.
A widely-supported legacy signal (e.g. USB) so that it works everywhere
A Micro-USB cable will work literally on every cell phone not made by Apple nowadays. On other kinds of hardware, like tablets and cameras, custom connectors are still found, but even there Micro-USB is still the most common connector.
A lightweight mechanism for negotiating power demands and capabilities between supply and device.
There's the USB 2.0 battery charging standard: http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/batt_charging_1_1.zip
A physically sturdy connector, with a reference design of a socket that will stand at least 1,000 insertions and ideally 10,000 in normal use.
Compliant MicroUSB connectors are required to withstand 10,000 insertion/extraction cycles.
A connector that either has an orientation so obvious that no one could possibly plug it in the wrong way, or one that works in either orientation.
Here Micro-USB fails. It's even harder to figure out the correct orientation than it was for Mini-USB connectors. And that's a feat.
Any patents that cover the design must be licensed royalty free, so third parties can interface with it cheaply and easily.
That would be great, but seeing how cheap USB peripherals are nowadays, I doubt that USB royalties are the biggest concern of anybody entering the market of hardware manufacturing.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin