Brandon Miniman
11-12-2007, 11:58 PM
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The UI isn't anything breakthrough - it seems to be a combination of iconic-based navigation from a main screen (think Palm) with pretty visuals including transparency and smooth animations (think iPhone).
It seems as if Google is putting the developer community in charge of making the Anroid platform compelling. Will it work? I think that once real devices start hitting the market (and at that point, it may be up to the hardware companies to include interesting applications *first*), developers may start to get involved.
One hang up I have about Android is that since it's open source, anyone can make software for it. This leads to lower quality software in most cases (think of Linux and all the junk applications that you can get for free), as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows, where there is a whole ecosystem of developers that make it their living to develop great software for a price.
The UI isn't anything breakthrough - it seems to be a combination of iconic-based navigation from a main screen (think Palm) with pretty visuals including transparency and smooth animations (think iPhone).
It seems as if Google is putting the developer community in charge of making the Anroid platform compelling. Will it work? I think that once real devices start hitting the market (and at that point, it may be up to the hardware companies to include interesting applications *first*), developers may start to get involved.
One hang up I have about Android is that since it's open source, anyone can make software for it. This leads to lower quality software in most cases (think of Linux and all the junk applications that you can get for free), as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows, where there is a whole ecosystem of developers that make it their living to develop great software for a price.