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Showing posts with label Android. Show all posts

iPhone 5 vs Android: why Android is better

Posted by ProAds Thursday, 29 November 2012 0 comments

The folks over at Entrepreneur have taken a stab at the ongoing iPhone vs Android battle. This time around they are focusing on the OS and have given some solid reasons as to why Android beats iOS 6 on the iPhone 5. Here are a couple worth highlighting:

iPhone 5 vs Android: why Android is better

Once you have chosen the amount of internal storage on the iPhone 5 , i.e 16GB, 32GB or 64GB, you are stuck with this as the iPhone doesn’t support SD card. Almost all of the Android devices do, so you can add on more storage once internal storage is filled up. The Samsung Galaxy S3 for instance supports up to 64GB extra via a microSD card.
Users of Android are able to choose which app they want to launch as the native depending on function. Be it the browser, email, caller and even keyboard, you can choose what you want instead of using the one that comes with your phone. With Apple you have to use their email app and for browsing the web you have to use Safari, by default.
Hardware: If you want the best there is the iPhone 5, and no other option. With Android you have a wide range of devices that come with a choice of processors, display size, different price tags, physical keyboards and other goodies.
The iPhone 5 comes with the Lightning connector while Android handsets can connect to the computer and syncs using standard USB cables, which are more readily available.
Widgets: With Android you can access vital information without having to launch an app. All the information is available via widgets. The iPhone 5 relies on a grid of icons which need to be individually accessed for information as compared to just having a glance. Android provides graphic weather updates, shows music album art and provides users with notifications regarding calls they have missed points out Entrepreneur.
ndroid is Google based and as such all of the services offered by Google are integrated into Android beautifully. This means that you will have no problem if you use Google Calendar as you can log into your account and the calendar on your handset will sync. Then there are other goodies such as Google Maps which Apple has removed from the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.

Source: by Mike Johnson

What is Android?

Posted by ProAds Thursday, 26 January 2012 2 comments

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. TheAndroid SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.

Features

  • Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
  • Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
  • Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
  • Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
  • SQLite for structured data storage
  • Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
  • GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
  • Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
  • Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
  • Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

Android Architecture

The following diagram shows the major components of the Android operating system. Each section is described in more detail below.
Android System Architecture

Applications

Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.

Application Framework

By providing an open development platform, Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications. Developers are free to take advantage of the device hardware, access location information, run background services, set alarms, add notifications to the status bar, and much, much more.
Developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. The application architecture is designed to simplify the reuse of components; any application can publish its capabilities and any other application may then make use of those capabilities (subject to security constraints enforced by the framework). This same mechanism allows components to be replaced by the user.
Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems, including:
  • A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, including lists, grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser
  • Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data
  • A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graphics, and layout files
  • A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar
  • An Activity Manager that manages the lifecycle of applications and provides a common navigation backstack
For more details and a walkthrough of an application, see the Notepad Tutorial.

Libraries

Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework. Some of the core libraries are listed below:
  • System C library - a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices
  • Media Libraries - based on PacketVideo's OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG
  • Surface Manager - manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D and 3D graphic layers from multiple applications
  • LibWebCore - a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view
  • SGL - the underlying 2D graphics engine
  • 3D libraries - an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer
  • FreeType - bitmap and vector font rendering
  • SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications

Android Runtime

Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language.
Every Android application runs in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine. Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM executes files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format which is optimized for minimal memory footprint. The VM is register-based, and runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format by the included "dx" tool.
The Dalvik VM relies on the Linux kernel for underlying functionality such as threading and low-level memory management.

Linux Kernel

Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.

Galaxy Nexus, Android.com and Google Music show beauty

Posted by ProAds Sunday, 20 November 2011 0 comments

Google starts a makeover. New smartphone (operating system), website and music store show the company’s future in mobile.


Take note Apple, Google is trying its best to win the beauty pageant mobile war by bringing a more polished smartphone operating system, operating system’s website, and the operating system’s official music store: Meet the new Galaxy Nexus, the new Android website and the new Google Music store for the Android smartphone.
The new set of improvements were implemented this month and it looks like the search engine giant is playing the “momentum game” inside the arena filled with beauty and intuition. The newest Android smartphone with the much-anticipated Android Ice Cream Sandwich arrived on Wednesday in the United Kingdom, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
The new Galaxy Nexus sports 4.65-inch Super AMOLED HD screen with 720p resolution, plus 1.2GHz dual-core SoC, 1GB of DDR2 RAM and the new ICS or Android 4.0 operating system. The available variant is the HSPA+ model, but customers here in United States are poised to get the LTE or Long Term Evolution variant that will run under Verizon Wireless.
Android's new Google Music, a win-win for Google.
Android's new Google Music, a win-win for Google.
On the same date, Google has launched the Google Music store in United States (even without the LTE Galaxy Nexus yet) which also supports the Android ecosystem. The new Google Music online store is slightly similar to the Apple iTunes or Amazon’s Mp3 store, but with a twist.
According to Google, buying to playback is easier using Google Music because the store is accessible online using the web browser or on mobile using a native app or the phone/tablet’s web browser. After buying song/s, Google will do the rest related to syncing, storing files etc.
And to kill at least three birds using one stone, Google is running a free song per day promo only available on the Android Market. So if you want free songs, you need a Google Music account and an Android-powered smartphone. Plus, you also need a Google+ account to enjoy the third feature because Google Music customers can also share purchased music files (stream only) via Google+. Three birds: Google Music, Android and Google+.
Lastly, Google showed off the latest official website of the Android operating system to add more excitement juice, the Android.com featuring new design, texts and other images that will surely give the geek-favorite platform its much-needed eye-friendly revamp (and not just codes and other geeky stuff).
The new website features the new operating system’s user interface sneak peek, features and notes about the platform’s more advanced support for applications to end the so-called Android fragmentation (see Google for more information). Apparently, the new Android operating system is the sum of the two older operating system versions, the Gingerbread and the Honeycomb. The new updates are Google’s steps as it stems fragmentation to compete with Apple’s iOS 5 and Microsoft’s beautiful but still not so popular Windows Phone.
Android still maintains a strong lead in the smartphone market share, largely due to the fact that the model offered by the platform is the “open-source” system and several device makers like Samsung, Motorola and HTC can take advantage of it. However, not all companies are treating Android’s openness as a positive advantage. In fact according to Nokia’s Stephen Elop, Android is fragmented because it is allowing OEM customization (ex: Sense, TouchWiz), while Windows Phone is a more unified and more beautiful user interface. He said:
“In terms of (Windows Phone) doesn’t allow for the Sense UI or whatever, I would suggest that one of the biggest challenges facing that particular ecosystem is the fact that there is more and more of that going on. And when I go into the store and look at what that brand was supposed to stand for, I’m not quite seeing it — it’s just unclear what the standard is for the user experience.”
Elop’s argument obviously came from the heart, but I’m not in the position to comment about it because I find Samsung’s Touchwiz (the version running on the Galaxy S II) to be very helpful especially in Gingerbread. Instead of being laggy and very intrusive, it actually adds nice and much-needed features that I sometimes wish were available in stock Gingerbread operating system. Apparently, the Android 4.0 is making TouchWiz or HTC’s Sense an irrelevant software.
Either way, the new wave of Android development is not actually related to Apple and its intuitive and less-geeky operating system, but the Android 4.0 is big response to stop Nokia and Microsoft from getting its much-needed double-digit market share score. According to the latest tally, Windows Phone is stuck at single-digit market share here in US

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