Google Releases the SDK For Version 1.6 of Android 69
Qwavel writes "This release includes improvements to the Android Market, the Search Framework, and Text-to-Speech. It now has support for more screen resolutions and CDMA phones. Android 1.6 is based on v2.6.29 of the Linux kernel and is expected in phones that will be available next month. The mystery of Android 1.6, however, is Google's continued unwillingness to commit to a Bluetooth API and any Bluetooth functionality beyond the basic audio functions."
Grr (Score:2, Insightful)
I want real Bluetooth :(
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I really would Kill to be able to use my Android phone a a Bluetooth Keyboard and mouse, Just the convenience of being able to control my Living room PC from my phone would just be awesome.
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fuck it.
I will continue to ssh to the host and use xautomation's send keys when i doing anything other then using vlc's ncurse interface
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Why the hate towards bt? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I wonder if it has something to do with the support for BT in the base kernel source? I did some looking around, seems like it's well supported. Maybe there's more to that story though?
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I'm sure that Google could have finalized their Bluetooth API by now if they wanted to.
The scary thing is the idea that Google might be considering going the same route as Apple: a proprietary Bluetooth protocol that they can license and control, rather then supporting the Bluetooth standards. That wouldn't be like Google, but it is otherwise hard to understand their hesitation.
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The scary thing is the idea that Google might be considering going the same route as Apple: a proprietary Bluetooth protocol that they can license and control...
That's the first I've heard of any such thing. A quick Google search seems to indicate iPhones work with regular bluetooth, offering a moderate selection of services. I know iPods communicate with a proprietary protocol over wi-fi when talking to Nike shoes of all things, but I've never heard of proprietary bluetooth being used. Do you have a link?
Re:Why the hate towards bt? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to create a peripheral or software that works with the Bluetooth of the iPhone or the iPod (excepting the basic audio peripherals) you have to apply for Apple's "Made for iPod Licensing" program.
http://developer.apple.com/ipod/apply.html [apple.com]
If you need a Bluetooth chipset supporting the Apple protocols you can buy them from CSR.
http://www.embeddedstar.com/weblog/2009/07/28/csr-ipod-touch/ [embeddedstar.com]
If Apple can achieve the sort of dominance in the consumer smartphone market that they have achieved with their iPods then this will pay off very well for them. They will make money from licensing and other companies phones won't be able to communicate with iPhones/iPods.
On the other hand, whether they are successful or not, this is bad for their users. This being /. I probably don't have to explain why standards are good.
At this time, if you want to e.g. sell a Bluetooth garage door opener for smartphones (yes, this really exists) you could support it on RIM, Nokia, MS, and even some LG and Samsung phones. I hope that Android phones join this camp.
I'm interested to see some of the things that people will do with Bluetooth now that the quality of the hardware and software support is getting good enough (it wasn't good enough on a lot of the older phones). It would be sad if the lure of proprietary were to curtail the potential of Bluetooth.
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That's the first I've heard of any such thing. A quick Google search seems to indicate iPhones work with regular bluetooth, offering a moderate selection of services.
I wouldn't call it a 'moderate selection', the iPhone support for BlueTooth is quite limited. It supports wireless earpieces and headphones, but stereo audio was only recently added in the 3.0 update.
The audio support is not complete, because only a couple of devices seem to work, and then the play/pause/volume buttons will not work. I'm speaking from experience; I recently bought a beautiful Sony-Ericsson bluetooth headset [amazon.com] only to find out that the iPhone cannot change the volume (always has it ru
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We do understand there is demand for a Bluetooth API, and it is a top priority for the Android Bluetooth team.
And the Android Bluetooth team consists of who, exactly? Sergei's dog? A team of wombats?
It could be that Google is avoiding the entire "we don't allow tethering" firestore by simply taking it one step back and not providing bluetooth, so making tethering technically infeasible.
Tethering (Score:2)
I have no problems tethering with my Samsung Galaxy out of the box. No root access required, no special applications. It provides a serial (over USB) interface to its internal modem, just point pppd to the proper device and it works.
(To enable it: Settings -> About phone -> Additional settings -> deselect "Mass storage only")
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Still, it needs a cable. Not as simple as the BT that everyone thinks of when tethering.
You have me almost convinced, but I'm still partial to the development wombat theory.
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I didn't realize there was a problem.
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2002 called...
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Why is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Many higher end smartphones already support WiFi. Bluetooth is still great for connecting user interface devices like headsets/mics etc. But for the other things you mention, WiFi is better.
One of the posts above quotes from the Android development team saying they understand there is demand for Bluetooth. Perhaps it is simply they feel there are more pressing priorities right now.
Could also be that their product manager feels that support for Bluetooth peripherals is all t
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Why is it that Android (and other cell phones) seem to have some obvious feature left out that developers are unwilling to fix?
It's Linux after all.
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Probably because bluetooth on linux is a godawful mess. Have you ever tried to actually use it? egads. Stuff that works on Windows in a second, I have to try pairing with Linux three or four times sometimes before it succeeds — if I can get it to pair at all. The underlying OS (Linux) needs to have support since Android is just a pretty interface and a JVM plus chosen classes. Putting a GUI on the existing tools is no fix at all, since they work so sporadically.
I hope Android comes together, I really
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If there was a phone with the openness of Android/WebOS, the polish of the iPhone, the large amount of networks like the BlackBerry, all in one phone it would sell like crazy.
You may be interested in this: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ [nokia.com]
To avoid the whole tethering fiasco (Score:1, Interesting)
If they put it in right away it would be easy to provide BT-based tethering to laptops, which a lot of cell service providers would hate and thus probably not allow android-based phones to be used on their network.
I bet they are waiting until there is widespread adoption of android on multiple networks before they add the functionality.
Already using 1.6 more or less. (Score:4, Interesting)
If your on a edgy modded ROM your likely using 1.6 (Cupcake) and some 2.0 (Donut) code.
(The latest experiemental Cyanogen ROM includes BFS (!) my first taste of the new scheduler on any system all I can say is the speed is mind boggling).
Delightfully, there is a glut of android phones on the way from various OEMs which should see the market grow and the code improve. Not that Android needs improving, in a year of having a G1 it never needed a hard reset, even with shitty crashing applications. I can't say as much for my iPhone.
Multitouch is coming to Android, now that Google is no longer affraid of Apple.
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Just FYI cupcake was 1.5, not 1.6
In any case, hacked versions of 1.6 are available right now, I'm running 1.6 on my G1... Firmware 1.6, Kernel 2.6.29-cm41, Build DCR63. Stable and nice so-far!
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Its irrating how slow development on the official Android source seems to be
But it isn't, it's just that Android is such an enormous project. The full source tree is a whopping 2.5 GB!
Multitouch is coming to Android, now that Google is no longer affraid of Apple.
Apple probably has little or nothing to do with it. To a certain extent, Android already supports multi-touch (for example, the zoom in/zoom out functionality in the HTC Hero's browser). Check out this article by Luke Hutch, the guy that originally unlocked multi-touch on Android.
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Absolute nonsense.
Steve Jobs got on a stage in front of an audience of millions and could not have made it any clearer.
"And boy have we patented it!" [youtube.com]
Oh oh look at all the "tinfoil hat" loonies who think Apple might actually sue someone. NO WAI. That's just a crazy conspiracy theory. It's not like they go on earnings calls and promise their shareholders they will sue anyone who...
Oh wait. NM! [macrumors.com]
Well, maybe we're still crazy and paranoid. Why wouldn't Apple just license one of their UI crown jewels to a competin
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Apps? OH yeah, lots of crashes. The OS on the other hand, never.
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Some corrections:
1) The Cupcake branch released Android 1.5.
2) Donut is the experimental branch of Android.
3) Donut is not "Android 2.0"
4) Nobody knows what Android 2.0 will be, or when it will come out.
5) If you're on a community ROM, yes, if you're using Donut code, by definition you are also using Cupcake code.
Carriers have significant testing requirements for phone software. Just because Android is open source and linux based doesn't mean you can take the linux geek approach and just release new versio
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(The latest experiemental Cyanogen ROM includes BFS (!) my first taste of the new scheduler on any system all I can say is the speed is mind boggling).
I don't believe a slightly different scheduler would make any significant difference in a phone environment. I think you are just imagining things. Feel free to do benchmarks.
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Do these unofficial builds include Google-sanctions apps such as Gmail, Google Maps, etc? Without those, the functionality of the phone decreases to near zero for me.
I'd rather have an N900 (Score:5, Insightful)
Android (and Palm's new WebOS) phones seem fairly cool but I'd rather use a phone that had more of the normal Linux userland. The FreeRunner [openmoko.org] still has lots of very rough edges but the new Nokia N900 [nokia.com] with Maemo 5 [nokia.com] looks really mouth-watering
.
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Re:I'd rather have an N900 (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I'd rather have an N900 (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the Native Development Kit (NDK) lets you build native code. There is a regular C/Unix environment underneath. If you look at a project like the Android Scripting Environment, they've managed to make Python, Ruby and Lua work on the phone, packaged as an .apk and not requiring root access. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ [google.com]
You can compile pretty much anything for the phone, without needing root/Debian, though its not always as simple as 'apt-get install', for sure.
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Hmm, that is simply not true. Can you call system, libc, audio or OpenGL (for example) functions from NDK? Nope. That means pretty much nothing will work on Android, except dedicated stuff that calls Java bindings back.
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Not only BT is missing. There's no calendar-app, and still no SyncML. Why? Even the Siemens S55 I bought in 2003 had a really pleasing set of Bluetooth-profiles, had SyncML, a calendar and J2ME... In my book, these are default, but required features. (ok, J2ME not so, since there's an alternative)
Google calendar was available on the G1 by default.
There are at least a couple of ways (Score:3, Interesting)
One way is to use the Native Development Kit, which lets you run regular C code on the phone. Here's a post explaining how to bind to bluez: http://blog.blackwhale.at/2009/08/android-bluetooth-on-steroids-with-the-ndk-and-bluez/ [blackwhale.at]
The other way is to use the existing android bluetooth API: http://code.google.com/p/android-bluetooth/ [google.com]
What that developer has done is use java reflection to wrap the existing (just not documented) android.bluetooth class API. I've been using it to communicate with an OBD-II adapter with some success (thought the dynamic port discovery API doesn't work entirely.)
For tethering, Wifi Tether works pretty well, since it doesn't even require the laptop to support bluetooth. It makes your phone a portable ad-hoc access point. Does require root access, for which there are some one-click solutions out there.
Waiting for a better technology? (Score:1, Troll)
Perhaps Google is hesitant to include a technology in Android that sucks as much as BT.
Google is just really bad at bluetooth (Score:1)
Great, now how about some standards support? (Score:2)