The SDK download includes a platform simulator, not played around with it too much but you can tweak available RAM, screen size, underlying Android version etc.

The SDK actually is an emulator, not a simulator, and it comes with a dozen or more device profiles and actual firmwares from some Google devices.

It runs quite slowly mind, but alternatively you can tether your actual phone to the sdk and run that way. You just select a device when you hit run. You can also debug stuff happening on the real phone, which is geekily awesome 🙂

Mmm.. that sounds cool.
Sorry for diverting the thread – please return to less geeky frothing.

Asus have announced that they will be bringing Ice cream to the EEEPad Transformer. 8)

mmmmmmm… EEEPad Transformer with Ice Cream Sandwich… droooooollll… sounds tasty 😳

After years in the wilderness, just ordered an Orange Monte Carlo, which if all the various discounts, cash back and extra Orange credit works out, should cost me £65. That seems a pretty good deal for a reasonable budget smartphone. After 3 months I can get the unlock code and go with a much cheaper tariff from giffgaff. It comes with gingerbread something or other, which I believe means I can upgrade to ice cream sandwich. So, I’m also very excited, if only I really knew what it was I was very excited about.

I like to think of the iPhone as the BBC Micro Model B and Android as the ZX Spectrum – one had the mass appeal, the other better design 😉

MIUI reckon they’ll have ICS available in less than 2 months. Hoping they’ll support the original Desire. I love that you can tinker with android phones.

B.A. – I have one of those. Seems prety good to me, though I don’t play games or watch vids on it so don’t really test its ultimate ossumness

They have a decent selection of beefed-up roms for it, maybe including overclocking the processor but (as you seem to know) no way of unlocking from orange yet without a delay and then paying 20 quid. you can root it though and then take off all the orange crap (like their “market” which forces you to use 3g to download apps rather than wifi, and the shitty version of mapping)

£65 is **** cheap – do tell how !! (mine was over 100)

And the advantage is that you can sell iOS apps for actual money

Only if you can get the things approved first!

I have the Android SDK open as I type. Android’s API is pretty frickin awesome. But it’s a pointless thing to bring to this discussion, since most of us do not develop for phones.

Indeed, are they opening up the telephony stuff yet? I seem to recall that there was a work-around so you could use the internal api but google weren’t overly happy and patched it in 2.3(?)

Just struck me that it must be a pain to try to test on all the different handsets with different capabilities, screen sizes etc.

THIS is a pita! However actually developing is nice and the tools available are pretty ace!

Anyway, sorry to drag that back in!

scaredypants, The OMC currently costs £119.99 + £10 Orange credit. £65 is purely hypothetical at the moment. There’s a Quidco deal, new Quidco customers get, £25 extra Orange credit and £15 cash back (£20 – £5 Quidco admin fee). On top of all this, I have Orange Broadband/phone, I was assured when I signed up to Orange broadband/phone, that I could retrospectively get £5 a month off my Broadband/phone if I had an Orange phone tariff, even PAYG. I’m not absolutely banking on all this, but in theory the net result, until I can go giffgaff (3 months), should be a net cost of £64.99.

£119.99 – £25 extra credit – £15 Quidco – £15 3 months off Orange bb/phone =£64.99

Same as you, I don’t play games or expect to play video online. I’ve always just had a mobile for emergencies and odd conveniences incl texting. Now, with internet, GPS/sat nav, MP3 music, FM radio, Apps for all sorts, it’s worth moving on and I also just don’t want to get left behind with technology. Seemed like a cheap way to get up to date-ish, at little cost.

Ice Cream Sandwich

‘snigger’

footflaps – Member
I like to think of the iPhone as the BBC Micro Model B and Android as the ZX Spectrum – one had the mass appeal, the other better design

Interesting take, except it’s fundamentally flawed. iPhone is one integrated unit; hardware and software designed to operate together. Android is a free OS forked across various versions and spread over a whole bunch of handsets made by a whole bunch of different manufacturers, many of whom have no interest in upgrading the OS for a given handset past it’s production life, relying on the skills of a few geeky nerds who are prepared to spend time hacking the OS, something 90% of the users have no interest or ability to do. Certainly among my extended circle of acquaintances I do not know of a single one who would want to do so. I do, however know a couple of dozen people happily using iPhones.

And have you owned an Android handset countered?

Hoping they’ll support the original Desire

I doubt the original Desire will ever get this new Ice-Cream Sandwich thing.
I don’t even think that Gingerbread was initially gonna be available for it, but read something about it being released after phone geeks were up in arms that it wasn’t gonna be.

It’s a much more involved job to upgrade to on the Desire than the previous upgrade and I’m pretty sure the same article said that there was not gonna be any more support for further updates.

‘s about the size of it.

HTC said they weren’t going to release 2.3 on the Desire because it wouldn’t support it. The flaw in that claim is that there was a shedload of cooked Desire ROMs running 2.3 quite happily by that point. So they pulled their face a bit and conceded.

On the back of that, I’ll be very surprised if there’s an official 4.0 release for the Desire. I wouldn’t be wholly shocked if a homebrew ROM or two appeared though.

Anyone got a link to a brief summary of what the extra features are?

Highly unlikely the Desire will get ICS (officially), partly as HTC are unlikely to bother building it for an outdated, discontinued phone, but also because it has a tiny amount of internal memory.
Even with android 2.2, it’s only left with a bit over 100MB to install apps etc. That’s why it was difficult for HTC to do the 2.3 upgrade.

I suspect that even if ICS fits in the 500MB or so of memory available, there won’t be any space left for apps.

That’s why it was difficult for HTC to do the 2.3 upgrade.

Plenty of hobbyists managed it by reserving an ext3 volume on the SD card and using that for app storage. I was running 2.3 with acres of app space for weeks before it was announced officially.

I can see plenty of political reasons for HTC not doing it, but few technical reasons (app security is the big one).

I love the way the cuddly, touchy-feely version names are reverting to three letter acronyms anyway!