Google shaves half a gig off Android Poundland Edition Google's "Poundland" Edition of Android – Go – has received an update to 9.0 Pie. Google leaps on the platform formerly known as Firefox with $22m splurge for KaiOS READ MORE Not to be confused with Android One, which is really a marketing program for full fat Android, Go Edition is a small footprint version of Android …
I can see some of both sides here:
I can see the benefit of a an E-Ink tablet for reviewing and annotating text. From there, being to use Android apps and services to share the results with collaborators would seem to be a reasonable use-case. More niche are paragliders who like their GPS on E-Ink, for visibility in bright sunlight.
For just reading some fiction on the beach, Android is likely overkill.
Android is pointless on eInk Readers and maybe only to make vendor "spying" easier.
The eInk is inherently only suited to reading and annotation, yet most are useless for actually getting the notes back to PC. Yet they put things like share note/higlight to Facebook, but not email nor ability to easily read back on per book basis.
I've an Android tablet and phone. The phone is convenient for reading eBooks, yet I've not found a single really good (i.e. actually better than Kobo H20, Sony PRS350 or Kindle eInk) ereader app.
The ability to search, organise, categorise, import the books is terrible. New eReaders in some cases worse than early ones. Homescreens almost dedicated to marketing. Worse than 1980s document management systems.
No point in Android apps in general on an eInk screen. They are best for reading. They could do with better reading apps and book management. This has not improved in 12+ years.
I've used maybe nine models of eReaders (one oddly was LCD not a tablet like Fire) and tried loads of Android apps. Aldiko not too bad.
I should not need Calibre to manage my "library" and eReaders.
May sound obvious but is there any way to get Android Go for regular devices?
After all, if Maps Go is 50% smaller than regular Maps, but only removes features a small percentage of users need....it could be pleasant.
Like how I run Lubuntu even though I don't have a low-powered machine, simply because I don't want or need the cruft the full-fat versions comes with...
Maps Go is little more than a link to a browser, something called Progressive Web Apps. So apparently yes, you can 'install' on normal Android, and you don't even need an APK file. It doesn't have navigation or offline maps though - the latter being well worthwhile if you have ample storage on your handset. Still, suck it and see:
https://www.digitbin.com/install-google-maps-go-incompatible/
Oh yeah, Symbian, the OS that wasn't well suited to lots of memory and graphics acceleration, causing its caretaker to be late to market with a Linux-based successor. It wasn't just Symbian that hit this bottle neck; the likes of Sony pushed PalmOS as far as it could go. Like Palm OS, Symbian didn't start out on telephones.
As a telephony OS Symbian was fine (though I remember one Nokia taking two minutes to open an standard SMS message) but most of here have mobile internet devices and general purpose computers that we merely call phones.
This post has been deleted by its author
I wonder what that equates to in terms of height of a stack of punch cards....
Wonder no more! A punch card can hold about 80 characters or 10 bytes. This means 500MB would take about 5e7 cards. There are about 143 cards to the inch. Stacking them in a continuous column climbs up 349,650 inches or around five and a half miles. YMMV (literally) depending on data storage format on the cards, rounding errors and other assumptions made above, and the amount of caffeine consumed immediately prior to digging this up.
Inches? Miles? Might I suggest you have a look here
I was aware of the page, but it would not run properly on my work machine. This theoretical stack of cards would soar into the skies a whopping 403 Brontosaurus lengths. Just picture 403 of these late Jurassic giants end to end and then imagine them floating snout to tail tip straight up* and you will be rewarded with a dubiously accurate image of this posited assemblage.
* You might want to imagine a sturdy umbrella or similar protection (see icon) because at least one of the beasts is going to go and from that height... well, let's leave it there.
> A punch card can hold about 80 characters or 10 bytes.
A punch card can hold 80 bytes. 'characters' is not 'bits'.
Some punch cards were smaller and 132 column, such as on System 3.
I could hold the operating system on punch cards for an ICL 1901 in one hand. It was about 3inch stack.
It's an OS for a device that does everything Windows XP can, more or less, so why expect huge difference? Its a 64bit OS designed with the internet, more than half a gig of RAM, video and hardware acceleration in mind. The only reason I would expect an XP install to be bigger is if it hadn't been shorn of drivers for a thousand printers and other hardware configurations.
Really?
Crap and erratic support on apps for copy/paste, printing, external storage, non-USA keyboards, custom key layouts, network resources etc.
It's more like Win 3.0. Barely, at least you didn't have to BUY a file manager for win 3.x.
Android is a work in progress that has been crawling in terms of developing useful to user rather than useful to Google features.
I switched to LineageOS a couple of years ago when our BOFHs tweaked Exchange in some diabolical way that the email app on my N9 didn't understand. Have to say that I was shocked at how user-hostile it is. My first ever smartphone (also my first ever mobile phone of any kind) was far and away the easiest to use. A Handspring Treo, it ran PalmOS.
-A.
I think the plan is indeed to ditch Java for the OS at some point, though I don't think that it will be replaced by FASM, not least because of the huge variety of SoC's that are expected to run. KolibirOS looks nice but I think I'd rather investigate QNX or RiscOS as possibile altermatives.
In any case, while shrinking the footprint is indeed desirable, the mere fact that 8GB ROMs are pretty much standard for the lower end and can still lead to devices with sale prices < $ 30 tells you that this isn't the bottleneck it once was.
If yuou're going to go to QNX, why not just bring back BB10?
I guess that Google (could easily afford to buy BB) and others looked at that and decided against it. After all, BlackBerry did the same after a couple of years. I suspect that mixing so much virtualisation with direct access to the hardware where required isn't easy.
I suspect that mixing so much virtualisation with direct access to the hardware where required isn't easy.
OTOH, I suspect that Google don't give a shit, and Android is now very, very mature, and the business plan is to milk it dry, doing diddly squat beyond the minimum, and that minimum includes periodic "new releases" with increasingly token improvements, and squashing sufficient security bugs to give the appearance of doing something about security.
This is of course the norm for all software businesses.
Java apps are extremely small as long as the developer can resist the urge to link to every open source library on Earth.
Google stuff is enormous because Google absolutely sucks at dependency management and they don't believe in dynamic library linking. Imagine tens of thousands of code monkeys each writing to and for APIs that are an opaque mix of local code and RPCs. You give up figuring out where anything is. The Googly version of "Hello World" that I learned in training took 15 minutes to compile, produced a 120MB executable, and took 5 seconds to launch. I told the teacher that I wasn't impressed. He recommend I turn on the "optimize" flag so it would only be 75 MB.
Not even Google can solve Googly problems. Rumor is that Google created Golang to ditch all the baggage around their C++ and Java codebases. Unfortunately, Go's crude data structures can not model the protobuf spec. At the time of my escape, the Go codebase was bloating out of control as maintainers of API code generators attempted to produce more correct protobuf models using complex trees of interfaces. Again, all of that bloat is statically linked into every single executable.
1K?
(You attempted to end too early, which puts you in Nid.)
You were lucky. I 'ad 256 bytes and a 20 key keyboard. Being sliced in two wit' bread knife was optional.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
