I was checking my Google Buzz and saw that some friends had shared about the Pac-Man game being on the Google start page www.google.com. Being my geeky self, I headed on over to check it out, and lo-and-behold, welcome to procrastination! Apparently Google is recognizing the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by reducing our productivity to 0% with this distraction.

Head over to Google and check it out for yourselves!

Nothing newsworthy, but I thought it was amusing (can I use the word, ‘cute’?) to see the site maintenance image and information that I was given from Grooveshark as I was trying to access their website (for those who don’t know what Grooveshark is, it’s a free “internationally-available online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application” [thanks Wikipedia]). I’d like to introduce you to “Pickles”, who is currently rampaging around in Grooveshark’s server room and creating havoc.

-Duncan

This will be a two-part series (edit: it looks like I won’t have the time to follow up this post, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Android and perhaps we’ll see more Android related posts in the future), looking at the Google Android Operating System. In this first post, we’ll look at some of the statistics illustrating the fragmentation issue that Android is facing, and the next post will look at some of the different features of the different Android platform releases (or limitations of the earlier operating system versions).

One of the main mobile operating systems that the developers at work have been focusing their recent efforts on for MO-Call mobile VoIP is the Android OS- a good thing to hear, since I’m using the HTC Hero, and also because the Google Android operating system has been making huge progress and gains in the US smart-phone market share.

(Shameless plug: One of the achievements that we enjoy with MO-Call is our broad range of handsets that we support- over 1,800 handsets. If you don’t know what MO-Call is about head over to our website to learn more. But in a nut-shell, we offer an application so that you can make cheap international mobile calls and SMS from your mobile phone.)

As referenced by TechCrunch‘s recent article on April 5th looking at the smart-phone , Android’s share grew an impressive 5.2%, compared to the 1.3% gain of the smart-phone market leader RIM, Apple’s -0.1% loss, Microsoft’s -4.0% loss, and Palm OS’s -1.8% loss of market share (market statistics from comScore.com).

What is the Android Mobile Operating System?

The Google Android OS was originally developed by Android Inc., and it is an open-source operating system that allows developers to write managed code in the Java development language, and uses a modified version of the Linux kernel. Android Inc. was later purchased by Google in July of 2005 as began to move into the mobile industry.

Android has been available as open source OS since 21 October 2008, when Google opened the entire source code under an Apache License. Since it’s inception, Android has seen several updates to the base Operating System to fix bugs and add new features, however these multiple update releases, along with the open-nature of the system, have resulted in a fragmentation issue across the Android platform and Android mobile handsets.

Android Fragmentation – 1.1, Cupcake, Donut, and Eclair.

//Edit: (Updated stats grabbed on 04/16/10)

Google is clearly fully aware of the fragmentation issue with their Android mobile operating system, and have provided developers with a resource to keep up-to-date with the distribution of the different Android platforms in the market. The data shown above illustrates data collected over two weeks, ending on the first of April, 2010.  This data provided by Google is based on the number of Android devices that have accessed Android Market within this 14-day period.

//Edit (A friend at Google tipped me that there are new stats on the Dev site which now includes 2.1 data):
The Android platform version across Android devices in the market does look a lot  more evenly distributed (and we still don’t know exactly what the actual population size that this distribution is taken from), but we still see that 38.0% of Android users are still using the oldest Android 1.5 platform, followed by 31.6% of users running Android 1.6, and 30.3% of users on Android 2.x (2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1) devices, with a miniscule 0.1% of users on the oldest Android 1.1 platform (which I haven’t even seen or used before).
This still means that 69.7% of Android users are running older pre-2.x versions of Android, which is huge, considering that many of Google’s roll-outs for Google cloud integration doesn’t affect older Android platform users.

As we can see, of the devices that have accessed Android Market from March 18th to April 1st, less than a quarter of those Android handsets are handsets that are actually running the latest Android Eclair platform (Android 2.0/Android 2.0.1), and over 75% of those Android devices running older versions of Android, such as Android Cupcake (Android 1.5) and Android Donut (Anroid 1.6).

One of the largest factors of the fragmentation issue due to the open-nature of the Android operating platform, as different manufacturers began to develop different tiered handsets with earlier versions of Android on their lower-end smart-phone devices. Moreover, operators continue to release customized versions of their Android devices to differentiate their devices from competitors, but have been also known to prevent certain Android applications from running (an example being the Motorola Backflip being unable to run non-Android Market applications).

Android Operating System Downloads – The Answer to Android Fragmentation?

According to Engadget, Google’s upcoming release of Android Froyo will directly tackle the Android fragmentation question by taking a new approach and separating the Android platform’s components and standard applications from it’s core, so carriers and handset manufacturers will only have access to the base Android platform functionality, and allowing developers to create and expand the functionality of Android through downloadable applications through the Android Market. This seems like a feasible solution in moving some of the control back to Google’s hands, but we’ll have to wait and see how effective this solution is to reduce platform fragmentation.

What are your thoughts on the future of the Google Android platform? Do you think that the open-source nature of Android will be able to compete with the walled-garden strategy of Apple’s iPhone OS, where they control every aspect of their phone development to create a wholly unified device? Please leave your thoughts!

One of the fun things about working at Morodo Group is that we have a lot of phones in storage that we have on hand for development to make sure that our application will work on different phone platforms; however if none of the developers are using the phones, then they’re pretty much just sitting in the storage shelf; unless it’s a new handset, then the CTO will use it as his main device (aka. the CTO took the Motorola Milestone that I was playing around with; sad, haha).

But, I’ve got nothing to complain about- I’ve been able to play around with the newest BlackBerry 9700, and I’m allowed to use the HTC Hero as my main handset now. It’s kinda funny because I carry two handsets with me at all times now; the HTC Hero (Android 1.5), and my own HTC Touch 2 (Windows Mobile 6.5 Pro). The only reason (well, two reasons) whey I still have my HTC Touch 2 on me, is because Pleco Chinese Dictionary doesn’t run on Android (the developer may support Android in the future, but until he sees a big enough adoption of the OS, he said he doesn’t want to spend the development time to develop a version of Pleco for the Android; sad). I guess I’ll do a plug for Pleco Dict; it’s straight up the best Chinese dictionary that I’ve used so far- the awesome thing about it, is that it has handwriting recognition, so if I’m walking around town and there’s a word I don’t recognize, I can do a quick Chinese lesson and learn the character.

The other reason I carry my HTC Touch 2 is because I’m trying to keep closer tabs of my spending habits. I’m sure there’s a similar application that I could use on Android, but currently I have a spreadsheet saved and set-up on Office Mobile that lets me track the date, category, cost, and sums up the total amount spent to-date at the top of the spreadsheet; pretty handy.

Anyhow- here’s a photodump of some images of the handsets that I’ve been playing with from work.

I’ll do a quick little run-through of some of the things that have made me a fan of Android.
Well- I’ll start off with one thing that I don’t like about Android (lol); that’s device/version fragmentation! The HTC Hero is still running on the oldest version of Android 1.5! Boo!

Google integration is ‘the’ main thing that I love about Android; especially because I have to switch between different devices at work when a developer needs to use a device for testing. I can just manage my contacts through Gmail contacts and know that I won’t have to go through the hassle of transferring contacts from one device to another- I’ll just have to log-in to my Google account and let the synchronization do the rest.
The same can be said of Google Chat (which is now my main mode of IM communications; gone are the days of AIM and MSN for me), and Google Mail.

Hello Google Maps and FourSquare! Well, I don’t use either of these very much because I usually forget to check in when I get to any popular locations. And I’m in 五道口, so there aren’t that many popular locations over here that are worth checking-in at; that and also because I usually just go from work-to-home, not very exciting places to check in to, heh.

I don’t have international calling on my mobile plan, so I use MO-Call to make cheap international mobile calls on my HTC Hero, which routes my calls to the Morodo network (disclaimer: I work for Morodo); shameless plug, or not, it gets the job done and lets me call back home to Singapore to let me parents know that I’m still alive =).
I also use Network Monitor to make sure that I’m not going over my monthly data quota; it’s been really handy and even allows me to set an alert when I reach a certain usage amount.

Along the same lines of reserving my data usage, I use Advanced App Killer (I think that’s the name of the app) to kill off any background running applications; I probably do a check about three times a day to make sure no pesky applications have snuck up in the background and are using data in the background. And if all else fails, I can always turn off the background data usage permission in my settings =).

That was a pretty geek-tastic post on phones. I really don’t know why phones have such a draw to me; bleh, idols =_=. Anyhow, that’s it for this post!

-Duncan

I finally made the switch from China Mobile to China Unicom. I had previously been trying (really hard) to get China Mobile’s GPRS to work on the HTC Tattoo, HTC Hero, and BlackBerry 9700, but nothing would work. I had scoured the internet looking for advice on how to set up the APN’s for these devices on China Mobile, but I’ve come to the conclusion that China Mobile GPRS only works for iPhone users (since it was my iPhone using friends who had suggested I try out GPRS on China Mobile).

//Note: Both CMWAP and CMNET both didn’t work. I actually brought my phone to a China Mobile store too, and the sales clerks had no idea why GPRS wasn’t working either. Womp.

Anyhow, from all the muddling around with China Mobile, here are some random codes that I discovered. China Mobile does have a neat service where you can just send in text messages to 10086, with code in the message content, to carry out various functions with your mobile account

CXGTC – Check your remaining data-plan balance
YE – Check your remaining pre-paid balance
KTSJLL20 – Activate GPRS 20RMB/month plan
QXGPRS – Cancel GPRS plans (yay)

So the reason why I finally changed providers, was because a friend of mine recently bought the Nexus One, and with that purchase, he decided to also go ahead with switching from China Mobile’s GPRS plan (he was using an iPhone previously) to China Unicom’s 3G plan. It was pretty much his doing that I also decided to go for the 3G plan with China Unicom.

For those of you who are thinking about looking into a 3G plan here in Beijing, here’s a link that my friend provided me that breaks down the China Unicom 3G service. I ended up getting the 96RMB/month plan, and I’ll see how much data I use and adjust accordingly.

For those who are interested about the APN settings for China Unicom, here’s what I had to input.

APN: 3gwap 3gnet (3gwap actually doesn’t allow your applications access to the internet)
Proxy: 10.0.0.172
Port: 80

It was a really quick set-up process (apart from my fumbling around with my broke Chinese trying to ask the sales-clerk what APN settings I was supposed to input), and I’m now getting 3G on the HTC Hero. I was thinking of trying out the BlackBerry 9700 again, since I’ve had a couple of Tweet replies encouraging me to give it another try, but after reading this blog about 30%-ish polled BlackBerry users wanting to switch to iPhone or Android, I think I’ll pass.

Anyhow- this was definitely a geek post. Dry, and geeky.

I’ll try spice it up later on this week with some pictures of the phones I’ve been playing around with recently.

-Duncan