Android!

[luckton]

There was also word yesterday about a refresh Nexus 10 coming soon.  No more detail than that though. 

[Quinton]

Piece of shit note ii shattered. Trying to convince myself a nexus is worth it this late in its life cycle. Someone convince me.

The N4 remains super snappy (possibly even snappier -- there was a bunch of performance work done) on 4.3 (which is OTAing now).  I'm completely happy with it as my daily carry phone.  They also added OpenGL|ES 3.0 support in the 4.3 update, which will probably be nice to have for the next generation of higher end mobile games.

The only downside in my mind is that the glass back is more breakable than metal or plastic and makes it a lot easier for the phone to slide around (and off of) smooth(ish) surfaces.

[01101010]

Piece of shit note ii shattered. Trying to convince myself a nexus is worth it this late in its life cycle. Someone convince me.

Price is pretty nice for the Nexus 4 considering the hardware you get for it along with your choice of network to throw it on. The glass front and back however make it a bit a of phone to be looked after and not haphazardly fumbled around with. I have nothing bad to say about mine, I like it's build quality and weight and I am careful enough with it that dropping it is not going to be an issue that happens once or twice a year if that. One thing I do not like is that Otterbox doesn't make a case for it... which is beyond me why they haven't.

That's my opinion on it.

[eldaec]

Which is why I don't see the point in the 7" form factor.  Too large to stick in a pocket or double as a phone, too small to comfortably web-surf with.  But obviously it has something going for it, since it's the most popular size.  I'm much happier with a lower-resolution 10" (480x1024) than I would be with any of the 7-inch models.

--Dave

The 7" tablets are exactly the right size for a men's suit inside jacket pocket. And the form factor is great for commuter trains.

I prefer the 10" for coffee table use though.

[luckton]

The Chromecast thing was too good of a deal to pass up.  We cut the cable cord a few months ago, and while we've been using the Wii U for Netflix/Hulu, I didn't really have a solution for the bedroom TV. 

UNTIL NOW!   

[Trippy]

Personally, I don't find 10" tablets to be at all useful -- they're bulky enough that I might as well bring my laptop which is massively more powerful and doesn't need a stand, external keyboard, etc, for more intensive (non-media consumption) usage.  A 7" device is light enough to hold for reading or gaming comfortably for quite a while, but big enough that there's actually enough screen to see what's going on compared to a phone (unless you are into really enormous phones).

Yup, I use my iPad Mini exclusively now and haven't turned on my iPad 2 in months. The larger screen is nicer for Web browsing but that doesn't outweigh the disadvantages particularly the extra weight. Waiting patiently for the retina iPad Mini now.

[schild]

The extra $64.99 for an Ouya seems worthwhile given the Chromecast requires futzery with other devices. Also, the Ouya can be hardwired over a gigabit connection so streaming 1080p+ video is actually realistic.

[luckton]

Acquiring and dropping hardwire in my circumstance is a bit....hard.  Wifi works splendidly across my house, esp. since I put DD-WRT on the router, along with getting everything setup right and proper.

[Quinton]

I recently picked up a Roku3 ($99), which is great for streaming video services (I use Amazon Video and Netflix, but it supports a bunch of others) and local video from the NAS (via PLEX).  It also has ethernet and a simple traditional remote control.  If you just want really solid video streaming, I think Roku is better at that then Ouya.  If you want to be able to run Android apps and are less concerned about fewer streaming video options, Ouya becomes more interesting. 

[schild]

You can sideload XBMC onto an Ouya and get about 3x the functionality of a Roku...

Edit: I should mention, not counting Amazon, Netflix and all that shit. But then, you can also just install the Amazon video player on the Ouya too I'd imagine. Among any other thing that can stream to an Android device.

[MahrinSkel]

Last I heard sideloaded Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Video were giving lousy performance on Ouya.  I've been holding off on getting one because until I can use it for Hulu and Netflix, it's not worth it to me.  Have they fixed that?  If it could do Amazon Video decently, I would go ahead and upgrade to Prime just for that.

--Dave

[schild]

Don't know as I only use it for XBMC. Newsgroups are still where it's at, 20 years later.

[MahrinSkel]

Don't know as I only use it for XBMC. Newsgroups are still where it's at, 20 years later.

They're good for current TV (and porn, I assume), not so hot for movies or anything niche.  Most of the time I just want re-runs or documentaries running in the background to keep that part of my brain from interfering with the rest, if I have to actively seek out and make decisions about what to watch, it's already defeated the purpose.

--Dave

[Surlyboi]

 

[Quinton]

John Carmack's Quakecon keynote has a lot of interesting stuff in it.  I thought some of his observations on the state of Android were both encouraging (we've come a long way since the last time he looked at the platform) and useful as feedback for how we could improve further (at least from a game developer's POV).  Any transcription errors are my fault - I did drop some ums and ahs but otherwise tried to be as accurate as possible.  Emphasis (bold) and bits in brackets are mine:

[ about android ]

It is amazing to see how the relevance of Android, the tidal wave of Android just pushing almost everything else out of its way.  I'm still, obviously, an IOS user for most of my day to day stuff, but I did finally just in recent weeks spin back up on Android development.

I looked at it three years ago and I thought it was really pretty awful, especially compared to Apple, but you look at paces of relative change, Apple continues to make things better but Google has made things better at a faster rate to the point where developing a Java app on Android is not that bad right now.  You download the adt bundle and plug in your device and it pretty much just works.  In many ways, without certification hassles of IOS, things like that can actually be a lot easier.  It's only when you get into the Native Development Kit that things really fall apart in terms of not really looking well-cooked at all.

When you look at the scope of Android and what they've done.  The power of free -- you know -- giving away the platform has been such a good thing for the entire sort of electronics industry.  Because if we look back five years ago we had every little handset company trying to write their own operating system, essentially, and doing a very very bad job at it.

I mean now we still have the danger that everybody, they go take Google's codebase and mess it up in various ways while "adding value".   We've got that classic problem that's happened with video card drivers in the bad old days and at certainly happens with the Android platform now, but it's still worlds better than if they had to be rolling it by themselves.  That's been a great thing.

It still has a lot of the messiness of Linux underneath it.  What's down there in the development tools reflect it.  But there's still some of the magic of it where when I'm poking through something and I realize this is going into the system library -- oh I can just go get the whole source code for android.jar and step in through that and I can look at the kernel drivers for at least the reference implementation of things.  So that's pretty wonderful.

It's not clear when I'll have an opportunity to do IOS development again to do a fair comparison but taking things in three year gaps is great to see progress where when you're sitting with it you might not notice just how much better things have been getting but the Android stuff looks at least usable now.

[ about nvidia shield and gaming ]

I was playing Sonic on it and Sonic is not supposed to drop frames, that's sort of the essence of what the Sonic the Hedgehog experience is about, and you do get an occasional stutter that I would lay the blame at Android.

When you adb into an Android system and you do a ps and you look at pages of stuff scrolling by and like "what is all this crap and how is it helping make my experience better?" It's a shame that that's not more nailed down now.

Some of the problems may be not just scheduling but also the drive for power management, where you'd think that if you have a quad core mobile system that we could just be saying "well let my game use two of those cores, put nothing else on there and just let me be like on a console and have things where they schedule and you wake up in a fraction of a millisecond," but it just doesn't work out that way.  You can have a 4 ms difference in when you wind up waking up the next time.  I'm still new enough to all of this that I don't have the answers at the bottom of it, but the platform is not as much as you could hope for.

And while it's all solveable, you can certainly look down and say what do we need to do at the kernel level, what do we need to expose to make this better.  Unfortunately it probably won't get solved like that.  It'll eventually be solved by a complete surfeit of extra resources.  Maybe when we have 16 core ARM processors, we can actually have 8 of them to ourselves and let all of the other stuff kind of use up the other processors.

And that's sort of what Microsoft and Sony are doing on the big platforms: reserving processors for the other stuff they want to do and as a game developer if we know "okay, we've got 5, 6, 7, whatever cores that are really ours", we can work with that and we'd rather work with that than having random other things popping up and bothering us.

[ source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1sjRD7NSec ]

[MahrinSkel]

Arise! For reasons I can not figure out, Asus decided to release their Cube, which is essentially an Android set-top, without explicitly tagging it as an Android device.  But it includes Google Play with the full selection of apps, and it has native-mode support for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video (how I ran across it) and Google TV.

Probably going to get one soon, my WDTV Live is showing it's age, I'd like to try out Amazon Prime, and my daughter would probably like to step up from the old media player I gave her when I got it.

--Dave

EDIT: It also has a double-sided remote with a QWERTY thumb-board on one side, full-fledged Chrome, and an IR blaster to control other devices.  This is, finally, a proper HTPC from a major manufacturer for $140.

EDIT2: Did some more checking, apparently this is not "really" android, it is a crippled version of it, and Hulu doesn't work unless you do some serious hacking (apparently Hulu wrote their licenses in such a way that they can run on android, or on set-tops, but a device that is anywhere near both has nearly everything blocked).  Back to the drawing board, problem is that there's almost nothing that will run Amazon, *and* Hulu, *and* play from USB.

[luckton]

Got the email this morning that my Chromecast is on the way.   

[Viin]

I got mine in the mail today. Pretty slick, no UI to speak of (all driven by the app on your phone/tablet). So far just YouTube and Netflix for iOS, but hoping others come aboard soon ..

[Pezzle]

Wish mine was going to be here in time for my trip next week.  Septober or something =(

[luckton]

Re-flashed my Galaxy Nexus with stock 4.3.  The battery life is  . 

[01101010]

I just cleaned the ParanoidAndroid off my phone and flashed the stock 4.3 factory image. It really does feel a bit quicker in response.

[rattran]

I don't want to upgrade to 4.3 and lose tethering  on my Nexus 7 :(

[01101010]

I don't want to upgrade to 4.3 and lose tethering  on my Nexus 7 :(

I take it you are not rooted?

[rattran]

Is there a root for 4.3 yet? I hadn't seen one on xda.

I'm rooted, and using a mod/patch to add tethering to my 3g nexus 7.

[luckton]

The 4.3 distro I have has a root.

http://rootzwiki.com/topic/36706-romaosp4381313-shiny-ota-like-stock-android-43-jwr66v-no-bugs/

[eldaec]

So the nexus 4 just got made cheap(er). Is there now any sensible way to get its LTE radio working?

[luckton]

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2087227

[Yegolev]

My Droid RAZR screen is acting up.  I'd just upgrade except VZW wants to take my unlimited data away in a new contract.  So, is there some place to get new-ish phones that isn't highly suspicious?  Besides retail from VZW, of course?

[luckton]

So...Hulu pushed out updates for the droid and iOS platforms to support Chromecast.  The value of my little $35 dongle RISES! 

[Krakrok]

I found the Chromecast to be pretty worthless. For web browsing it lags a couple seconds behind what's actually happening and the video it streamed was significantly darker than the original. 

[Tebonas]

So, I finally succumbed to my annoyance with Apple and my need to pretend I do something for mother nature and my fellow man by ordering the Fairphone. Thus its time for research before it arrives. Does anybody know a place to start assembling a list of current "Must have" apps? I guess Antivirus is a thing with Android due to its open system. Any tips what I should install before going out into the wild and install more stuff from dubious sources?

[Quinton]

Provided you're installing apps from the Play Store and not random sites out on the interwebs, you really don't need antivirus software -- sketchy third party "free apps!" sites are the primary source of android malware.  Often Android antivirus/antimalware software is of questionable value or simply a way to run your battery down.  Just about anything you could want should be available via Play Store where it is actively scanned and reviewed.

[luckton]

My top Droid apps:

- Breaking News
- Contacts+ (excellent social contact integrator without the Facebook bloat)
- Elder Sign: Omens
- Mega Mall Story
- Titanium Backup

[Tebonas]

Thats what I came up with in the first sweep:

1Password Reader   (Password Manager)
ASTRO File Manager (File Management)
Austostarts             (To check whats going on under the hood)
Boat Browser         (Alternative Browser tu supplement Chrome)
Business Calendar    (Calender Replacement)
Juice Defender       (Battery management app, still wary if useful)
MX Player Pro          (Video Player)
Pocket Casts          (Podcast Player)
Poweramp             (Audio Player)
QuickPic                (Photo Gallery Replacement . possibly replacing with one that does automatic photo sync with my iCloud and/or Dropbox account)
Super Backup        (Backup tool, possible replaced by Titanium Backup if I root the phone)
Tasker                  (Task Automatition, possibly replacing Juice Defender for automatic Wlan/3g toggles)
TuneSync              (Syncs ITunes Playlists and Songs over Wifi)
TuneIn Radio          (Radio App)
Whatsapp              (Chat/SMS)


Now my question. I have my eye of Juice defender. The idea being that it turns off all useless data connections when the screen is turned off. Anybody has any experience with this or is is just voodoo like all those battery apps and I'm better off with Tasker?

[Jherad]

Apps I couldn't live without at the moment:

Glympse - awesome for letting loved ones know where you are and how long it'll take to get to them.
Quickpic - in my opinion one of the best image browser apps out there, and is very lightweight.
PocketCloud Pro and PocketCloud Explore - really handy if you're away from home and realise you left something important behind on your PC.
Spotify - Because music.
Audible - Audible books when I'm driving long distances.
MX Player pro - Best video player. Hands down.
ES File explorer - has replaced Astro as my file manager of choice as it supports streaming over windows shares.
Autoguard - makes for a pretty serviceable dashcam.
FTP server pro - does what it says on the tin. Fast file transfer over wifi and more convenient (for me) than messing around with USB cables.
Tasker
Five guys app 


I also really like the NPR news app. Helps you find local radio stations, and has audio streams as well as text.

I haven't tried Juice defender, but did try another app (name escapes me now) that purported to do the same thing. Noticed no appreciable battery life increase, and data didn't turn back on as quickly as I'd like when I needed it (and in some cases had to be restarted manually). I think Tasker can be set up to take care of everything you really need.