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Phone OS


Klaynos

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Pangloss's thread about apple and the iphone has made me create this offshute thread...

 

Mainly I want to know what you think of the software (which even in these modern times is controlled greatly by the OS) that your phone uses.

 

I for many years now have used Sony Ericsson phones, I'm a bit of a fan... but in the last 2 years of owning my phone it's crashed a few times, which is rather annoying, and it's certainly not the most shiney of the OSs. It's also really quite closed and the amount of thrid party software available is not that good and not cheap...

 

I've known people with windows mobile phones, and my dads got one atm, they seem ok ish very power hungry and I know a couple people where their phones (different models owned a year appart) crashed daily! But there's quite alot of software avaliable including an official pdf viewer ms office mobile etc...

 

Sybian I've not used much just fidling with my brothers N95 it seems nice but I can't comment much...

 

The iphone is VERY pretty, but it just doesn't seem to have the functionality of other OSs and they try and lock you down so much it sucks....

 

Google android, there's not been many phones out for this yet, but it seems to be pretty open and looking at the vids that are about, make it seem just a pretty and fluffy as the iphone software... could this be a decent alternative to the others?

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It's hard to say anything definitive about Android until you actually have a phone in your hands, which for us in America may be as early as next week. Android supports open development through a proprietary virtual machine which is targeted by the Java language, as opposed to operating systems like Windows Mobile and the iPhone which support development in native code languages.

 

I'm incredibly underwhelmed by the only virtual machine Google has put forth so far: V8, which is Google's attempt at a JavaScript virtual machine. The code is clean, but the lack of an intermediate language leaves me quite confused as to what their motives were. Their primary focus seems to be minimizing virtual machine overhead than actually making programs performant. The arguments for an AOT compiler are generally weak compared to JIT as the number of optimizations that can be performed via runtime analysis vastly outweigh those that can be performed through simple static analysis. They modeled the VM's behavior off of Self but the VM lacks the full Self featureset, and the optimizations they do perform via runtime analysis seem much better suited for a Smalltalk VM than they do a Self VM. Sun's JVM, in particular HotSpot, was modeled off a Smalltalk VM.

 

Android feels like a less open platform than the iPhone. The iPhone supports development of native code applications, whereas Android runs all applications within a proprietary virtual machine who's target language is Java (yet does not implement the JVM specification and thus cannot be considered a true Java virtual machine).

 

I own an iPhone. It runs OS X. As my phone is hacked, I have full control of everything which happens on it. OS X is an excellent Mach/BSD-derived operating system, and the APIs for it (based on Cocoa and thus based originally on NeXTSTEP) are top notch.

 

The interface is quite tactile and frankly a pleasure to use. It's meant to be poked and prodded and the way it responds is quite pleasing. The use of multitouch for zooming and other features is quite excellent and also quite the pain point on most other phones.

 

The phone does an excellent job of remembering where you were and what you were doing in any given application. You can leave virtually any program then go back and find yourself exactly where you were, even if your phone has been powered off or even if you decide to completely reinstall the phone's operating system.

 

Windows Mobile 6 is a fairly nice operating system however the user interface leaves quite a bit to be desired. While Apple opted to close every (non-hacked) application immediately when you leave it, Windows Mobile has true task management more akin to a desktop PC. You'll either love this or hate it, as multiple applications will tend to eat up your phone's resources but at the same time it's often quite nice to have multiple programs running simultaneously. That said, Windows Mobile often exposes its roots in Windows CE, which was never designed to power a phone. A fun exercise is to hand someone who's never used it a Windows Mobile phone and ask them to make a call, then note their confusion.

 

The Blackberry OS is nice for traditional phone users. It's simplified and streamlined to make the most common tasks easy to execute. That said it ends up feeling more like a phone than a smartphone with daily use, with an interface bound to more traditional concepts about how a phone should work. That may change with newer phones like the Bold.

 

Palm is an OS that certainly shows its legacy, both in its antiquity and immense feature set. The interface is clunky and outdated but its capabilities, exemplifying over a decade of development, are impressive and in certain respects unrivaled.

 

I haven't had much experience with Symbian but I've heard nice things...

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