Oblomovka

I like T-Mobile. I’ve been a subscriber to their mobile service in the US for years, and they’ve been pretty good: their support has always answered my questions, their online interface doesn’t suck, and their signal in the Bay Area has been good enough for me. They’re GSM, so you have a choice of phones, and I’ve never had problems unlocking their phones for when I travel abroad and cavort with foreign SIMs. At the moment I have one of their Nokia 6086 phones, which lets you use your WiFi hotspot to make calls, which means that I have free calls at home and work, and I can use it as an EDGE Bluetooth modem for my laptop when I don’t have Internet access otherwise. It only runs signed applications, which shows that T-Mobile’s love of entirely open hardware is profoundly limited, but, hey, as long as I can just treat it as a pipe to my really open device, I don’t care.

When the Android HFC G1 came out, I was tempted. Temptation was as far as it went, because I really can’t afford another gadget right now. Prodding around, though, I was a bit disappointed by Google’s Android OS. Android applications are Java apps running in their own sandboxed VM (Google’s Dalvik). There are APIs, but they don’t give you complete access to the metal, and everything is running in Java-time. That means that, for now at least, it looks like you have to write in Java, and you can’t try clever tricks outside the API.

That seemed to rule out the two applications I would love to have on a G1: a VoIP app, and a modem tether to connect my laptop to the phone’s 3G network. Of course, those are exactly the kinds of application that T-Mobile would blow a gasket to see on their phone, but that’s not a coincidence. Telcoms only fret about software that their users would snatch in a second.

Now, though, I’ve seen a couple of comments in the Android developers’ community that make me more amenable to buying it. The first is this official statement that the G1 lets you run the Android debugging shell and install files and apps via USB. If cross-compiling for the G1 is as easy as it is on the emulated environment that comes with the SDK, that bodes well for writing tethering links — or even a VoIP application.

This comment saying Android will support the Java Native Interface (JNI) in the future, which would mean that native apps could access the Android Java API, and vice-versa, is also comforting. It looks like JNI is already supported, but undocumented.

It’s funny how, even when the entire OS and development environment is open source, there are still concerns that production Android phones could be locked down, and really no indication whether they are or not in tech media coverage of the phones. I don’t even know if the G1 will be upgradeable to later Android versions, whether I can install my own version of the OS (once Google release the source) or what future restrictions may be placed on my usage. These are questions that aren’t just pertinent to hackers — they are what will determine exactly how flexible the G1 and Android platform will be against the more tightly-controlled, but fast-moving iPhone target.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 2:49 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS/Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.