Android Orbiter

[richard.e.morton]

As per the iPhone thread...

How much would you pay (from the App Market) for an Android based Orbiter with full functionality?

remember, android phones will be on every carrier worldwide shortly.
The HTC Dream and Magic are excellent especally with Android 1.5
Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, Motorola, SonyEricsson have all committed to producing Android based phones.
Many other companies are also looking at Android for all sorts of things such as tablets and small netbooks & laptops

[tschak909]

Does Android have access to the underlying bluetooth? This is important for Mobile Orbiter usage.

-Thom

[richard.e.morton]

yes.
http://source.android.com/projects/bluetooth-faq

[totallymaxed]

As per the iPhone thread...

How much would you pay (from the App Market) for an Android based Orbiter with full functionality?

remember, android phones will be on every carrier worldwide shortly.
The HTC Dream and Magic are excellent especally with Android 1.5
Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, Motorola, SonyEricsson have all committed to producing Android based phones.
Many other companies are also looking at Android for all sorts of things such as tablets and small netbooks & laptops

We'd contribute to this for sure :-)

Andrew

[tekoholic]

Wow...  The original Q, as yet not answered, was how much we would be willing to pay.

Not sure, but if it works correctly, I'd pay up to $5.  I'd love to help you test, as well, if you're looking.  Running 1.5 on my G1 for the last few months, with the UnionFS apps2sd hack.

[geekyhawkes]

I think $5-$10 seems pretty fair to be honest.  To make the most of the app it would have to work on more than just a G1 though as that phone will be long forgotten within a year or 2 as android establishes itself (IMHO)

[tschak909]

we still need to put together a development fund:

One would need:

* a Google Dev phone (unsigned and unlocked for dev work)
* android SDK
* a copy of the current JavaMO to borrow code from

At the very least, this would be a straight mobile orbiter using the Bluetooth Dongle proxy, and would take maybe 30 hours of work to port. I'm not sure, because i am not familiar with the more interesting gotchas of the android platform that may be.

-Thom

[hari]

bluetooth and UI will be different. Otherwise most of the JavaMO code can be used.

br, Hari

ps: I never took money for my contributions, so please don't get me wrong. But 5/10$ is not really an incentive for many devs that want to earn money for their work. Given the small market penetration of Android, how many sold copies would one expect in the next year? Let's assume 200, but I think thats quite high for the intersection of lmce/android users. That pays about a day of a developer..

[Che]

YES. Just YES.

[Che]

$50 would get you few buys. This is an open sourse project, and whilstI appreciate that that means free as in libre, It should also be as close to free gratis as possible. OS should be a labour of love, not of money, and whilst I can't program, If I could, I wouldn't expect to be paid for a OS piece of kit. That comes through advertising, which comes through popularity, which comes through freeness. Firefox is a good example of this,as is Linux. No-one has ever had to pay for using them, and their founders are fairly rich. Not Billionaires, admittedly, but they don't exactly have financial problems.

Whilst I'm not a developer, I do not view LMCE as anything other than a labour of love. An amazing, Fantastic, even orgasmic labour of love, but a labour of love none the less.

[hari]

Che, no offense, but you have not undestood how open source works.

To stay on topic, http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=blob;f=core/java/android/bluetooth/BluetoothSocket.java;h=fd8885ece9935e2f4909940c582bfa6a803afd41;hb=master

that is the RFC from last month for RFCOMM. I don't see server side rfcomm support in there..

br, Hari

[hari]

argh, /me was not looking hard enough, thats the server side: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=blob;f=core/java/android/bluetooth/BluetoothServerSocket.java;h=ca467011c91ec92fb4ff5ef3af9fba1c4a49b45b;hb=master

Not bad, one should be able to plug that together with the existing commandprocessor. If Android is capable of drawing png/jpg on some canvas and reporting keypresses/pointer events back, we are pretty set (yes, I assume it can :-p)

br, Hari

[totallymaxed]

ps: I never took money for my contributions, so please don't get me wrong. But 5/10$ is not really an incentive for many devs that want to earn money for their work. Given the small market penetration of Android, how many sold copies would one expect in the next year? Let's assume 200, but I think thats quite high for the intersection of lmce/android users. That pays about a day of a developer..

I agree with you Hari...so maybe in these cases we should make contributions in a more general sense. Maybe the fund would provide all of the dev tools and hardware for development of any new platform such as this. Another possibility is that some Dev's may not want to be 'paid' in anyway but would be happy to receive some new LinuxMCE "toy's" as a way of thanking them for their efforts...these would be gifted in a decoupled way so the Dev in question had no feeling of obligation as such.

Anyway just some ideas from...we as a company are open to all of the above (and any other proposals that might emerge in discussions here)

Andrew

[tschak909]

yup, in the end, I really would just want to be able to realistically keep up with the glut of hardware flowing into the market and e able to support it.

It is nice being able to occasionally pay bills and expenses by doing a large driver project or two, but those are very few and far between.

So really, i'm open with whatever works

-Thom

[davegravy]

My next mobile phone will be whatever linuxmce has the best support for -there's talk of developing for both android and the iphone. I'm willing to contribute $40 to one of these, but I prefer to wait to see which makes greater strides.