first, this is not an official answer from Google, just the opinion from one
guy in the Android development team.
any company/people that is *not* part of the OHA, and announces they have
some piece of hardware that "runs/supports Android" simply managed to hack
the system images provided with one of our SDKs. that's more or less easy
depending on your hardware, because we try to use the Linux kernel as our
porting abstraction as much as possible, and its sources are available.
however, since they don't have access to the sources of the rest of the
system, there are several issues with it that you need to understand:
- the ported/hacked Android binaries may lack support for some
(hopefully minor) hardware features. e.g. H/W graphics acceleration, full
audio output/input support, camera, etc.. not a real huge deal anyway
- the next SDK release' system binaries probably won't work unmodified
on this hardware, because we're still actively changing both the kernel and
the system for various reasons too long to explain (and probably not
suitable to this forum anyway).
- these modified binaries cannot be legally re-distributed for obvious
reasons. anyone that, at this points, distributes a hardware device with
these binaries pre-installed on it may receive a legal notice from the OHA's
attorneys (especially if they intend to sell them). note that this is
different from selling the bare hardware without anything except a custom
kernel on it.
I don't think anyone at Google or the OHA is interested in blocking
enthusiasts and hackers from testing the system on a variety of hardware
(including companies). after all our goal is *really* to make the system's
sources available under the Apache 2.0 license, but we still want to decide
when exactly this will be done (and I can't tell when this will be, so don't
ask me). after that, things will obviously be very different
so, whenever you see some sort of announcement like this one, take it with a
grain of salt. it's really a disguised sales pitch for hardware that may or
may not run Android SDK binaries properly (with or without modification). as
for the "mCUE" user-interface, I guess it has nothing to do with Android
itself. some marketers just love to attach unrelated products in a single
announcement ("traction through confusion")
On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Vipin Kumar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> Is this news true or an April fool joke?
>
>
> http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/google/d2-technologies-releases-mobile-handset-solution-powered-by-google-and.asp
> http://www.d2tech.com/
> http://www.d2tech.com/4-news/2008/08-04-01a.htm
>
> Best Regards
> Vipin
>
> >
>
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