Hi all. I am about to start an Android development project. I would like some advice before starting with the project.
First of all, I have done some research on which phone would be the best to do Android development. I have seen many suggestions, but most people seem to point at the Google Nexus One (or its UK equivalent, the HTC Desire). I was wondering if there is anything more recent that is as good as the Nexus One. I have seen people suggesting the Nexus S, but I'd rather not use a Samsung phone for the reason I'll explain below. Also, the HTC Desire S seems to have a signed bootloader, and I'd like to be able to tinker with the OS if I will need to during the project (this is not a commercial application, it's more of a research project, so it's ok if I need to modify the OS). The HTC Desire HD seems more like a modern alternative to the Desire, but I have found no one suggesting it as a good, modern developer phone for Android. Any other suggestion? For this project I will need to triangulate the user's location using GSM cell info. Problem is that sometimes, we will need to triangulate the position *after* the phone has lost signal (i.e. the user has gotten into an underground transport system). I was thinking of two possible strategies to do so: 1. write an application that stays in the background and uses LocationManager + LocationManager.NETWORK_PROVIDER to receive location updates from the network provider and then use the latest known location 2. log all the cell IDs I see and use the last few ones (together with their known location) at a later time to triangulate the user's location Strategy #1 has the obvious advantage that it is supported by most Android phones and works reasonably well for what I need to do. Problem is, it will drain the user's battery. Even if it is relatively cheap to use Network Location instead of GPS to locate the user, I need only to locate the user when he/she enters the public transit network. If the user goes out of town, my application will keep querying the location provider for nothing. Strategy #2 works reasonably well for my purposes, as I suppose the phone will see a different set of cells depending on the entry point (and therefore it might not even be necessary to do the actual triangulation, I could build a database of (Station Name, Set of visible cells) tuples and consult it without even bothering translating that into actual coordinates. Also, logging the cell information is something that can be done substantially for free, as the phone already has that information and I am only reading it and discarding it if I don't need it. Trouble is, in this case, that I have seen that the function for doing this on Android don't always work well on all phones. I know, by reading previous posts on this forum, that Samsung phones don't support getNeighboringCellInfo(). Also, many *other* phones don't support that function. I was wondering: is there anyone here who knows of a current phone that supports getNeighboringCellInfo() *for sure*? Thanks, Davide -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
