Good news for me
I just got one of these yesterday so thats one less thing I have to do. Got to say so far im not unhappy with my move away from Apple. Flash on a mobile with Java is more then a little nice. Forgot how much I missed it.
HTC will begin releasing unlocked version of its Android smartphones' bootloader code next month. The first phone to get the update will be the dual-core HTC Sensation, which will get a "software update to support bootloader unlocking... in August", HTC said. "We’re in the testing phase for the unlocking capability now, and …
I wish they'd be a little less vague about what devices are getting unlocked... I have the Wildfire S and despite it getting proper flash support the other day (iPlayer etc. now works on it) I'd love to completely cut out all the HTC crap.
But has there ever been a phone maker - or anyone else for that matter - to consider something along the lines of virtualization layer for phone OSs? Seems like we're well to the point where our smartphones could handle the overhead without too much loss in performance, and I think it would greatly improve the challenge for the OS makers.
Again, just thinking out loud, but what if the hardware and carrier specific functions were all a part of that lower level - with just the apps and UI running inside an abstracted container. Maybe, even, this would allow the OS makers to update their piece in a more timely fashion since they wouldn't be relying on the hardware makers and carriers to modify their pieces before the updates can actually get to the users.
/Paris, because I have no idea what I'm talking about here or if it even remotely makes sense.
I don't think it's impossible to do that, but who would you sell it too?
Yes, there are probably a huge number of geeks (myself included) who would like to be able to try out different phone OS flavours before picking one, but beyond us who would care?
I think any manufacturer would struggle to sell more than a couple of hundred thousand of such handsets, so it really isn't worth the development time.
Plus, of course, you'd need a patent and royalty free standard for the HAL API before the third-party OS writers (Google, MS, Nokia?) would even consider adapting their OS to work with it anyway and suddenly you're talking several lorry loads of work for no return.
Feel free to try and persuade someone to do the hard work, though. I'd like this capability :-)
For an OS update today it has to go from the OS developer, to the Hardware mfr (who tweaks and certifies it) to the carrier (who further tweaks and certifies it) before it's even available to the users. Because it's all one big ball of wax, that takes months to do for an existing phone (assuming the hardware mfr's and carriers even bother to pursue it) and, at least in my reading, is a big part of the reason why we have so many phones running around unpatched and back-revved.
Thinking also, given the volume of devices rolling out, there must be thousands of different mobile OS distributions floating around. That must be insanely expensive to manage, so it's really no wonder why carriers rarely provide OS updates.
I wasn't thinking so much for the geeks as I was for the average users. If the OS could be abstracted from the core functionality of the hardware and carrier radio pieces, I think it might make OS updates quicker to get to the user and cut the software development and management costs.
Maybe...