Life by Bits & Numbers

Microsoft can very well loose the portable space completely. It already practically lost the mobile phones war. Although this happened not due to being able to support ARM processors, but due to the fact that mobile phone can not be efficiently powered by an operating system designed to be used on a desktop.

There are rumors that Microsoft is hoping to make a big splash in the Netbooks space. Netbooks are ultra small and portable laptops which are mainly intended to be used for internet – browsing/email/messaging and possibly light office tasks on the go. Those hopes however might just fall apart very easy with proliferation of Netbooks powered by ARM processors. Same processors that power most of our mobile phones.

“Inventec, a Taiwanese company that makes laptops on behalf of several of the world’s best-known PC brand names, is developing up to four Snapdragon laptop models for customers, said Mark Hirsch, vice president for marketing at the company.” They will showcase one of the concept laptops at the Computex in Taipei. The reference laptop is  intended to demonstrate the possibilities of the platform uses a 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU. It has a 1,024 by 600 pixel resolution screen, a 64GB flash disk and integrated 3G wireless. And it only weighs about 800 grams – quite impressive for ~10″ laptop.

Those specs clearly show that you get quite a useful package which is extremely light and portable, plus you can usually go for more than 6 hours with a typical network usage. Not like current WiFi connectivity, integrated 3G wireless promises everywhere connectivity easily accessible at speeds comparable to those you will get on a weak WiFi link.

All of the above clearly makes the Netbooks attractive productivity devices on the go and for small tasks and my guess is that we will see a lot of those small laptops coming very soon and which is more important many of them will be powered by ARM processors. Since Microsoft does not currently support ARM processors, they will not be able to compete with other OSes in this space. There were rumors that Windows 7 will support ARM architectures, but it was not officially confirmed yet.

Many Netbooks are coming out powered by flavors of Ubuntu linux or recently reworked Android operating systems. Being targeted at embedded devices and open source – Android is an ideal choice for underpowered, small devices.

The final word of proliferation of Netbooks will probably remain after WiMAX. If the Netbooks can support WiMAX better and it gets sufficiently widespread, more and more people will choose Netbook over traditional laptop, especially when the Netbooks can be 2-3 times as cheap as laptops and people that do not need the processing power but rather need battery life and better connectivity will choose Netbook over a laptop in a heartbeat.

I was contemplating quite a lot about the title for this post. Originally I wanted to give it the title of “Why developing for Blackberry sucks” but then I thought it might be too harsh and does not really reflect the content of the post which is about comparing the experience of developing for Android and experience of developing for Blackberry and settled for the current title. There were other titles revolving in my head, but all of them were just variations of  the original “why developing for Blackberry sucks”

I have been developing for Android for some time and lately I have been working on developing for Blackberry and I must say development for Android wins hands down in all aspects. Many times, especially frustrated with Blackberry buggy IDE or other cumbersome experience I wanted to write this post, but I had to find the time for it.

So what is so bad about Blackberry development? It starts at the very basics – development environment. Google has developed a very nice plugin for Eclipse which works very well and even has the basics of support for visual editing of user iterface screens. RIM – the company behind Blackberry for a long time had their own development environment – JDE. Written using basic SWING components, there’s no need to mention how bare boned and outdated it looked. They have recently introduced Eclipse plugin as well, but it is pretty buggy and half baked. It is hundreds times better than the first version of the plugin, but it is still from being stable and feature rich.

Then we have the emulators – gosh, why do I have to restart the emulator everytime I want to test a new build? It can take up to a few minutes to restart the emulators for the more advanced models. To feel the pain, just imagine the nightmare of programming the UI for Blackberry in that setup. And no, there is no visual helper that can show the layout quickly, not to mention visual builder.

The compiler, or more exactly the packager – “rapc” has many times weird problems and behaves like a whiny child with lots of attitude problems. Same goes for the MDS server emulator.

Compared to Android, this can be nightmare. Yes I’ve had some issues and observed buggy behavior with aapt while developing for Android, but it was quite easy to resolve. For the UI part of the development, Android beats Blackberry as well. Constructing layout using XML is much easier than writing actual Java code. (Apple had actually went one step furthergiving the developers visual tools.)

Localization is much easier in Android as well. Besides conceptually being easy, the support of the Eclipse plugin for localization is half baked and buggy and what’s most important, it is not that easy to find documentation on how to implement localization for Blackberry in Eclipse.

The last but not the least (and in fact probably most important) is the vibrant, enthusiastic and active community of the Android platform. It is so much easier to find answers to any problems you have while developing for Android. I was a little considered about Android being all open source in a sense that there is no central authority with central responsibility for certain things, and Blackberry has all this and it turns out that what many enthusiasts can do, easily outweighs any size company organized or not.