sebt3 said:
Grench said:
I would like to be able to use the Pandora as an e-book reader with current titles, etc... I don't see the big book houses outright supporting Linux.
I cant see how you couldn't be happy with current free offering : http://www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm#2
You're kidding right? A library full of 50 year old books and public service announcements? I like reading current books - and I'm perfectly willing to pay for them.
mali said:
@Grench
Pandora would never comply with Google's certification rules so the market support would have to be hacked.
Never say never - we don't even know what the certification rules are. Can the certification be applied to an isolated virtual machine run on the device? We don't know. At this point the whole discussion is hypothetical anyway.
mali said:
From a marketing point of view this would be pretty bad, because you'd have to create your own market, which would be pretty shitty I think, and the user would have to hack the market himself. So you would basically deliver a bad product the user has to hack. Using a fully open OS and properly supporting it is a much better alternative. Reviewers would moan that the device has no market access out of the box.
Assuming an absolute when something hasn't even been looked into? Android only makes sense to me if there is access to the Android Market - I think we agree there. I simply don't take it as writ that we have no chance of being able to get something working. I could even see the possibility of an android2_2.PND file that pulls the OS off of an SDHC card in, essentially, a hosted VM environment on the Pandora. Performance might not be 100% with the current 1Ghz phones for those applications, BUT not every application requires that kind of performance.
mali said:
I don't mind an Android alternative from some community devs if they feel like doing some work on it, but I'd never want to see a single minute of the core devs time spent on that crap, tbh.
Crap? Is getting access to book readers, Netflix streaming, Google maps & routing, etc... crap then?
If we stop fighting over whether or not to have this as the base OS and address it as an VM environment and treat it like any other emulator on the device - THEN we have something really going for us. I agree that it is a poor choice for a root OS on our device. Shutting the door on it out of hand, though... Odd for this community.
Will Google let an Android VM on an ARM device access the Android Market? No idea. However, I don't think anyone has asked yet. Who knows, we might get lucky and have someone there understand the legitimate use for something like that and give it their blessing.
And -if- we can start setting up a VM on ARM environment, I could see us putting in an iPod environment as well - just add the OS scraped out of your old iPhone or similar device.
Heck, you could even run CE in one, though I don't see any point to CE anymore.
Can you imagine popping in an SDHC card and having those pop up as emulated/VM environments?
The Pandora is built to emulate and house other operating systems. So far the concentration has been on doing this for old game consoles where we emulate it's CPU, RAM, etc... -What if- we were to set something up to house the modern OSs running on other ARM platforms as VMs? In theory it could be easier than writing an emulator because the CPU uses the same instruction set. I think it might just be a killer application set all it's own.
IMHO
My comment was referring to Craig's "Remember this is how we do things, we just ask the forum and see what happens. It's hardly the first time I've just dropped a topic on the forum to see what happens.".
