We received this post from Adam, one of our faithful readers. I enjoyed reading it and wanted to share his thoughts with you guys.
I personally really like Eclair (2.1)… really… However, you guys gotta admit that Froyo makes Eclair look a little like Vista. Of course, it’s not considered to be a bad Android, and… it’ll take a good amount of years before Vista loses its title of “worst OS ever” or “Biggest Fiasco of all time” (I’m talking about the stability, low performance, and the bad PR it caused Microsoft – obviously, there were a ton of feature improvements in Vista).
Anyway, the similarities between Eclair and Vista are quite interesting (and humorous). Just for fun, I thought I’d point them out:
1) Performance
From day one, When Vista came out, the standard WinXP PC came with 256MB of RAM (512MB was a good buy, and 1GB was HEAVEN). After Vista came out… lets just say RAM got really REALLY cheap. Today, Win7 can run on 512MB even though we all have 2-4GB of RAM on our computers. Eclair was the same, as it could only be put on high spec devices. In a way, we owe the new standards of Snapdragon and 500+ RAM to Eclair.2) Fragmentation
When Android 1.6 (“Donut”) arrived, a lot of market apps needed to be re-written. I’m no techy, but I could tell that something was fundamentally different in Donut’s design that caused launcher problems (icons disappearing, Force Closes, etc…). Nonetheless, it was when Eclair arrived that the market started to fragment with Navigation, Firefox, and other apps. Vista did the same. before Vista we had Home and Pro, yet now we have Home, Home Premium, Ultimate, etc… and most importantly 32/64Bit – perhaps the biggest fragmentation-creator of of them all! (Yes, I am aware that I have just butchered the English language with “fragmentation-creator”). As we all know, fragmentation has definitely become Android’s achilles heel. Since Eclair came out, Android’s fragmentation has been the no. 1 topic when slamming Android in the news. Furthermore, lets not forget that even Eclair was fragmented because it came out as 2.0 for the Droid and 2.1 for the N1.3) The Aftermath
In both cases, it seems the organizations involved managed to increase Android’s performance, lower its system requirements (presumably), and give their consumers the impression that they took their latest criticisms quite seriousely when developing their next generation.
Thanks for the article Adam, although personally, I think Microsoft are in a worse situation.
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