Developing for devices other than phones?

[ikonen]

To Android developers: Hello all!

I am a student at a technical university in Finland, and I

 

[Carl C]

Welcome to AF!

If you'd like to ask a few specific questions I'd be glad to answer them

 

[ikonen]

Welcome to AF!

If you'd like to ask a few specific questions I'd be glad to answer them

Sorry - It's a bit difficult to come up with very specific questions about this, since I'm mostly fishing around for information on how developers are feeling about Android moving to devices other than mobile phones, and what developers would think to be problematic with the new devices types. But let me list a couple of things I imagined to be important changes here and questions that I've been wondering about them. I'm afraid the questions are still going to be pretty non-specific, but maybe they will provoke some thoughts from people. Feel free to correct me if I get any of these facts wrong.

- Screen size and resolution. Up to Android 1.5 the only resolution supported by the platform was 320x480 on a 3.2'' screen. It wasn't until Android 1.6 came around that the support expanded to other resolutions, such as 480x800. However, many of these non-mobile devices have screens much larger than that. For example, the Vega tablet I mentioned in the poll has a resolution of 1366x768 on a 15.6'' screen. Would that kind of difference in resolutions matter when designing applications for the device? Could an average application from Android Market just be scaled to fit the bigger screen, or would it have to be tailored somehow?

- 3G or not. Two out of three of the devices I mentioned as an example do have 2G/3G support, but quite a few of the other Android devices I've found rely mostly on WiFi for their connectivity needs. This is a weird question, but how much do typical Android applications rely on good connectivity? Is it important enough that having to use WiFi would have a notable impact on how useful most applications would be for the device?

- Android Market. Just about every manufacturer with an Android-based device mentions the possibility of using all those thousands of applications from the Market on their device. In practice, however, many of these manufacturers actually have their own small markets set up with a handful of applications and an invitation for developers to come and make more. Any idea about why this is so? Is there some legal obstacle for why these manufacturers cannot use Android Market for their devices? Or are they just trying to create their own, specialized niche market here? And from developer's point of view, what difference would it make to publish applications via Android Market or a market run by an individual manufacturer?