It’s here! Well, sort of. You can get Android 2.2, aka Froyo, on your Nexus One if you’re brave enough to install the new OS manually. Thanks to the folks at Android SPIN, there’s a pretty easy way to get the Android 2.2 SDK and get it installed onto a Nexus One. I have no idea of this will work for any other phone running Android.
You can download the Froyo update here: http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF50-from-ERE27.1e519a24.zip
Once you have the download, if you want to flash the downloaded update file, follow this guide:
http://forum.androidspin.com/showthread.php?t=2631
This past week marked Google’s 3rd Annual Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, CA. The event which spans the course of two days is a platform for Google to share it’s latest goodies with the world among other things. As an Android convert, I was excited to see the Day 2 Keynote which highlighted all of the new features in Android 2.2 (aka Froyo). If you love android already, make the time to watch this presentation. It’s all very excited stuff. If not, maybe take a look and see what Android has to offer over the leading brand. You may be surprised.
For me, I love how dedicated Google has become to being “open”. Their mission is to make the Internet great and easy to use for everyone, which is more than I can say for some other groups out there. I not only support the amazing technologies that they’re producing, but also support the way they’re doing it. The essence of the Internet is in openness, and Google has been a leader in keeping it that way.
Recently I made the switch from iTunes to SongBird. The main reason for the change is that I also recently made the switch from my iPhone to the Nexus One. To make a long story longer, I’ve felt that Apple has been on a slow and steady decline since releasing the iPhone and probably more attributed to teaming up with the likes of AT&T and other carriers internationally. In short Apple has been tightening it’s grip on user experience and customizing, which I hate. Don’t get me wrong I love(d) my iPhone, but it was just time to switch. And although I haven’t blogged about it much yet (which I should) I absolutely love my Nexus One. Love it. However, iTunes and the Nexus One don’t play together. Not that they don’t play well, they’re just completely incompatible; another sign of how Apple’s grip is loosing customers. While the Nexus One is completely open, simply appearing as an external drive that can be written to, iTunes will only write out to iPods and iPhones. Maybe I’d still be using them if they could write songs to any device. Oh well.
So. Now that I’m off of iTunes, I’m in need of a new source of digital music. After seeing an old friend’s facebook post about their new album being released on Amazon, I figured I’d get myself a copy and have since purchased a number of songs and albums off of Amazon’s MP3 store. That is until today. Last night I started up Songbird on the task of organizing my music. With the quantity of music to be copied to a new location the task took quite a bit of time. Meanwhile I decided to download a few songs from Amazon. The way the Amazon MP3 works, is that you download an Amazon MP3 file that must be opened through their Amazon MP3 Downloader. Well yesterday I had Songbird going through all my MP3s and soas not to create havoc in that process I decided to refrain from downloading my Amazon MP3s until the morning. I had downloaded the files to be opened by the Amazon MP3 Downloader, but not the actual MP3 files. Upon open said files this morning I see this coming out of Amazon’s app:
Download no longer available.
What the hell is that!? I go into my Amazon account. I can see the songs that I’ve purchased. When selecting my three songs from this morning, Amazon says “already downloaded”. Hmm. Annoying? Yes. Bullshit? Yes. Explainable? I wish.
Basically what this comes down to is that I’m not using Amazon to download MP3s anymore. Or if I do, I will be skeptical. Digital downloads are a tricky thing. I’m a web developer. I understand this. That said, if a company like Amazon wants to start selling MP3s, it needs to have it’s shit figured out. After a quick google, I found that I am hardly the only person this has happened to. It’s one thing to download a file, accidentally delete it and then not be able to re-download. But to say you can’t download this file because you’ve already downloaded it, when you simply haven’t? That’s bullshit. That’s someone else’s f*** up that I just paid $3 for. If it was more money I’d probably contact Amazon and have a string of posts after this talking about how bullshit (or amazing) Amazon’s customer service is. But it’s $3 so I don’t care that much. Instead I’m just not going to use them any more. Little ‘ol me? Not a big deal. I might spend a few hundred dollars a year on MP3 downloads. However, for a company as big as Amazon, I’m sure there are hell of a lot more people just like me that are having a similar experience. Say 1,000 people? Reasonable? Sure. Multiply by $300/year? That’s $300K a year because some programmer(s) can’t get their shit together? Lame. Especially when Amazon is going up against a giant like Apple’s iTunes Store? No wonder they have such a huge market share.
Me? I’m still trying to stay off of iTunes. Apple’s getting too big for it’s own good. I still love them, but they’re doing things that make me nervous for them. Songbird has the 7digital store, which is okay. Seems like they’ve got a fair amount of stuff on there. Haven’t used it a ton, but it seems to be pretty well integrated with Songbird, which I like.
About a week ago I got the Nexus One from Google. Today I decided to delve into the SDK and see if I could get a “Hello, World!” script running on the phone. Following the Android Developers website, I downloaded the SDK and installed the Eclipse plugin for Android. I was able to get the Hello, World! script running fine in the virtual Android machine, but when I started trying to connect my phone for debugging I started running into issues. I’m using the Nexus One which is currently on Android 2.1 and I’m on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It seemed that whenever I ran the command adb devicesin the terminal, I got an empty list of devices. Frustrating.
Well after scouring the internets with no results, I remembered that when I installed the SDKs with Eclipse, there seemed to be a lack of overlap between the two. When installing the Eclipse Plugin, it creates a folder in the workspace called com.google.android.sdk, except this SDK doesn’t line up with the SDK from the Android Developers site. When I had initially put things together I simply copied over some of the files created by Eclipse to avoid breaking the plugin. But when running adb devices, it was running from the Eclipse provided SDK. Upon trying again with the adb command from the Android Developer’s SDK, the phone shows up on the list of devices. So now I’m copying arranging files to use the good SDK.
Not sure if this will have an effect on the Eclipse plugin. I’m assuming not. My guess is that the Eclipse plugin was simply packaged with an older version of the SDK. We’ll see though. So happy to see the Android SDK is in Java though. Way better than the iPhone SDK.
UPDATE:
Looks like you don’t want to overwrite any files. Simply leave the com.google.android.sdk directory as is and point to the downloaded SDK in the Android preferences pane in Eclipse (SDK Location). I had to delete and recreate my helloworld project in Eclipse to repair the errors due to the missing core library (android.jar).