Android history and review part 1 – finally, a new post :)

Hi everyone!

It’s nice to finally be able to get on with this. 🙂 This is one of the posts where I was going to use the laptop to do things, namely virtualisation, but instead I’ll be doing it on the desktop. I’ll be using Android-x86 to do this post, so I’ll sort of be reviewing that too.

This will probably end up being a series, because it’s too much to put in one post, and it would get boring – I’ll break it up over time. Mostly, this will be video, but I’ll write some side notes as well for when (not if :P) I get things wrong. Installations won’t be covered, because they all work pretty much the same way. Also, installations are boring 🙂

On to the post:

Android 0.9 – a quick look

It should be interesting to see where it all began! I’ve never really looked at it much before. Anyway, here we go:

Okay, so not much to see here, because I couldn’t figure out how to go home or back! No Android Market or Google Play Store, not much customisation, not really any default apps!

To be fair, 0.9 is very old, and this was the earliest version that I could find – it wasn’t going to be perfect 🙂

Android 1.6

What I’ve done is tried to pick the most change-heavy versions of Android, so you’re not seeing the same stuff over and over here. Essentially, this is one version per video to keep it interesting 🙂

Okay, so there was some stuff to talk about here! Yay! And I could go back and stuff 🙂 Anyway, we had an App Store, but it didn’t work, a browser that didn’t work, and some customisation stuff. Not bad for Android 1.6! Not too much more on this one, just that it installed, and did work quite nicely.

Android 2.2

This is very similar to what I used to use on my old phone XD. You might well have used the 2.x releases as well, they were really popular. We’ll see if it brings back fond memories of no multitasking and very few apps!

It appears I was wrong: you can do multitasking with Android 2.x. I suppose it could have something to do with the fact that that old phone only had something like 140MB of RAM…

I liked this, it seemed pretty cool to me that you can run these in virtualbox, even though things like installing apps still won’t work. Mind, I guess you could side load them 🙂

Android 3.2 – the last in this post

This version was weird. It only ran on tablets (as far as I know), and introduced a lot of new features. Shame it was kind of buggy, though. It’s a bit like a precursor to version 4 in terms of what it can do and how it looks. That’s probably because it is the precursor to Android 4 :P.

It was weirder than I remembered it being :P. Not that similar to Android 4 actually, just, umm, different in its own special way. We did have the Android market this time, but I couldn’t use it even to browse without logging into a google account. Ah well. It’s nice to use, but honestly it’s a bit strange, is Android 3.

Next part coming soon!

The next part of this series will be coming soon, probably a week or two. Hopefully one :). This hasn’t taken me as long as I thought, so I think it should be ready quite fast.

And yes, much shameless self-promotion, but if you want some laptop parts, particularly for older PCs, you may as well look here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/hamismcintyre-bhatt-0. There’s a fair bit being sold, so if you’re after something, please take a look.

Moving on, I hope you enjoyed this post (let me know if you didn’t :)), and the next one will be out soon, as will the PXE-booting stuff. A rant about aforementioned laptop may appear soon here as well XD.

Hamish

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About Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty

I'm a self-employed software developer working on Free Software projects, as well as studying for my degree with the Open University. Being pedantic when it comes to detail is fortunately useful for both of these things! A strong believer in free software, I have a few pay-for programs available under the GPLv3 and enjoy reporting bugs and helping to improve various open source projects, including volunteering at Wimborne Model Town to work on their river control system.

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