Quote:
Originally Posted by answerman
Please don't take this as a n00b post... I've been around here for the last 4 years or so (I did the 6700/6800/Touch Pro sequence like a lot of us), but I've been fairly quiet since I got my Touch Pro, just running the stock ROM. My previous two phones were tweaked/customized to within an inch of their lives though... starting with HelmiC's work on the 6700 and going right through most of DCD's ROMs, while being quite involved in the projects involving the unlocking of the GPS chip on the HTC phones.
I got my wife a Droid Eris for Christmas, and I've been pretty impressed with it. So, the idea of getting Android running on the Touch Pro definitely is interesting. I've been following this thread when I've had time, and I have a couple of questions aimed primarily at Makkonen. If these were asked earlier in the thread, please accept my apologies.
First, and most important... Makkonen, with your experience working with this project, do you see the ultimate goal of actually running Android as the native OS being a possibility? Are there hardware differences between the Touch Pro and Droid Eris (using another HTC phone as an example) that would prohibit it? I'm not as knowledgable about the phone hardware as I am with desktop CPUs, but to me a stopping point would be if the actual core OS directives were "hard coded" into the chipset. With the ability to flash the chipsets, I would think that even if this was the case it could be overcome.
Secondly, regarding the battery issues: is the battery truly being depleted at the rate Android is reporting, or is it an issue with the driver (or whatever Linux uses) reporting incorrectly? Has anyone done a test using some equivalent of ACBPowerMeter for WinMo to actually gauge the rate of battery discharge in mA per hour? Using some rough numbers, if a 1300mAH battery is being depleted in 4 hours, that means a constant drain of over 300mAH. Has anyone verified this?
Finally, regarding the touchscreen: again using my previous comparison, the Droid Eris uses a capacitive screen, while the Touch Pro uses a resistive screen. Is that a hardware difference? Meaning, are we trying to make a resistive screen "act" like a capacitive screen? That would explain a lot of the sensitivity issues.
This project looks interesting, and I learned never to say "never" a long time ago... people all said that WinMo 6 would never run on the 6700, and I was there the night that HelmiC "virtually" came into the room and unveiled his work. We've come a long way... and if there is anything I can do to assist, let me know.
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I don't have much doubt that the Touch Pro will eventually have (mostly) stable, (mostly) complete native port of Android. There is nothing preventing this in the hardware; the only thing at issue is the amount of time and inspiration available to the developers to make it happen. That there are still people working hard on improving the Vogue Android port gives a good sign that the Touch Pro port will continue to come along (though it might not reach maturity until most people have left it behind).
As far as the battery, your numbers sound about right, and reasonable. I don't think there is a tool that could give us very good battery info in Android, since the underlying data that we have access to is not very good at this point. A constant drain of 300+ mA from a device with all its parts in a full-power state doesn't sound too far off. With power collapse working, that can be seriously reduced (to an average of maybe ~150mA). With power collapse working and the most offending battery drainers disabled (radio off, wifi off), I imagine the phone would probably only draw 25-50mA and would last for a day or more. Which is still less than ideal, but, again... reasonable.
Finally, a resistive touchscreen is a fundamentally different beast than a capacitive one. There is no getting around this; Touch Pro Android will never support multitouch, and will never have the effortless touch experience of a capacitive panel. That said, we're not trying to make a resisitive screen act like a capacitive one -- we're using the driver from the HTC Tattoo (the one Android device with a resisitive screen). This driver obviously has some issues with our specific panel, but that's a smaller, more tractable problem than the capacitive/resistive issue.