I’ve been intrigued by all the android world since I first learned about it and would like to get my hands dirty developing for it. The question that comes to mind is if it’s worth buying the unlocked phones that Android sells directly or not.
Those phones (link) quoting the Android page:
Run and debug your Android™
applications directly on a device.
Modify and rebuild the Android
operating system, and flash it onto a
phone. The Android Dev Phone 1 is
carrier independent, and available for
purchase by any developer registered
with Android Market™.Please note that this device is
intended for development purposes, and
may not include certain features found
on consumer Android devices.
So will it be worth it to purchase one of those as a tool for app testing as opposed to developing and testing just on Eclipse or one of the other IDEs and emulators.
-Have you tried it, do you own one?
I’m assuming they have the same specs as the HTC Dream and the HTC Magic, since they look exactly the same although they have a ‘developers edition’ custom black design not that I really care about the design for this particular item.
All comments are welcomed,
Thanks in advance.
Update:
I’ll leave it open until tomorrow to see if there are any more answers, then I’ll just pick the most voted since it’s really a subjective question with no good or bad answer.
It depends what sort of applications you wish to develop. I find that the emulators very accurately reflect how things work on genuine devices; you can seamlessly connect to either an emulator or a dev phone using the command line tools, the Eclipse tools, the debugger etc.
Also, while you can flash your dev phone to a new OS version, HTC often lag behind (e.g. there’s still no 2.0 image available) and it’s much easier and faster to just use the emulators. The emulators also allow you to create and test with different screen resolutions, whereas the two dev phones available are only “standard” resolution.
I find it’s quite rare that I need to use my ADP1 dev phone for development — my rooted consumer HTC Hero works fine for most of the development I do.. allowing me to pull files from the device etc. Though the only reason I use my Hero rather than an emulator is because I’ve been working on an app that uses audio recording functionality.
However, where having a physical device would help is where you need to do specific stuff regarding the camera, audio hardware, orientation and compass sensors, GPS, wireless network access and so on. Should you need to connect a debugger to work on hardware-related issues like the above, then you would definitely need a dev phone.
Overall, it’s definitely worth buying an Android phone for testing and demonstration purposes, but whether it’s a development phone is up to your requirements.