Android commands over 86 per cent of the smartphone market

[HEXUS]

And Android 7.0 Nougat looks set for release later today.

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[LeetyMcLeet]

Android master race!

[shaithis]

Regardless, lets see how much profit Apple leverages out of that 13%.........

[excalibur1814]

"Android commands over 86 per cent of the smartphone market"

... and yet it requires a hefty ish spec to work smoothly along with insane amounts of ram. The OS reminds me of Windows Mobile 6.5 and, the moment you remove the phone from the box, you have to do the usual thing of Force stopping and removing X or Y.

The perfect phone for the mass market. Most people don't even know that they have Android, "My Samsung" etc. iOS offers nothing new, Windows Mobile is pretty much dead (Shame) so we're left with Android.

Oh well.

[jimborae]

"Android commands over 86 per cent of the smartphone market"

... and yet it requires a hefty ish spec to work smoothly along with insane amounts of ram. The OS reminds me of Windows Mobile 6.5 and, the moment you remove the phone from the box, you have to do the usual thing of Force stopping and removing X or Y.

.......

Oh well.

Compared to what though, re the insane amount of ram & heftyish spec???? Yes my OnePlus 3 has an insane amount ram but it doesn't use anything like all of it or most of the time even half of it. The Nexus 5X only has 2Gb of ram & absolutely flies on Marshmallow and Mediatek chipsets are hardly hefty and yet my sons Umi Super runs like a dream. Yes I admit I'm a bit of an android fanboy but following the terminal demise of Windows Mobile, as you say, what else is there, besides the dreaded iOS

PS I loved Windows Mobile in the begining but MS's failure to promote, develop & support it sufficiently was criminal. Actually thinking about Win Mobile 7 & 8 could run on pretty paltry specs, so compared to that yes Android is a bit of a resource hog.

[preter_s]

"Android commands over 86 per cent of the smartphone market"

... and yet it requires a hefty ish spec to work smoothly along with insane amounts of ram. The OS reminds me of Windows Mobile 6.5 and, the moment you remove the phone from the box, you have to do the usual thing of Force stopping and removing X or Y.

The perfect phone for the mass market. Most people don't even know that they have Android, "My Samsung" etc. iOS offers nothing new, Windows Mobile is pretty much dead (Shame) so we're left with Android.

Oh well.

Who says Android requires any hefty spec or RAM to work? So many third world country consumers are using entry level Android phones with less RAM and older components than the pathetic over-priced fruit phones. The foreign odd job labourers working in my country (& yr neighbourhood) are testament to that - it is often their only means of free/cheap entertainment & communication with family halfway across the world.

Get some basic knowledge before you whine & moan.

[CaptainAmerica]

Who says Android requires any hefty spec or RAM to work? So many third world country consumers are using entry level Android phones with less RAM and older components than the pathetic over-priced fruit phones. The foreign odd job labourers working in my country (& yr neighbourhood) are testament to that - it is often their only means of free/cheap entertainment & communication with family halfway across the world.

Get some basic knowledge before you whine & moan.

He (while being woefully uninformed) does have a point. Android is based on Linux, yet doesn't use all of the resources that provides. There is bits of unused code in the OS, which does push up minimum specs a little. Not as much as is made out though.

[DanceswithUnix]

Actually thinking about Win Mobile 7 & 8 could run on pretty paltry specs, so compared to that yes Android is a bit of a resource hog.

But that would be the same sort of era as the HTC Hero I had, which ran Android 1.6 just fine on a really old single core 600MHz Arm V6 core in about 170M of ram.

[DanceswithUnix]

He (while being woefully uninformed) does have a point. Android is based on Linux, yet doesn't use all of the resources that provides. There is bits of unused code in the OS, which does push up minimum specs a little. Not as much as is made out though.

Android only uses the Linux kernel, which is modular and rather efficient (eg the initialization parts are kicked out of memory when finished with).

The worst bloat in Android is down to the use of Java, there seemed to be a noticeable drop in performance and increase in resource required when the SQLite database was replaced with a pure java version around Android 3 with no benefit that I ever saw explained.

[jimborae]

But that would be the same sort of era as the HTC Hero I had, which ran Android 1.6 just fine on a really old single core 600MHz Arm V6 core in about 170M of ram.

er I thought the HTC Hero pre dated Win Mob 7 by quite a distance and certainly WM8. Yes the Hero was a great phone, still have one myself and also a HTC Magic which had even less ram but I still managed to get it to run HTC Sense UI with a ram swap partition fairly smoothly. And that's what I loved about Android in the early years, the shear hackability of it. These days I dont really have the time or patience to muck about with it.

[DanceswithUnix]

er I thought the HTC Hero pre dated Win Mob 7 by quite a distance.

Quite possibly, which is sort of the problem for MS. Win CE, Mobile, Phone? Give up, buy something else.

I just remember that at the time when I had the Hero (I got one really cheap as it had already been around a while by then) a co-worker was trying to ride out the start of the storm of incompatible MS "upgrade" paths, but he ended up on Android.

[jimborae]

Also I got Nougat OTA update for my N6P last night, can't see any differences to the N preview it had been running but will be interesting to see if the battery life improves. Overall if feels just as nippy as it always has, yet to see if there are any camera improvements.

[crossy]

Android only uses the Linux kernel, which is modular and rather efficient (eg the initialization parts are kicked out of memory when finished with).

The worst bloat in Android is down to the use of Java, there seemed to be a noticeable drop in performance and increase in resource required when the SQLite database was replaced with a pure java version around Android 3 with no benefit that I ever saw explained.

Hmm, I wonder if that's why Google's (reputedly) looking at alternatives to Java, but which still run on top of the JVM. Although Java's bloaty horribleness is at least keeping me in a job.

Also I got Nougat OTA update for my N6P last night, can't see any differences to the N preview it had been running but will be interesting to see if the battery life improves. Overall if feels just as nippy as it always has, yet to see if there are any camera improvements.

I'll be fascinated to see how the OEM's handle the Nougat updates - there's been a lot of press that the background update feature won't be there, because you need to have that "vendor partition" and no-one's sure if that can be retrofitted to an existing system rather than needing a complete factory reset. I've got a Samsung at the moment, so I figure it's at least six months before I have to worry!

What's concerning me, of course, is that the missus' phone is a Nexus 5X - so if the update is a troublesome one then I'm going to be in the dog house for a good long while. Especially as she was quite content with her previous Lumia running Windows Phone...