Quote:
Originally Posted by WendyH
I forgot to say, I asked the Sony guy if it was running on Android and he said in an evasive manner (without making eye contact), "Oh, I don't know anything about the technical stuff!" I said, "Well I notice it has a back button now, just like Android." He said, "Oh we just thought that a back button made things easier for our customers. Now you don't have to use the home button and start again, you can just press back." Then he demonstrated it for me.
He look decidedly uncomfortable the minute I mentioned Android.  |
Kindles have had Back buttons for years, and they are Linux based without Android. Android is not required for a Back button by any means. I have no idea whether Sony actually used Android with their own UI on top of it or stuck with Linux. My guess is that with so few changes to the new T1 over the x50 series they would have saved lots of development money by sticking to the Linux based system they already had. Time will tell. If Sony did stick with Linux, then you want see Android geeks flocking to buy the T1 just to root it.
@JSWolf, the video I saw of the T1 in action showed a VERY sluggish device. My Kindle 3 which is known for a slow processor seems faster than the T1, so Sony obviously didn't take advantage of the faster processor if it has one. Of course some of the slowness seems to be due to very poor interface choices by Sony, like making you click/press several times just to lookup a word in the dictionary rather than making it a one-click operation. The key to speeding up an eInk reader is designing an interface that requires as few screen clicks/presses as possible. You could hookup a 4-core 3GHz processor to an eInk reader and still you will have to wait for the slowest component, the eInk screen, to refresh. A faster processor means faster indexing and searching and non-screen calculations, but the eInk screens will always be slow to refresh even with the fastest processor available.