I have been given a HTC Desire handset by Telstra free of charge to review. The comments expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion.
The HTC Desire is my fourth smartphone. I bought a Nokia N95 the day they were released in Australia – and never looked back. I’ve since owned an iPhone 3G (purchased the day that was released in Australia), and, currently, an iPhone 3GS. I’ve had a lot of experience with smartphones, and my expectations are fairly high. I didn’t set out to compare the HTC Desire to the iPhone 3GS, but I was certainly acutely aware when one handset dramatically underperformed / overperformed compared to the other.
After a week of heavy use (20 – 26 May), here is the assessment of my experiences with the HTC Desire:
Telephone – While the telephone functionality works well enough, the display seems to turn on and off at random during calls. When the screen is off, you can’d do things like mute or end a call. This is pretty clearly a bug. I don’t know if the voice quality on the HTC Desire is all that fantastic. Having heard myself on recorded for a radio interview, I found the sound much more filtered than I had expected.
SMS – The Message widget, as I’ve explained, is a huge fail. The Message app is fine.
Email – While I dislike the Mail widget, the Gmail app is full of win. This makes sense of course – Gmail is a Google product – and using it was a pleasure. What Android needs is a good Gmail widget to go along with the Gmail app. Then life would be sweet.
Music Player – Meh. Pale shadow of the iPod (though apparently HTC has been sued for having a pseudo cover-flow effect in their music player, because, yeah, Apple, that’s what sold me on it). The bigger issue, as I see it, is music management. You can just ‘drag’ your music files to the mounted HTC Desire’s drive (which is the microSD card). Drop them in and the music player will find them. But, um, what happens when you want to manage that collection? You’re poking around, trying to remember what filename maps onto what song? Often that’s less than obvious. And where did you put that album you dragged in so casually six months ago? A management app – similar to DoubleTwist – is what’s needed. That application should ship in the box with the HTC Desire.
Camera – The still camera seems quite reasonable. Better than the iPhone 3GS, but then, you don’t buy an iPhone for the still camera. God no. The video camera did an ok job, but I believe that the 3GS actually does a far better job with video than the HTC Desire. Which is unexpected. The files are the standard DCIM type produced by digital cameras, so it should be compatible with software that retrieves photos from cameras.
Voice Recorder – It works. Produces files in AMR format, which is odd, but seems to work in iTunes.
Keyboard – Don’t get me started. It sucks. That’s all I can say about it. Fortunately, it can be replaced. This is one of the strengths of Android – nearly all the core UI features can be supplanted by something more to your liking. I didn’t do that – working from a stock model seemed to be appropriate to the spirit of the review – and I would advise anyone who buys the HTC Desire to look into alternate keyboards. (These are available through the Market.)
Battery Life – Meh. It doesn’t seem to be noticeably worse than with my iPhone 3GS. When you use a smartphone a lot (continuously, really), it drains the battery quickly. This was as true for my N95 as it is for the HTC Desire. That said, it did seem as though a 35-minute phone call took the battery from 100% to about 70% (eyeballing). I don’t know if that’s normal or excessive. It did seem like a lot. I keep my smartphones charging all the time they’re at home (which is also my office), and only very rarely do I need to worry about my battery capacity. But it is nice to have a changeable battery – as the HTC Desire does – because then I can rest assured that I will never find myself completely out of power.
Tethering – Stilgerrian took a whack at this, with some success. I did, but only to see if the ‘Use Internet’ menu item that appears when you plug the HTC Desire into USB actually does what it says. It doesn’t, at least not on a MacBook Pro. All this apparently will change with Android 2.2 (which includes unicorns and rainbows, too), but whatever.
FM Radio – It works just about as well as the FM Radio on my N95, which is to say, yeah, kinda. But there’s a fair bit of static. The first time I launched the app it took about 2 minutes to do a full scan of the local airwaves. Why did it need to do this? I have no idea. And no explanation was offered.
Multitasking – Oh. My. God. This is what a smartphone should be like. Moving seamlessly from app to app, and it all just works. Between the music player and Foursquare and Twitter and Gmail, just by holding down the Home key – which brings up the running apps – and tapping on the app you want to foreground. App switching is instantaneous. I like it!
Market – The Android Market is a well-designed app that allows you to pop your search terms in, and browse a list of apps that fit those parameters. The apps are all rated – which is some help – but there’s no information about the app until you click through to an informational page. A one-line description would speed the process of app selection along. I found AppBrain a very useful utility for finding, selecting and managing my Android applications. Buying an app is straightforward – you enter your credit card data just once, then it’s there the next time you want to buy something. It’s all very quick and easy.That said, Android apps are, as a general rule, nowhere near as polished as equivalent iPhone OS applications. There are singular exceptions – most Android apps by Google fall into this category – but many of the rest have a real ‘wow, look what we just threw together’ feeling.
Hackability – Within an hour after unboxing my HTC Desire, I had a terminal, an SSH server, and Python 2.6 running on the device, all legally. No ‘jailbreaking’ or other warranty violations required. In this respect, the HTC Desire is the perfect handset for the hacker: the Android operating system is well-documented (kinda), the development tools are all free, the Java language is understood by any undergraduate in a computer science program (which is not the case for Objective-C). The potential for Android is enormous. It’s easy to make things, and easy to get the things you make out there. That’s got both pluses and minuses, because there’s a real danger that Android could drown in crap apps. On the other hand, you can always roll your own.
Media Management – There is no way to manage the media on HTC Desire, except on the device itself. There is no ‘iTunes’ for Android, where users can work with music/photos/recordings/video/etc on the device. This means management is wholly up to the user, who may not have any clue how to do it. It is good that almost any media on the device can be shared directly from the HTC Desire to Gmail or Flickr or Twitter, etc. That goes a long way to relieving some of the pressure. But sometimes you just want to plug it in and have at it. There’s no good way to do that.
Android – Android seems fully mature. In a week of heavy work, the handset crashed just once. That’s much better than equivalent first weeks with either my N95 or iPhone 3G.
SenseUI – SenseUI delenda est. I found nothing to like about SenseUI. I’ve already written about the abortion that is the SenseUI keyboard, and the Messages widget. There’s more where that came from. I just think that those folks are designing a UX/UI without actually giving it to people to see if they can use it. They just go, ‘Well, this is pretty enough… Ship it!’ I am not impressed. I believe SenseUI is the HTC Desire’s biggest drawback.
Next G network – Wow. This is what mobile broadband is supposed to be like. High speeds, everywhere, all the time, even deep within Sydney subway stations. I love it, I love it, I love it, and I will be using it for my iPad. I will probably migrate my mobile number to Telstra within the next year. There’s just no going back.
Manuals – As in, where are they? Did I miss something? I got a 23-page ’Quick Start Guide’ for a handset that I could reasonably expect to spend a month exploring. And I’ve got a bit of practice at this sort of thing. The average user would quickly get lost, and possibly just give up. Manuals – long, loving, detailed, and simple – are a must.
TheVerdict
Should you buy an HTC Desire? That answer depends on who’s asking. If you’re an unskilled user, I’d recommend that you go with an iPhone instead. You may be locked into Apple’s ecosystem, but that ecosystem has been top-to-bottom designed to provide a seamless user experience. You will be more productive and more expressive with your iPhone than with an HTC Desire, precisely because that user experience is so seamless.
If you’re a very skilled user, one who likes to get down-and-dirty, who likes exploring, who likes discovering new features and new ways to work, or if you’re a developer who wants to open up the guts of the handset and start exploring, HTC Desire is emphatically your handset. The device is not perfect, but it is a toy box, completely open and completely accessible. You can have a field day with it, replacing things you don’t like, enhancing the things you do, and writing your own applications or widgets. It’s all LINUX underneath, which should fill the hearts of many a developer with joy. Android, while in a process of rapid-fire development cycles, is mature enough to support a robust development community, mature tools, and a ’spark’ that the iPhone OS development community will never have – a feeling of unlimited possibilities.
I do believe that the momentum in the handset space has shifted from iPhone OS to Android. But, in general, a fair bit of time passes between a shift in momentum and a shift in the market. In eighteen months Apple will have formidable competition on multiple fronts from Android. The HTC Desire is a stepping-stone along that path, but it is not the end of the journey.
Texting is probably the single most important activity that people perform on their mobiles. Voice calls have begun to taper off a little bit – but SMS continues to grow and grow and grow. For that reason, you’d have to give texting pride of place on mobile. On the HTC Desire, there is a home screen widget, called Messages, which is designed to display texts:
The topmost ‘card’ has the most recent text that I’ve received. Underneath it, receding into the distance, are other cards. The navigation between these cards is a little weird. I’m not sure what metaphor HTC was going for here, but I think it was the Rolodex. Yes, that’s right, the Rolodex. Something that most kids who text probably haven’t ever seen, that relic of paper address books, before everything went digital a few years back. So the metaphor itself is wearied.
Manipulating this pseudo-Rolodex is strangely difficult. You need to perform a sort-of dragging motion. Drag upward to move forward a card, drag downward to move back a card. It works, more or less, but you can’t move through more than one card at a time by continuing the dragging operation. It’s one drag operation per card. If you had, say, 20 cards, that would be rather annoying.
Because only the top card is visible, you can’t get a quick overview of your recent texting activity. You only know who sent you the most recent text. Anything else is buried somewhere in the pseduo-Rolodex. I would be hard-pressed design a more clumsy interface, one which slowed the user down this much and kept them from getting things done. This is the kind of interface which is precious, designed to advance a metaphor which is actually mistaken – Rolodexes are for addresses, not for messages – and pursues this metaphor to the point of ridiculousness.
Why not have something closer to the Mail widget, which displays a list of your received emails? That way you’d know at a glance who you were in SMS conversations with. Tap on a conversation and go to the Message application, ready to send another text. So simple, so uncomplicated, so metaphor-free. And yet, on the HTC Desire, so seemingly impossible.
Here’s the thing: if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t criticize. I couldn’t be bothered to invest the time it takes to examine an interface and develop a hypothesis of why it is just so horribly, horribly broken. (Feel pity for my poor students at SF State, USC, and AFTRS, who got this treatment from me, year after year.) Because, I mean, why bother, really? If it sucks why bother to pay it any attention at all?
And that’s the point: Android does not suck. HTC Desire does not suck. Which makes their screw-ups all the more annoying. And unfair. You want your new friend to be practically perfect in every way, and when he reveals a bad temper or obsession with the Wiggles, etc., well, it’s just – disappointing.
I analyze a UI simply by interacting with it. When I make a mistake, I note it. When I make the same mistake repeatedly, I realize that the fault is not my own – it lies with the UI. This brings me to the Notification Bar. This is the place where Android apps can post all sorts of status updates – an email has arrived, or a file has finished downloading. It lives at the top of the screen in Sense UI. I don’t know if that’s an Android standard or something specific to Sense UI. And it sucks.
Why? Well, I didn’t even know you could pull down the Notification Bar until several days after I received the HTC Desire. Perhaps I should have known, but I just watched it fill up with weird icons and thought nothing of it. Like the Microsoft Windows taskbar. But it turns out that if you tap on it just right, you can pull it down. And therein lies the trouble. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when I go for the Notification Bar, this is what I get:
Here, I’ve selected the Time/Date widget on my Home Screen, not the Notification Taskbar. Note the position of my thumb – directly on top of the Notification Taskbar. So clearly, I’m landing on the proper point on the screen. But, for some reason, the UI is interpreting that gesture as something else. This has made using the Notification Taskbar (which is actually a nice feature of Android) a complete pain in the ass.
Picky? I don’t think so. This is the sort of thing that should work out-of-the-box. Or it should go back to QA.
Update: Several commenters have pointed out that a ’swiping’ motion, from the HTC logo downward onto the screen, opens the Notification Bar reliably. That’s a lovely insight. I wish it had been printed somewhere…
Now let’s come to the keyboard. I was, briefly, enamored of the keyboard on the HTC Desire. The subtle whirr of the vibrator with every keypress provides a wholly-needed bit of physical feedback. But the keyboard has two shortcomings which are so serious I would rate them as fatal flaws. The first one is apparent in this screenshot:
I tried to type ‘You so totally rock’, only I mistyped something, then went to use the backspace key – that right-arrow on the right hand side of the keyboard. Only the backspace key is so small that I missed it, and ended up striking the ‘m’ key several times instead.
Contrast that to the iPhone’s keyboard:
Note how large the backspace button is. This is not an accident. I am sure that Apple learned through extensive user-factors testing (Apple may not run focus groups, but they test their UI choices aggressively) that their virtual keyboard needed a large backspace button. And so it does. I don’t really enjoy using the keyboard on my iPhone, but since I’ve been using the HTC Desire I look back on it with fondness, almost love. iPhone pissed me off, but the HTC Desire keyboard makes me purple with rage.
But that’s not really the worst of it. The worst is trying to edit text you’ve already typed. Apple has this amazing (and presumably, heavily patented) feature for editing text: hold your finger down and a magnified view of the text insertion point pops up on the display. Move your finger around, and the cursor moves with your finger. It’s all quite easy – almost intuitive.
I tried doing this on the HTC Desire, but that finger motion only selects the entire text box, or brings up a dialog that asks me if I want to edit the text – again, a silly question since that’s obviously what I’m doing. So how does it work? At first I tried just poking the text box. Sooner or later I’d hit the spot I’d want. More or less. Then someone on Twitter told me I could use the HTC Desire’s optical trackball to position the cursor more accurately. Oh, I thought, that sounds great! Until I tried to use it. The optical trackball is a clumsy, kludgy fail. It should be smooth, should roll through the text neatly, one character at a time. It. Does. Not.
How something like that got through a QA process is beyond me. We’ve already established that there is no UI/UX process over at HTC, so I know that it wouldn’t have been caught there…
I plug my HTC Desire into my MacBook Pro, and this happens:
That’s very pretty, isn’t it? I can just imagine my father thinking, “What in the hell do I do now?”
This is the kind of dialog – and the kind of design decision – that only a geek could love.
There’s no problem with Android, per se. Android is an OS. You can build whatever UI you choose on top of that OS. HTC has chosen to develop SenseUI as a ’skin’ over Android, to provide it with user accessibility. As you can see, they clearly knocked it out of the park with this one. Because every user will be thoroughly knowledgeable, understanding the subtle differences between ‘HTC Sync’, ‘Disk drive’ and ‘Internet sharing’. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolute bollocks. The user should never have to tell the device how it’s to be used. The device should figure that out because it’s being used that way. If you can’t do that, then you’re not listening to the user, and if you’re not listening to the user, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to make mobile phones.
Wait. I suddenly sounded like Steve Jobs for a moment there, didn’t I? Well, fair enough. Because this argument concerns him. I’m beginning to see the wisdom of Apple’s design fascism. There is something to be said for a single eye looking out over all of Mordor and controlling every thing that happens in the cracked valleys below… (Oh, wait, that’s another fairy tale.) There’s something to be said about putting the user experience first and foremost. That user experience should be so seamless as to be invisible. Nothing less than that is acceptable.
Does this mean you steal techniques from Apple? Damn straight it does. If you’re not prepared to learn from your enemies, you don’t deserve to win the game. Plug the device in. Launch an app to manage the device – something that looks an awful lot like iTunes – but has the advantage of an open architecture, so all of your content partners can provide their own plug-ins. The consumer plugs their mobile into the computer, and everything else just happens.
There are a number of opinions – as you might expect – but the consensus clearly is that I should continue as a Social Media Reviewer for the HTC Desire. I will respect that consensus and continue to post my reviews and thoughts through the 29th of May.
The other, larger question of reputational damage is more unsettled. Excellent points were made. There may be some damage to my reputation – if nothing else, people will view me differently because of my participation in this marketing experiment. Truth be told, I’m viewing myself differently. I’ve come to a new level of awareness and sensitivity about what it means to be hyperconnected to 6000 other people. I never thought that I could do as I pleased, but now I’m really beginning to see a shape to those constraints. That, alone, was worth the price of admission and any damage to my reputation.
Will I do this sort of thing again? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Not because anyone at Telstra or within the Social Media Review program has been anything other than excellent. Rather, because I am coming to understand that my own value is a direct reflection of my own values. And I’m not sure that this sort of project fits well with those values.
I will now close the open comment procedure on the blog. Comments will once again be moderated.
Finally, thank you all very, very much for your participation. It has been eye-opening.
Yesterday rapidly became a difficult day for almost everyone involved in the HTC Desire Social Media Review program. It may have been the forest of #TelstraDesire-tagged tweets that started showing up in many Twitter feeds, or maybe it was something else, but there was definitely something in the air. And it was unpleasant.
The gist of it seems to be this: some people are suggesting that the social media reviewers are causing themselves a fair bit of reputational damage by participating in the review program. Consider the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Othello:
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
I’ve given that point a lot of thought, and it’s a fair cop. I can completely understand why someone might think less of me – or any of the other 24 reviewers – because of our participation in this program. We are bought and sold. We are carrying Telstra’s water. We are, in short, the willing mouthpieces for an organization which is – it must honestly be admitted – not the most popular in Australia.
The longer I persist in this willing companionship with Telstra, so I am warned, the worse the damage to my reputation.
That is an opinion. It is a valid opinion. It is not the only possible opinion, or the only expressed opinion. But it is an opinion of consequence, and I have decided that I need to tread very carefully. I do not want to damage my reputation – an HTC Desire is not worth that risk. Nor is any gadget.
What then is to be done? Yesterday I decided that since this is a social review process, I would go out to all of you to seek consensus and, hopefully, some clarity to guide my actions. Live by the mob, die by the mob. Hence, this post and thread are where I would like us to have a full and honest (but polite) discussion of all of the issues raised by the HTC Desire Social Review program. This is a new kind of thing – both for Telstra and the reviewers – and for this reason it really is a good idea to talk this out, here and now, at the beginning of the review campaign. At least then we’ll understand where we stand, and what the risks really are.
If there is a consensus that I should return the HTC Desire to Telstra, I will do so tomorrow. I will then go next door to the T Life shop and purchase an HTC Desire and prepaid Telstra phone plan. I will immediately rejoin the HTC Desire Social Media Review program under my financial wherewithal. That way it will be perfectly clear that I do this because I choose to, not because I have been bought or sold. If the reputational damage comes from having any relationship with Telstra or its products, so be it. That I am prepared to accept. But if there is an appearance of impropriety because of the gift of the HTC Desire, let’s get that out here, right now, so I can remove that appearance immediately.
I have invited the other HTC Desire Social Media Reviewers to join us in this discussion. For the duration of the day, I have turned off comment moderation on this blog. Please be polite. But, first and foremost, be honest. I can take it. And it’s a sign of respect.
Let’s see… Can I afford a $750 mobile? Easily. Then why participate in the HTC Desire Social Media festival thingy? Do I need more visibility? Probably not. I’m going to be on telly tonight, seen by about a million people.
So why do it? What’s my motivation?
I wanted to participate in a public exploration of the HTC Desire. I consider this a great opportunity to do just that. I could have done it by myself, but having 24 other people also doing it makes it a truly ’social’ event. Was this clever marketing on Telstra’s part? Oh yes, I’ll grant that. But it wasn’t the shiny object that seduced me. I have an iPad coming at the end of next week. I can wait for the shiny objects.
Rather, it’s the prospect of doing this project together, of learning together, of sharing what we know together. If we do our jobs well, then every single one of you has a wealth of information to make an informed decision. It’s that simple. So far, no one has been particularly lyrical (though I have rather liked the Next G service, I am well aware that it comes at a premium). What you’re getting are a group of people who are crowdsourcing a review, and doing that in full public view. There is certainly a ’squeee’ factor when the device gets unboxed. But that only lasts a few days. Then the real work begins, the building of a collaborative knowledge base from which we can all base our decisions.
Today I began to transition to the HTC Desire as my primary mobile. While my iPhone will still be receiving calls, I’ll be using the Desire for everything else for the test period.
Other than the various UI nitpicks – which will be the subject of a subsequent post – I’ve been very happy with the Desire. It is snappy, and the Telstra NextG network is always fast. I’ve been so conditioned by the slow speeds on my regular carrier (here to remain nameless) that I’d not really even imagined what it would be like to have a truly high-speed mobile broadband experience. It is, in a word, liberating. I was swapping back and forth between Twicca (a Twitter client) and the onboard mail client, and the browser, zip-zip-zip. Not only was moving between applications easy (because of the multitasking), but in each case network access was fast and smooth.
That, in itself, represents a substantial improvement over the user experience with my iPhone 3GS. That’s something that will make returning to the iPhone – and my current carrier – quite difficult to contemplate. I could – indeed I will – get used to this.
Well, my friend Nic dropped by for dinner, and afterward we got to playing with the HTC Desire. She’s thinking that perhaps it will be her next phone. Nic explored features I hadn’t though to look into, just yet – such as the camera and video camcorder. Here’s the video we shot on the phone, then uploaded to YouTube, directly from the video camcorder app:
Yes, this is the world’s most exciting video. Ever shot. By anyone. Anywhere.
I spent most of the weekend just playing with the HTC Desire – getting used to its differences – but finally, on Sunday evening, after dinner, I sat down to write a little code. First I needed a development environment. I bought a copy of QuickSSH, which turns my Desire into an SSH server – complete with SFTP and SCP functionality. That means I can mount the drive within the Desire over the network, via SFTP.
For several years I have been using the TextWrangler program as a code editor on the Macintosh. It’s fast, and has some nifty features – for example, it will allow you to open and save files connected via SFTP.
See where this is going?
I started the SSH server, then opened a Python code file in TextWrangler. I could edit and save normally – from my Macintosh – and run the code on the Desire. No plugging or unplugging, nothing but a seamless Python development experience. I like it.
One thing is broken out of the box – the HTC Desire’s ability to scan & convert various barcodes (UPC, QCode, etc.). The app included with the distribution doesn’t actually work. There is a replacement that should be installed and used in its place.
A helpful person on Twitter pointed me to AppBrain. It’s both a website and an Android app. When you install the app, it records all of the apps on your phone and uploads that list to a website, where you can than manage them, add new apps, and so on, then, when you sync from the app, it downloads all of the new apps, deletes the old ones, etc. Quite nifty. It also means that the number of apps on my Desire has started to multiply rather rapidly. Not the worst fate in the world, though.
And I finally have Google Goggles. Which is one of the niftiest apps ever. It uses the camera to photograph something, then does an analysis of the thing (book, or product, or what have you), and figures out what it is, then goes to Google and pulls down a search of information about that item. That is the future.
I was getting a bit aggravated with my HTC Desire. The screen layout seemed too planned – and a bit too tuned to Telstra’s OTA services (BigPond, FOXTEL, Sensis, etc.). Worst, when I clicked on the ‘mail’ widget, it immediately took me to register for something called ‘my mail’. Ugh, just what I need, another email account.
Somewhere in the middle of this frustration, I discovered scenes. Scenes define a complete layout of screens (there are seven ‘home’ screens on the HTC Desire) and widgets. The widgets include all sorts of things like the clock, or email (which, this time, I was able to set to use my Gmail account) or Twitter, or SMS messages, etc.
It’s almost perfect. But I need a Gtalk (Talk) widget. There’s an app – so I can launch it from a shortcut – but having a full-screen widget with it would be perfect. Then you’d just move to that screen and start chatting. That’s the kind of instantaneous, responsive communication that a mobile should have.
This whole thing makes the best case for multitasking (in design, if not necessarily in practice) that I’ve yet seen.
I am a furious, almost obsessive user of Twitter. The HTC Desire does have a stock-standard Twitter client, Peep, but that basically just grabs my current updates and presents them in a list. Which is fine if you only follow a few tens of people. I have over 5700. That torrent needs to be managed carefully – which I do, using TweetDeck on my MacBook Pro, and on my iPhone 3GS. The great advantage of that is that any user lists I make up in TweetDeck on the Mac automatically transfer over to the iPhone.
TweetDeck does not offer an Android version – though there are rumours one is soon to arrive. There’s an ongoing private beta test for a web-based version of TweetDeck – using HTML5 in all of its full-fledged goodness – but that’s still some time from general release.
Right now I’m stuck. I’ve downloaded Seesmic – which some people love, though I’ve never used it. And there are others, such as TwitDroid, and even the official Twitter Corp. application. All of these could work. But all of them mean that I will need to rebuild my ‘close friends’ list. A list that was months in development.
I’m a big fan of the Python programming language. It is the glue of the Internet – literally. It’s what Google uses to keep everything running smoothly. And here it is, on my HTC Desire:
$ export TEMP="/sdcard/ase/extras/python/tmp"
export PYTHONHOME="/data/data/com.google.ase/python"
export AP_PORT="54243"
export PYTHONPATH="/sdcard/ase/extras/python/:/sdcard/ase/scripts/"
/data/data/com.google.ase/python/bin/python
$ $ $ $ Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Sep 19 2009, 11:03:28)
[GCC 4.2.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>print "Hello, world!"
Hello, world!
>>>
The secret is ASE, the Android Scripting Environment, which provides several popular scripting languages: sh, bsh, Python, Ruby, Lua, Perl and Tcl. There’s something for everybody on that list – if everybody is a coder!
