Work on HAC is progressing nicely and its being tested on both Emulators and Android devices. To make sure it works and gives us no unpleasant surprises we currently test builds on four different Android devices with more coming soon.
We chose a variety of devices running versions of Android from 1.6 to 2.2 although for OS 2.3 and later we currently just use the emulator. Official Android statistics show that few people are now using devices operating OS 2.1 and lower but we found on eBay that there are still many people buying smart-phones such as the G1 which uses OS 1.6. These older smart-phones are still an excellent way to start out developing your Android apps even though they miss out on later functionality like media playing.
It is really essential to use at least one Android hardware device because the emulators although excellent do have their problems notably very slow with some graphics/media and awkward with keyboards.
Device Roundup
The HTC G1 Dream is a smart-phone running OS1.6 with a 320×480 capacitive screen and a physical keyboard. Testing on a device with a physical keyboard is a must because the emulator’s soft keyboard has some problems and sometimes getting the soft keyboard out of the Chinese mode when doing API calls to it can be very awkward. Also the G1 is a good test of orientation handling as when its physical keyboard is flipped out an orientation change to landscape is signalled by the OS. Note, G1’s generally don’t come with an SD-Card and one must be fitted for HAC apps to run on it.
The HTC Hero is a smart-phone very similar to the H1 except it runs OS2.1update 1 and has no external keyboard. It also has a 320×480 capacitive screen and more RAM at 288MB compared to 192MB on the G1 . Both the G1 and Hero use a 528MHz processor.
The HiPad IMX515 is a tablet usually running OS 2.1 although it can be upgraded to OS2.2. It has a 800×600 resistive screen, 512MB RAM and an 800MHz processor. USB seemed to run well on OS 2.1 but after updating to OS 2.2 our USB no longer works reliably necessitating the use of wireless ADB debugging.
The EPAD 10″ Wireless tablet uses OS2.2 and has 1024×600 resistive screen. Its use a 1GHz processor and has 512MB RAM. For input it can use an external USB keyboard and mouse. Ours has problems with USB debugging as apparently there are no USB drivers for it yet but wireless debugging is very reliable.
Debugging and ADB Connectivity
For the Android developer the main issue is of getting one’s apps to run under ADB on the device so they can be debugged by the debugger. Unfortunately many devices have poor or non-existent USB debugging so for them the only option is to use wireless debugging and for this some of them must be rooted(either fully or partially).
Both HTC devices have excellent USB debugging although no wireless. On the other hand our two tablets have poor or non-existent USB debugging but wireless debugging works very well for them.
Conclusions
If you are serious about the quality of your app then you need to test on at least one Android device. Which device you need depends upon the functionality of your software. Our G1 has serious problems playing most media but is great for many other things including testing keyboard functionality. Our tablets have large screen areas and can show how your app will scale up from a smart-phone screen. As our tablets use newer Android OS they are more likely to play the media you need and also offer greater OS functionality. All our Android devices are budget buys from eBay but once you start developing on an Android device then the emulators seem very slow and archaic even though they are still a must for testing purposes.
If you could only afford one device then a tablet covers most options as in HAC you can set your card/screen size to say 320×480 and use the unscaled option that employs absolute pixels so the card appears as smart-phone size. HAC also has fit option to scale proportionally your card and have it appear in the centre of the screen. The last display option is stretch which fills the entire screen but the distortion can be unsightly.
HyperNext Android Creator 