Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt

Ahhhh... Sorry to hear that. It seems like a hack at best to spoof your device's identity and not terribly practical in the long run. I suppose waiting for official support is the best option.

I'm surprised that Netflix didn't target Dalvik as that would have given them the most compatibility and smallest amount of work/support. Perhaps they needed NEON or something...

Originally Posted by Kangal

You target Dalvik, and you open the possibility of having devices which have no right ($$ from OEM?) and even crapdroids to run the App. And not to mention the RIM Playbook and other devices which have Dalvik-ported to it.

Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt

Ok, so this isn't really android news.... yet...

Samsung and Nouvoyance have demonstrated a 300dpi 10.1" display for tablets!

http://www.androidcentral.com/samsun...wqxga-displays



That's WQXGA (2560x1600) if you were wonderfing

Press release:

Originally Posted by Kangal

You target Dalvik, and you open the possibility of having devices which have no right ($$ from OEM?) and even crapdroids to run the App. And not to mention the RIM Playbook and other devices which have Dalvik-ported to it.

Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt

Dan has it right. Trying to target hardware aspects of specific systems in an effort to prevent execution on non-sanctioned machines can't be terribly effective in that there are literally hundreds of systems and they are all remarkably similar. I'm guessing, that it would take a tremendous amount of work to use this to differentiate systems.

IMO, a far better scheme would be to impose artificial boundaries, for example a sophisticated system specific encrypted identity or simply exploiting a devices identity file -- ala the data in the prop file.

I suspect that this is an NDK application, and that they're using something like ARM NEON extensions for decoding of DRM and parsing of video which would be off limits to Dalvik. Still, if they are using the NDK, it would be much more difficult to support multiple systems as testing would have to be done on each individually -- which is likely why only a handful of system are officially 'supported'.

I would have tried to find a creative way to use Dalvik to lower the cost of support and testing substantially. For example, use fragment shaders to decode the DRM'd video quickly and efficiently in the GPU. I'm sure other solutions exist, but they would require a bit of creativity, which may be too much to ask.

Originally Posted by danramos

Based on comments from Netflix (which effectively said they're TRYING to make it work on lots of handsets but it's Android's LACK of a DRM layer that makes their app simply not run/work on most devices), I get the sense that their app actually DOES work fun on every device but they they're PROGRAMMING the application not to run. On my Galaxy Tab, I get an error about having an unsupported device and it jumps back to the Android desktop. It didn't even get anywhere CLOSE to playing video. You clearly saw video showing that the HARDWARE will play Netflix video once you can get past the lock-out, however. I strongly suspect that the DALVIK video playing layer is able to play Netflix video just fine and that the problem exists within Netflix's own app in the form of exclusionary code, not NDK or any kind of proprietary hardware code.

As far as DRM goes... why is Netflix unable to deliver DRM'ed content but everyone from Samsung to HBO to Dish and even Google themselves able to do it on the Android platform? This further bolsters my suspicions and makes Netflix smell strongly of bull manure.

Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt

Here is the Galaxy Tab 10.1 working with the original Tab dock for HDMI:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJAjNDuPf6k

Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt

[...]
GSM Arena does very thorough reviews, and the Galaxy S II gets top marks all around.

From the review:


This is the phone to beat this year. Period.

Originally Posted by ME2g

Is it true that Android does not have a screenshot possibility?:
"One of the most baffling options to be left out of Android is the ability to take screenshots."
[ http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/...artphone-hacks ]