This is not quite true, though. They would not - currently - be able to
buy the game through the Android market (unless they root their phone
and use something like Market Enabler) - but there is nothing to prevent
you from selling the game directly from your own site as well. In either
case, most signs suggest that Google will soon get their fingers out and
enable the market in many more countries. I'm looking forward to that
myself, living in Scandinavia.
>> plus Apple's unwillingness to compete for the low-cost segment
>>
>
> There aren't a lot of Android devices that have a lower cost of ownership than an iPod touch. (Augen's device has no Android Market, so don't count that.) And an iPad is cheaper than a Dell Streak…
>
That depends a lot on how you view the cost. In Scandinavia, you can
pick up a lot of Android phones for 1 NOKr (you won't get near an iPod
Touch for much less than 1700 NOKr) - though obviously with long (and
often expensive) contracts. The beauty of the Android ecosystem is that
there may not be a lot of devices as cheap as an iPod Touch right now
(no one has bothered making Android music players, though there were
rumors), but by this time next year, we will likely be seeing the first
Android phones in the 1000 NOKr price range. Which was my point - there
are many companies targetting the feature phone segment with cheap
android phones, and this is simply not a battle that Apple is willing to
take. At the same time, the top level iPhone is going to be swamped by
higher specced devices in short order (2GHz processors, HD camera, etc).
At some point, only hardcore Apple loyalists will be willing to purchase
a phone with half the specs for the same price as a competing product.
Have no idea about the Dell Streak price point, but I there are many other tablets already out and more are coming. I do know that the ASUS Eee Pad intended as a direct iPad competitor is going for a $400 price point (half price of the iPad) and that smaller versions are supposed to go at the $300 price point.
Either way - as I said - I'm not saying you should develop for Android. I just want to support outis's request that you keep in mind the possibilities cross-platform. For Android devices, this shouldn't even be particularly hard. It is very easy to port from objective C like languages to Java (I've done C++ to Java myself, and it went pretty fast), so if you make sure to decouple the GUI from the game internals (which your developers should do in any case - it's good programming practice), then porting should not be a huge task. And you can make web apps with Java too, btw.
Best of luck with development and hopefully this will be a success to spur on further projects. Like Paul, looking forward to seeing how you adopt this to the small touch screen interface. There are certainly some unique and interesting challenges when working in this format.
Regards,
Michael A.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Powered by hypermail