Mark Murphy is generally worth reading, when it comes to Android stuff, and his latest column suggests the creation of an Ombudsman, who would serve as an interface between Google and the developer community when it comes to questions which aren’t purely technical.  An individual or team with privileged access to Google folks who might not otherwise deal with the ‘public’, but who could prevent said Google folks from being overrun with identical, irrelevant, and common questions, and therefore allow some of the interesting questions to actually get answered.  Works for me…

The first ‘shipped’ build of Android 1.6 - the release built from the donut tree.  It’s an ADP1 build, so not really designed for end-users, but it can be easily flashed onto any rooted G1/Dream.

The lines between Google, Android, the Android Open Source Project, and HTC are still somewhat blurred, and it’s interesting that these builds are - I believe - put together by Google, but published by HTC because they’re designed to run on HTC hardware.  More interestingly, after Android 1.5 was released, it took quite a while for HTC to put out a build for ADP1, and a lot of people complained, but in the case of 1.6 the ADP1 build is the first one published.  Things may actually be changing…

Stephen Fry - for those who don’t know - is a very well-known and pretty popular British writer, comedian and actor, formerly the comedy partner of Hugh Laurie, now famous with a fake American accent as ‘House’.  He also, somewhat surprisingly, turned out to be a pretty hardcore gadget freak, starting a blog a year or two back with some accurate analysis of the smartphone market, from the point of view of a well-educated end user.  He’s in the process of doing a round-up of the latest smartphones as of late-ish-2009 on his blog, and this is his overview of the Magic and Hero, as they are in the UK.

Android link of the day

Yes, it’s my blog - in particular, my thoughts on some of the worst abusers of the Android Market: “The Android Market has many problems, some of which may be solved or at least eased with the upcoming 1.6 release - but it seems like spam will be around for at least a while, and will doubtless expand if/when the Market grows and there is really serious money to be made.”

Android Link of the Day

Google’s take - in the voice of Dan Morrill, aka morrilldl on Android IRC or on Twitter - on the Cyanogen issue. Short summary: They really really want people to work on Android in the community, they’ve nothing against rooting or replacement OS images, but the ‘Google apps’ like YouTube, GMail, GMaps and, yes, the Market client, are proprietary, not part of the Android Open Source Project, and you can’t be distributing them without a license.  Sorry.

Going to Taiwan for the weekend - the gf is going to a  j-pop concert, I’ve never been to Taiwan before and it’s keeping up my record of leaving Hong Kong at least once a month.  Hoping to meet up with one or two Android devs on Saturday night for beer and chat, and looking forward to the view from the top of Taipei 101.  Unless the threat of the tropical storm materialises and we end up lost in the clouds, of course…