11.1. Features too good for a feature phone

Technology pundits often use the term feature phone, usually as a pejorative. The term is used as an antonym to smartphone, and any phone running Android is classified as a smartphone. But Android smartphones rarely lack in features. MP3 playback, cameras, and video playback may have once put the “features” in feature phones, but they’re staples of Android smartphones as well. So how do you determine which features a given phone supports? Let’s see how we can answer that question in a way that’s most useful to application developers.

Technique 54: Detecting capabilities

At the time this chapter was written, 200+ unique Android smartphones and 30+ Android tablets were on the market, with another 50+ such devices announced but not yet in stores. Most of these have cameras and about a dozen of the smartphones have front-facing cameras. The resolution on the cameras varies from 1–10 megapixels, but many of the front-facing cameras are so-called VGA cameras with a 0.3 megapixel resolution. There’s a lot of variance, and you’re going to have to think about these variations if you’re going to use multimedia capabilities in your Android application.