Hi Charles,
if you want to avoid use of shaders, and use glTranslate, glRotate and other friends, you can still use the OpenGL 1.X ES context. For most tasks it is still powerful enough. I tried it on HTC phones at work and it behaved nicely (Android + Java).
On desktops, it is still supported to use fixed pipeline, even in OpenGL 4.X, you just have to create compatibility context instead of core. There is no performance hit using compatibility context, right the opposite, I remember the talk on OpenGL forums that the core context was a bit slower, because it had to do more checking to trigger invalid function usage errors
But I guess that was the case mostly in the early implementations, now I observe no difference.
Petr
