Android

Warning…Warning Will Robinson! The Android is out!

So the Android SDK is out… looks very interesting and well thought out.

Below is a video of Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discussing the availability of the SDK and demo applications on the Android platform:

As I was suspecting, Android is Java-based, but it is not Java ME-based; the package structure is android.os . The Android web runtime is based on the open source Web Kit, a logical choice, and is the underlying OS is based on Linux 2.6 kernel.

General Features:

  • Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
  • Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
  • Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
  • Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGLES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
  • SQLite for structured data storage
  • Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
  • GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
  • Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
  • Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
  • Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

The Android Application framework seems quite interesting: see Android’s Application Building Blocks. A great summary of the architecture can be found at See Androidology – Architecture Overview, Part 1.

The Platform (click to enlarge):

Android Platform

Video: The Architecture Overview, Part 1:

Google has set aside $10M to give away to developers who come up w/ good applications for Android.

See Android’s page at Google at http://code.google.com/android/index.html.

Last but not least, let’s see how the “Hello Android” application looks like in Android:

public class HelloAndroid extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) {
        super.onCreate(icicle);
        TextView tv = new TextView(this);
        tv.setText("Hello, Android");
        setContentView(tv);
    }
}

Let the games begin!

Related to this see:

ceo