Android

I'm trying to keep a life-support minimum of a blogpost/month. I would like to post more often but I find it so difficult these days.

So far there must be thousands of blogposts and reviews about Google's new OS and SDK for mobile devices. They made a very noisy launch of their new Mobile Platform (OS + SDK). Well, not really so noisy but whatever Google does shake the ground all over the Internet community.


I think it is a brave move from Google to get into a market where some big names are entrenched to eliminate any opposition, the most active players Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, not even mention the Mobile Operators to whom Google is fighting a battle to get the 700MHZ band in the US.
Google seems to be using all its firepower to get a piece of what I think it's the natural extension of the Internet into the real world, your mobiles.
The challenge is huge but every player has what it takes to make it really interesting to follow.

As far as I've seen from a technical point of view Android gives more power developers to create new services as it provides an extensive API to manage different aspects of the mobile's capabilities. This is a serious limitation in today's J2ME-enabled phones, and as a consequence you have to deal with different and sometimes erratic implementations of the same API. J2ME was built as a restricted subset of the main J2SE classes with "portability" in mind, however we cannot say that this was accomplished flawlessly. Although it provides optional packages with additional functionalities on certain phones, you will always find yourself doing a balance between portability and funcionality and that really cut the possibility to make your ideas real.

It is not clear to me yet how Google is going to promote the adoption of their Android phones in a market of billions of handsets. At the end of the day, this is the most important factor, no company will create services for a platform that doesn't have a critical mass of users. However, as a first move, Google have called the attention of thousands of developers around the world to use their imagination and create applications to have a good set of software when the first set of phones are launched.

I leave you with a couple of videos that describes Android's architecture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBGfUs9mQYY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL6gSd4ugSI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPukbH6D-lY