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Well. its been a while I'm following what is, in my opinion, the most
interesting happening in the mobile phone arena: the previously rumored as Google Phone, and later officially named Android. The way Google entered on the mobile world was something of unexpected, and, at the same time, filled users, OEMs, carriers and, specially, developers with plenty of expectations.
Some out there might be asking themselves where I've been when Steve Jobs did his wonderful keynote announcing to every corner of the world he’s new engineering achievement: the iPhone. I would like to clarify that it is a great and innovative phone, but in my view, nothing more than that. Remember that, once, upon a time, Motorola RAZR was a great and innovative product...On the other hand, Android has something of renewing to the whole mobile industry. Its is free. It is open. It is completely customizable. And for us, developers, it builds up a entirely new paradigm for developing applications. Application developers or not, many of you might had saw the videos of the first Android SDK, which packages an emulation of what we would see later on a cell phone.
As new SDK releases follows we could preview what later became the first Android phone to hit the market. Many had noticed that the phone has exactly the same software you found on the emulator. Some might say it even looks like the emulator. What I'm trying to say is that was the system as the Open Handset Alliance has made it (Duh!). The HTC engineers had only changed hardware drivers and vuala, there it is! Other OEMs are certainly tweaking their phones so we might expect plentiful of mobile phones for all flavors and tastes to be launched this year (check what Google CEO said @ Telecoms.com).
Yes, Google has rally built something... a really powerful platform... it is even about to show up into the crescent netbook market. What!? Yes, the netbook market. Android has setup fear into dominating Windows XP. Asus, HP, Dell, Acer and recently MSI (checkout @ Engadget) had been spotted attempting to build netbooks over Android. And the latest announced OS update – version 1.5, also known as Cupcake - gives us a hint that this netbook story is becoming serous as it states to support "x86" processor architecture (used by Intel and AMD mobile processors).
Alright so we've made it through here and here it is Cupcake. Cupcake adds lot of news on the platform but if you keep in mind that Android it is being evolved into a community, many of his new features may point clues to what OEMs are planning for they forthcoming mobile devices. I could bet that one of the coming Android phones is an iPhone-like touchscreen phone without a physic QWERTY keypad, as the Cupcake supports virtual keyboard. It’s pretty acceptable that, at least another one of them is a music phone, due to the added AD2P support... (see a full list of changes @ Android.com; see how to emulate the new environment @ Nullwire.com).
The new mobile phone era brings application stores out of the carriers hood - thanks to Apple, I must agree - and just a few clicks away from our fingers, also enabled us to developing innovative applications beyond what we could even imagine. Accelerometer and GPS are now familiar and in the near future will become usual as mp3 players and cameras. Android had moved through it all and added application cooperativeness into the game. Enabled developers to replace untouchable features like phonebook, home screen or even calling applications in the way you just expect from Windows to use a music player, web browser or mailing application as default for all your requests.
Plus, I just could not believe how easy it is to deploy and test applications at Android. And debug it on device! It’s just great! Once you have installed the phone drivers, just plug the phone on the computer; go to Eclipse and press run/debug! That’s all! The application starts running on the phone in a few seconds! Marvelous! For sure, there are new times coming for the mobile devices arena.
Soft Keypad
Orientation Switching
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