Introducing Android

Android is an open-source platform developed under the Open Handset Alliance to enable faster development of mobile applications and provision of services to the user

Introducing Android

Introducing Android

     

Android is an open-source platform developed under the Open Handset Alliance to enable faster development of mobile applications and provision of services to the user. Google is the leading company to develop and promote Android, however there are other companies as well who are involved in the development of Android. Some of these include T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and others. Android literally means a robot with human qualities and it seems it is just what the developers of this amazing mobile platform that combines an operating system, middleware and powerful application development, intended.

Android made its debut in 2007 on Google's G1 mobile phone developed in collaboration with T-Mobile. Although Google has claimed that Android would be open source, which means developers can twist and tweak Android's code to come out with their own Android versions, the reality is a little different. It turns out that Google has allowed access to only selective parts of Android's code while some other parts are still off bound.

Android Features:

Android has many amazing and unique features that are of significance to developers and users alike, some of which are:

  • Application Framework that enables reuse and replacement of components
  • Optimized Graphics that is powered by customized 2D graphics library and 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification
  • Media Support for common video, audio, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
  • Provision of Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G and Wi-Fi
  • SQLite for structured data storage
  • Open source WebKit engine based integrated web browser
  • Camera, GPS, Compass, and Accelerometer (dependent on hardware support)
  • GSM Telephony
  • Dalvik virtual machine optimised for mobile devices
  • Rich Development environment that includes a device emulator, debugging tools, performance and memory profiling and a Eclipse IDE plugin.

Google Android will be available with a host of features that includes a web browser, email client, calendar, contacts, SMS feature, maps and others. All the Google Android applications are written in Java and run on Dalvik virtual machine, which itself functions on top of a Linux kernel.

Android's outstanding features are that developers can get complete access to the identical framework APIs as used by the core applications. Besides this the app architecture is so designed so as to make the reuse of components simpler and the capabilities of any application can be published and used by any other app subject to the relevant security constraints. The users can also replace the components using the same mechanism.

The fully integrated Android package comprising an OS, middleware, applications and user friendly interface is expected to considerably speed-up product development while lowering the cost of mobile services development.