The New Android Market

Android Market Updates
With the arrival of the Donult build of Android, the official app store market has a face-lift.The new market offers greater opportunity for developers to showcase their apps in a more organized and efficient fashion.

New Android Market's Look & Feel
The overall user experience has been improved with the latest version of Android. Now users can conveniently explore apps and games.

The homescreen is divided into 3 categories:

• Apps
• Games
• Downloads

Once the user enters into a category, titles can be further browsed with respect to Top Paid, Top Free and Just In.
Apart from viewing respective screenshots posted by developers, users can also read reviews by other users.

Google released Android 1.6

After 'Cupcake', Google has released 'Donut' or Android 1.6
last tuesday. Android 1.6 a is a minor update to the
Android platform with new features.These features includes
support for diverse display resolutions, Quick Search facility,
Faster Camera, VPN Support, CDMA Support,Battery Power Monitoring

Diverse Display Resolutions

Now android apps can be deployed to devices with screens
all the way up to 800×480 – in other words, Android apps
will show up better images to higher-end screens.

Quick Search
Donut offers universal search facility,scaning all of the
phone’s data – e-mail, SMS messages, and even
third-party apps that are “searchable.”
The system is able to recognize which results are most
 important to users,so contacts or apps that have been
 previously clicked will move to the top of future searches.

Faster Camera
For photography lovers, the new version offers
greater speed.The Android Camera, Camcorder, and
Gallery apps have been updated with an interface that
makes it easier to navigate between each. Switching from
camera to camcorder is easier, and the camera moves
39% faster than previous versions.
There is also a 28% improvement in speed when
taking one photo and moving along to next.


VPN Support
The new VPN control panel allows developers
 to configure and connect to the following types:

• L2TP/IPSEC pre-shared key based VPN
• L2TP/IPsec certificate based VPN
• L2TP only VPN
• PPTP only VPN

Power In Your Control
With the advent of Android 1.6, the battery power
lies in the hand of the user. One is able to determine
 what applications or services are using excessive
battery power. By means of this feature the user is
able to adjust settings to either shut down or
uninstall the application.


Support for CDMA
Android 1.6 includes support for CDMA in the
telephony stack. In other words, android apps
can run on more devices and networks. This opens
the doors to android handsets on the likes of Verizon,
Sprint, and Virgin Mobile. Do stay in touch as Sprint
is going to release its new devices for android
next month.

Text to Speech API
Now we are able to enjoy android apps that
cannot just write but speak as well. Android 1.6
features a multi-lingual speech synthesis engine
called "Pico".
Pico allows any Android application to "speak"
a string of text with an accent that matches the
language. The engine supports the following
languages: English (American and British accents),
French, Italian, German and Spanish.

NOTE: For T-Mobile G1 or Dream users,
download the SpeechSynthesis Data Installer
from Android Market, which includes the "voices"
needed by the text-to-speech engine.

Motorola has fallen for Android

The marriage of Motorola and Google is surely a lasting one as Google's Android is far more luring than ever before for the mobile phone giant. A year ago Motorola planned to invest in making smartphones for Android and began to build its team.

Here is what Scott Webster of Android Guys.com speculated almost a year back:



And here is what Dino Brusco, the Senior Director,Platforms & Services at Motorola said about Android apps on Motorola:




Motorola's CLIQ

Motorola has announced its first Android handset this week, the CLIQ. As expected it runs the new MOTOBLUR Android skin, and Moto's calling it "the first phone with social skills" to highlight the social networking integration. Now everything is where you want it – in one place, on tap. Your friends, pics, emails, messages, and Facebook™, MySpace and Twitter happenings. Motorola CLIQ is the first phone to come with MOTOBLUR, the only service that can sync them all, with continuous updates and back ups. There are no logins or apps to open, and your data's always safe. Talk about socialized.

Heare are the key features:


Talk and Standby Time for GSM4
360 minutes/6 hours of continuous talk time, and standby of 325 hours/13.5 days


Form Factor
QWERTY side Slider, Full Touch


Band/Modes
WCDMA 900/1700/2100, GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps (Category 7/8), EDGE Class 12, GPRS Class 12, GPS


Operating System
Android 1.5


Weight
163.00 g; 5.7 oz


Dimensions
58 x 114 x 15.6 mm; 2.28 x 4.49 x 0.61 in


Browser
Android HTML Webkit


Email Types
POP3/IMAP embedded (including Macmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL1), Push Email


Battery
1420 mAh


Connectivity
Bluetooth3 1.5, 3.5mm, USB 2.0 HS, Over the Air Sync (OTA); Wi Fi


Display
320 x 480 pixels (w x h), 187 DPI


Messaging
MMS, SMS, Email (POP3/IMAP embedded, Push Email) IM (Embedded) Open Source


Audio
AAC, AAC+, AAC+ Enhanced, AMR NB, MIDI, MP3, WAV


Video
Playback - H.264, H.263, MPEG at 24fps at HVGA resolution; Capture - H.263, MPEG at 24fps at HVGA resolution


Camera
5 megapixel, auto-focus


Memory
Removable 2GB MicroSD card (included); Supports 32GB MicroSD (optional)


Location Services
Integrated 5-way navigation, GPS, Turn by Turn directions, Google Maps with Street View , E-Compass


Size
103.15 cc; 6.32 inches


Antenna
Internal / Antenna diversity (2 antennas to enhance reception)


WLAN
802.11b, 802.11g


Address Book/Calendar
MOTOBLUR aggregates Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Gmail, and syncs your work contacts, email and calendar

It'll come in two colors, Winter White and Titanium, and have a 3.1-inch 320 x 480 screen, 3G, WiFi, and a five megapixel camera that'll also shoots 24fps video. Internationally, the CLIQ will be known as the DEXT, and it'll be on Orange, Telefonica, and America Movil.

What the heck is Android

Introduction

In 2005, Google bought Android, Inc., a small company, based in Palo Alto, California. Apart from android core technology, the acquisition brought Google a wealth of talent including Andy Rubin, co-founder of Danger Inc. and a former engineer at Apple. Some of the people who left to work at Google were Rich Miner, the co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Chris White, an engineer at WebTV, and Nick Sears, the former VP of T-Mobile. They all were facing a challenge to reach out to the common consumer market for smart phones more conveniently and in a timely fashion. They realized that absence of an open standard is the missing link and has to be addressed. The same hurdle was also felt strongly by other players in the mobile phones market and led to the formation of OHA (Open Handset Alliance).

Android is an open source mobile platform supported by the Linux OS. This Linux-based OS was developed by Andy Rubin and his team at Google. The android project was initiated by Andy Rubin’s team at Google and later led by OHA. OHA is a business alliance of 50 firms dedicated to develop open standards for mobile devices. Android was officially unveiled and released in November, 2007 by OHA.

Architecture

Delivering a complete set of software for mobile devices which includes OS, middleware and key mobile applications, android offers full advantage to developers to leverage the full capabilities a handset can offer. Built upon Linux kernel, it utilizes a custom Java virtual machine (Dalvik Virtual Machine) to take full advantage of memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment. Android is a continuously evolving technology at Google dedicated to build innovative mobile phones. T-Mobile G1 is the first phone released in late 2008 running android.

Following diagram illustrates the major components of the android OS.

Features

Android offers a wide range of out-of the box facilities to its users. Besides having a user-friendly mobile environment it also offers an innovative experience with its outstanding features

Some of the features that android offers includes:

ü Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components

ü Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices

ü Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine

ü Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)

ü SQLite for structured data storage

ü Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)

ü GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)

ü Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)

ü Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)

ü Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

ü Multitouch Android has native support for multi-touch but the feature is disabled at the kernel level (possibly to avoid infringing Apple patents on touch-screen technology). An unofficial model has been developed that enables multi-touch, but requires superusers access to the device to flash an unsigned kernel.

Required Development Resources

As android is based on Dalvik Virtual Machine (a customized JVM) it does not support the full version of Java SE or ME. And hence it only reuses the language syntax and does not support the full class libraries and APIs incorporated in Java SE or ME.

Supported Operating Systems

• Windows XP (32-bit) or Vista (32- or 64-bit)
• Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later (x86 only)
• Linux (tested on Linux Ubuntu Dapper Drake)

Required Software

· Java 5 or 6

· Android SDK

· Eclipse: Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers, Eclipse IDE for Java Developers, Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers are most recommended.

· Android Development Tools plugin (optional)

Here are a few useful links:

http://source.android.com

http://www.android.com

http://www.android.com/market

http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system

An Introduction To Android

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