Android Mobile

What is Android?

Developed by the Open Handset Alliance, Android brings Internet-style innovation and openness to mobile phones. 

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.

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 OpenGL ES 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

Naturally, you’d think that Google has gone serious into Mobile technology. Eversince iPhone was released, more and more companies, groups, and individual are looking into Mobile arena.

Mobile Application Development

at first glance, C/C++ developers might think that they could easily develop/port their applications from Symbian OS (which is written in C/C++) to Android Phones. Unfortunately, no. Currently it only supports development in Java.

The fact, that it runs on linux, doesn’t mean it can run all linux applications. Infact, it does not support it officially, although there has been some experiments like Gnome/KDE on it being done.

All application of Android is run on a custom Java virtual machine, called Dalvik virtual machine.  

The virtual machine runs Java platform applications which have been converted into a compact Dalvik Executable(.dex) format suitable for systems that are constrained in terms of memory and processor speed. It was written by Dan Bornstein, who named it after the fishing village of Dalvík inEyjafjörður, Iceland, where some of his ancestors lived.

As a developer assigned in Research & Development for this platform, I found many great things, and also frustrating parts working with it. Great things such as being able to develop applications in a quite easily. With its increasing popularity and community, developer’s resources increases as well. However, as I’ve said, there are parts tht really frustrated me. The fact that it uses Java (which we could say a great and kind’a overly designed language), its naming conventions are quite confusing for newbies like me. So it may take a while before you can understand what a certain keyword or declaration means.

For more information, you can check out the official site.

http://www.android.com/

Links and resources:

http://www.anddev.org/