Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Android: First impression

"The Droid is out"

Everyone on this planet is talking about it, the most awaited "MOBILE PHONE PLATFORM' was introduced to us on 11/05/2007 and days after this we got to see it live in this video.

what was all the hype about? well "When God sneezes! the earth tumbles!!" I think this is what happened in the case of Gphone. When google showed interest in coming into mobile handset market, there were dozens of rumours/hoax flying around, and what we got finally is ANDROID.

The SDK and the underneath platform technology dint impress me.
  1. The UI doesn't look COOL enough.
  2. Its running on Linux core [Hardware Abstraction Layer- HAL]
  3. All the native Components are written in c/c++.
  4. Application layer is JAVA so the exposed API's are all java based.
surely it is more than what have been discussed

The best part of ANDROID is the webkit based browser. Goolge has managed to successfully port the worlds most powerful browser available for mobiles to their Linux 2.6 kernel . Webkit is port of Apple's safari based webcore engine.

what does this mean? All most all the phones right from a feature phone to a smartphone and PDA have linux running beneath. Linux has the highest number of users [apart from symbian and WM] in PDA/Smartphone arena. With this port of webkit onto the linux platform we can expect almost all the linux based mobiles to have webkit based browser.Linux mobile enthusiast would be thrilled to use this powerful tool which the symbian users are doing from past 2 years.

finally who is gonna win this race mobile race?
will it be open standard - syambian?
Or open handset platform - Google?
or proprietary and closed - windows mobile , OSX?

its very difficult at this stage to predict anything.With google entering this race, future of mobileswould be worth waiting for.

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