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Google's Android Cellphone SDK Released
AchiIIe writes "The android SDK has been released to the wild. As expected it features the Linux Kernel, low level libraries such as FreeType, OpenGL, SQL Lite, WebKit (as a web browser), a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU. A common java API is provided. A video has been posted with an the overview of the API." SM: Several readers have also written to mention the Android Developer Challenge offering $10 million in prizes for cool mobile apps.
What I would love to see is for HTC to port Android to some of their older devices in order to get a developer's platform out there quickly.
Android for Kaiser = drool. Even Android for Hermes would rock.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Android is fully based on Java.
Being a developer of an open source java database myself, I am absolutely thrilled.
This is the the single best possibe thing that could have happened for the success of Java on devices. This SDK will be decisive for how software will be written for the masses in the future: With Java. Don't forget: The number of mobile phone users without a PC will soon be an order of magnitude higher than the number of PC users.
db4o - open source object database for Java and
Some friends and I have started a discussion forum for independent developers at ohadev.com, please stop by and leave some comments if you're interested in getting in touch with some independent Android enthusiasts.
"The Android Developer Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, and business entities. While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions."
Mama Mia! Tabernak!
Kevin Smith on Prince
Now, your phone is your true home assisitant.
- Want to see the tv guide? Look it up on the house phone.
- Want to control lights on the X-10 network ? Use the home phone.
- Likewise, you want to look in on baby? Buy the extra network baby camera and then use the phone to listen or view.
- Want to jot down a note, then do it on the phone and have it show up on the home server.
- Want to view your photos? Do it on the home phone, hit #9, and have it show up at the TV in front of you.
- Want to control the TV, Stereo, etc? Buy the inexpesnive IR controller (LIRC based) and then use the phone to say, volume up, channel change, etc.
All in all, an inexpensive form of this AND the interesting attachments are missing.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU" - Kind of hard to do that in an emulator on a PC. What CPU is this optimized for? (Guessing ARM... Still, to evaluate performance you need real hardware.)
The "custom Java Bytecode interpreter" probably means a Jazelle JVM or variant. These are specialized CPU/JVM combinations that execute Java bytecode in hardware. This technology is used on many of the Java phones already in the market.
-WillYou know, it may not take a whole lot of work to get an Android runtime up and running on the iPhone once they open up the iPhone SDK. I read through the Android dev docs, and apps are written in Java. You don't directly call native code, you just have a JVM with libraries available to it. So it may not be all that hard to get a compatible runtime into a much wider variety of devices.
That would mean that you could code for the gPhone and deploy on the iPhone (or even iPod Touch), either by loading the runtime onto the iPhone first (cf. "Cedega"), or by bundling a stripped-down runtime into the iPhone version of the app (cf. "Cider").
That'd rock. That'd rock hard. I'd become an Android developer if things work out that way.
Having done a quick pass through the docs, it doesn't look like there's much info on the VM, other than that they're calling it the "Dalvik VM" (a Google search doesn't turn up much - Dalvik is just some place in Iceland, so it's likely they just chose the name).
I kind of doubt the Jazelle thing, though, since Warren East at ARM was talking smack about Android, and they are the ones that do Jazelle...
http://code.google.com/android/
:).
Check out the video of Sergei! He's the CEO of the company, worth billions of dollars, making an official product promotional video and he's wearing a shirt that looks like he slept in it! If you can be a billionaire wearing shirts that you slept in I don't even know why I even bother wearing a collar at all
(1) It doesn't come with java libraries, they have written their own framework. It pretty big though... I count 2000 classes.
(2) You need a bit of patience to learn eclipse. Don't try to learn it without reading the tutorial. Once you get over the learning curve you probaly will like it.
(3) Yeah, that annoys me too, but only minor annoyance.
They don't necessarily need to make a profit w/ Android. This whole thing might be a defensive strategy to keep the client-side web open, which is something google's real profits depend on.
-metric
It's more than that. Google makes money by gathering information about you based on your searches and email contents, then sending that info to advertisers. A Google phone could do both of those things, but could ALSO target ads to you based on your GPS coordinates!
For example, if your search history included something like "taco bell nutrition information," and you were walking past a Taco Bell, I'm sure Pepsi Co would gladly pay Google some cash to have your phone pop up the message "try our new Grande Chuldita Supreme! Just across the street and to the right! Stop by in the next 10 minutes and receive 50 cents off!"
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The bundled emulator is some version of qemu-arm. Just do a 'strings ./emulator'
Nope. With the exception of the libraries, it's pretty much all Java, and actually, it would be insane for them to allow you to code natively. You loose all of the advantages of hardware independence which is exactly why this sort of platform exists in the first place.
PalmOS primarily ran on low power devices, and you pretty much needed to "hit the metal" if you wanted to get any sort of performance from your apps. It's something I used to do a great deal in the past, but not for many years.
However, we're talking about much more powerful devices here. Even the most basic smart phone packs quite a bit of processing power these days, and much of the core functionality is provided at a hardware level, so the level of abstraction provided by a driver model is absolutely essential. If you go low level, then your application isn't able to take advantage of the additional power offered by some devices but not others. You end up coding to the lowest common feature-set.
Making use of the APIs which provide interoperability and a standardised framework is the only way to ensure that your software will run on all Android devices, something which from a business point of view is essential.
For what it's worth, I was always a big fan of Palm's work back in the day, but they really haven't moved with the times, and I genuinely can't see them surviving for long now that Google have put together what, certainly at first inspection, appears to be a very fine, well thought out, free mobile platform and application stack, especially as they are also providing all of the necessary tools and support for free.
I know I'll certainly be putting in the time to fully learn the APIs and try and come up with novel commercial ideas for a chance to get hold of some of the $10M cash their putting up to get as many people involved as possible. I suspect many others will be doing the same.
With a company the size of Google behind the software, and interest from plenty of big players on the hardware front, coupled with sensible Open Source choices when it comes to the main platform components, I can't see it being anything other than a success.
Whilst it's currently being marketed as a smart phone platform, Android easily has the potential to spur on the creation the sort of non-mobile convergence devices that we've been expecting for years, but which have failed to materialise. If you look at the functionality provided by the platform, it's more than capable of providing all of most people's day to day requirements of a full PC, and not just a mobile device. If you ignore gaming, which has always been the driving force behind the push for faster hardware, then most users only require a small fraction of the processing power available in their desktop PC, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if within the year we didn't have full desktop oriented devices based around Android on the market.
As you can probably tell, I think Google have done pretty much everything right as far as Android is concerned, and I'm very excited about it. I fully expect the smart money and development talent to be behind them, if not from the very start, then very soon.
I personally DO_NOT_WANT native assembly/c code mucking around with the private information on my cellphone, secretly making expensive calls, running some weird new uber-connected botnet. Let all this widget application code stay in the sandbox WHERE IT BELONGS.
And seriously, go away. You sound like the kind of developer that would allow buffer overflow exploits and such for the sake of raw speed. And then open source your nigh impossible to compile code, expecting others to fix it.
Video, audio, and decompression belongs in supplied libraries anyways.