Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Google Android

Google Android is the software platform for mobile phone, based on LINUX operating system and developed by Google and Open Handset Alliance. It is the software stack of mobile devices that includes an operating system, middle-ware, user friendly interfaces and applications as well. It is the basis of Google's gphone which is being a hotcake in the technological market today. As it is the emerging technology, many studies are going on in this topic in today's computational world. Android is expected to gain significant market share in the future because of people's orientation towards this technology. Lets look into the Architecture of Google Android at first.

Talking about the architecture, Android has Linux kernel as the lowermost part. At the runtime, Android runs on Dalvik virtual machines. It is a register based virtual machine designed by Google specifically for Android platform. It is optimized for the lower memory usage. The architecture of Android includes a set of libraries used by the various components. The developers can use these libraries for various tasks of graphics, sound, data storage etc. In the application frameworks, we can get the services which a developer can use while designing the application. This layer of android architecture contains the application components which can be reused. For example, "View System" can be used to design the user interface of the application. We can use lists, test boxes etc using "View System".
On Top of all these layers, there is an applications layer. The developers can write their own applications in JAVA to run in android. All the applications must be written in JAVA.
The main features of android are summarized as: Adaptable in many types of handset layouts.SQlite is used for data storage. Supports audio/video media.Supports wide variety of connectivity techniques ( GSM, Bluetooth, CDMA etc)Web Browser is also available The software requirement specification for android to develop and run the application programs is: Windows XP or VistaMac OS X 10.4.8 or later (x86 only)Linux (tested on Linux Ubuntu Dapper Drake)Eclipse IDEJDK5 or JDK6Eclipse Plug in Android SDK We can also create an android application without the Eclipse plug in, but the Eclipse plug in makes the task easier and convenient.

Whenever a new product arrives in a market it gets some applauds and some bitter words of criticism also. Android has also been criticized in some cases. People are claiming that although it is said to be open source, Android is not fully open source because the SDK is not openly or freely re-distributed.

In overall, Google Android is great software to delve. Because of the ability to deliver the complete set of software (Operating System. middleware and key mobile applications) for the mobile phones, the Google Android is getting more popular these days. For us, it is a great learning experience of the upcoming technology. Now, we are hoping to hear about the official announcement of gphone by Google in a near future.

References:

[1] http://code.google.com/android/documentation.html
[2] http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html
[3] http://www.youtube.com/user/androiddevelopers
[4] http://www.anddev.org/
[5] http://www.last100.com/2007/08/29/the-gphone-is-coming-how-google-could-rewrite-the-rules/



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