Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Android

For a few months now, I've been reading a little bit about android and playing around with the sdk (downloadable from http://www.android.com/) with Eclipse. Too bad I dont have a G1 phone to test it out, but soon.

So android as some of you might know is the next generation platform for mobile devices. Not all mobile devices in the market support android. HTC, Samsung and Sony have a few G1 phones with T Mobile and Verizon has offcially announced that they are coming up with an android phone soon. It will probably be Motorola's Calgary phone.

A lot of cool applications can be developed using Android and, when I say cool, I mean it. You can control any hardware component of your android phone, including camera, your touch screen, keys, buttons and whatever hardware your phone contains. For instance, lets say you are a vivid reader and you are at a book store and have picked a book you like but would like to check prices for the same book online right there. You can take a picture of the book's barcode using your android phone and an android application can obtain the book's information by searching online stores (you can REALLY write an application that would grab the ISBN code and search popular websites for the book just by controlling your camera). The concept however is called Pattern Recognition I think, if you are geeky and want a name for it.

Alternatively, if you are just a fan of visuals, and if you have a Blackberry, you can create themes which makes your blackberry OS look like android. You would need the theme desginer from Blackberry's website. It is called Plazmic CDK 4.7. You also will need a device emulator for your phone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great blog post, I have been after something like that :)

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