• Android News

  • Google Says Android Will Stand Alone - Washington Post
  • Contrasting iPhone vs. Android - SearchVoIP
  • New LiMo Phones Up the Mobile Linux Ante for Android - eWeek
  • Google Says Android's Fine, No Need To Join LiMo - InformationWeek
  • HTC's Android Phones Coming in Q4 '08 - Techtree.com
  • Strategy Analytics: Android and LiMo will Coexist - MarketWatch
  • Content Providers: Android's Data Sharing Mechanisms - informIT
  • Scripting Your Android Device - AndroidGuys
  • O2 and Vodafone line up mobile music downloads - Times Online
  • Google GPhone Delayed By HTC Glitches, Global Equities Says - Barron's Blogs

• Android SDK Feed

  • Content Providers: Android's Data Sharing Mechanisms - informIT
  • A for Apple, A for Applications - CIOL
  • LiMo Foundation Onslaught On Android - AndroidGuys
  • New LiMo Phones Up the Mobile Linux Ante for Android - eWeek
  • Movial Opens Source Code - Wireless Week
  • Carmack: iPhone more powerful than Nintendo DS, PSP combined - Apple Insider
  • Developer Spotlight Series: #13 - AndroidGuys
  • Sun Moves JavaFX Closer to Primetime - InternetNews.com
  • Fancy ListViews, Part Six: Custom Widget - AndroidGuys
  • JavaFX SDK preview launches: Can Sun play the RIA game? - ZDNet

We’re still digging through the Android SDK’s overwhelming documentation, but I thought I’d share with you some initial impressions about the emulator and code samples. Because Android-compatible hardware isn’t scheduled to hit the market until the second half of 2008, the Android SDK includes an emulator that mimics the environment of a mobile phone on a standard PC desktop - a standard practice for any full-featured cellphone SDK. Just run the file “emulator.exe” in the “\tools” directory after unzipping the SDK, and you’re good to go. From here, you can play around with the Android default GUI and application suite as seen in the official Android demo video, which includes a web browser, maps, phonebook, etc.

If you want to try out the API code samples and game demos, you’ll have to set up your development environment, which isn’t too difficult if you have used a Java IDE previously. Follow the instructions here to integrate the emulator with the Eclipse IDE, create a new Android project with source from one of the projects in the “\Samples” directory, and you’re good to go. Here’s Lunar Lander running in the Android emulator:

Of course, compared to other wireless toolkits out there the best and most important feature has to be the integrated hooks into the OS’s GUI. Press the “menu” button on the phone and a slick menu pops up:

How cool is that? For game developers, a robust set of GUI hooks like these will be a godsend, since up until now every Java mobile game has to implement their own versions of menus, buttons, scrollbars, and so on from scratch, which usually meant buggy, slow, inconsistent, and limited interfaces. Again, this is just the beginning. There are tons of nifty features in the huge codebase that Google has dumped on us today that we’re still in the process of digesting.

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