Google’s Android Hits a Few Snags, But Feature Details Emerge
The code powering the guts of the Google Phone isn’t quite ready for its debut. But promising new details about the open-source mobile OS’s inner workings have emerged.
The Open Handset Alliance has promised a new Android software developer’s kit (SDK) within "several weeks," complete with a new user interface for Android. This re-vamped SDK should address the concerns of developers who felt the first release wasn’t quite up to snuff.
This also means the deadline for Google’s Android Developer Challenge — the one with $10 million in cash prizes for killer mobile apps — has been pushed back to April 14.
The extra time and effort apparently have not been spent in vain. Lance Davis at the Register’s developer site got a sneak preview of the new Android at Google’s Code Day event in London last week.
Android will use the Linux 2.6 kernel to manage devices’ memory, display, camera, Bluetooth, flash memory, USB ports, keypad, audio and battery. There are also libraries for SQLlite, Freetype, Webkit, openGLS and new media framework being supplied by Real.
Google is also recommending devices have a minimum of a 200MHz processor with 64MB of RAM and 64MB of flash memory to run Android. As Davis notes, this shows that Google is approaching the handheld devices of the future not as phones, but rather as small computers upon which "voice is just another application." Such thinking represents a shift away from the status quo within the mobile industry. Davis points to possible problems with this model, as well, like the confusion likely to arise when conflicting apps are installed.
Meanwhile, the LiMo Foundation also announced the impending availability of its Linux-based mobile platform Monday. The LiMo platform will be available mid-March. LiMo is one of Android’s main competitors — if one can peg that term to open-source software distributions — so it will be interesting to watch which manufacturers adopt which mobile OS and when.
