Android
Shifting phones to a new gear
Last week one of my friends showed me his new smartphone with a lot of excitement, which he bought recently. He waited long for his new phone that runs on Android, the most talked about smartphone and tablet operating system at the moment from Google. Once I got hands on experience on the features and advantages, especially the apps, it was clear to me that there was no reason for him not to get excited. His smartphone gave him relief from the boring task of synchronising his phone with his PC on a regular basis to backup the contacts, thanks to his new phone OS that automatically syncs contacts with his Gmail account. That's not all! The phone syncs with Facebook too. He showed me that the phone's calendar informs him of the Facebook events date by date. He doesn't have to log on to Facebook to know what's happening. All he does is keeps the phone synced with Gmail and Facebook accounts. He showed me the latest app that he downloaded from the Android Market, the application store for Android. It is called Google Goggles. It can identify pictures taken with your mobile phone to search the web. He said there's no need to type or speak query, all you have to do is open the app, snap a picture, and wait for the search results. He showed me how it works. The app is an interesting one. The app works fine with pictures of books, DVDs, landmarks, barcodes, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, or text. He is now waiting for it to work with the pictures of animals, plants, cars and more. There were some fun and useful apps he showed to me. For example, the app "Where is my Android", my friend said, helps you find your phone when the ringer is turned off or on vibrate mode. It even turns on the GPS of the phone and sends you the link of it's location on Google Maps. You can use any phone to text your secret attention word to your phone to turn on the ringer and play your current ringtone. The app also gives you the phones GPS coordinates of the phone with a separate attention word. My friend is yet to use the app as he is too careful to lose his precious phone. He passes most of his leisure time with the phone nowadays with so many apps to play with. Google's Android- based smartphones have come long way since its inception in 2008. At that time hardly anyone would believe it could even compete with the Apple's iPhone, let alone win the battle. After two years or so, Android is not only competing but also seemingly taking over the smartphone market. Android's success lies in its Open Handset Alliance (OHA) strategy. Established in 2007 the alliance includes Google, HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung, LG, T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems. Its flagship OS/software, Android, is based on open source lincence and developed to compete against the mobile platforms from Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, HP and Research In Motion. Based on modified version of Linux kernel, Android operating system has become the best-selling smartphone platform. Apart from cell phones Android is used for netbooks and tablets, including the Dell Streak, Samsung Galaxy Tab, TV and other devices. Android has seen a number of updates since its release. These updates typically focus on fixing bugs as well as adding new features. Generally each new version of the Android is developed under a code name based on a dessert item. The most recent released Android versions include: 2.0/2.1 Éclair, 2.2 Froyo, 2.3 Gingerbread and 3.0 Honeycomb. The Motorola Xoom tablet is the first device featuring Honeycomb version that went on sale in February this year. The upcoming version of Android is Ice Cream Sandwich, a combination of Gingerbread and Honeycomb into a "cohesive whole". It is expected to be released in the mid-2011 and Jellybean, which will come out next year. It has a large community of developers for developing applications (apps) that extend the devices' functionality. Apps are available in the Android Market which is run by Google. Market comes preinstalled on most Android devices and allows users to browse and download apps published by third-party developers. Currently there are over 200,000 paid and free apps in different categories available for Android with an estimated over 3.5 billion downloads. The Android Market was announced in August 2008 and was made available to users in October 2008. In February this year, the market was made fully accessible on the web, allowing users to browse and pick up applications using their PCs, send them to their mobile phone and make comments on them. All this functionality was previously accessible only from mobile phone devices. Apps can also be downloaded from third-party sites. Apps are primarily written in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries. Growing success of the Market had a hiccup recently though. In March 2011, Google pulled 58 malicious apps from the market, but by that time apps were already downloaded to around 260,000 devices. The malware (DroidDream) exploited a bug, which was present in versions of Android older than 2.2.2. But shortly, Google remotely wiped the apps from infected users and rolled out an update that would undo the exploits that allowed the apps to view information. They also announced that they would be resolving the issue to ensure that events like this do not happen again.
Reference: Wikipedia
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