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Monday 18 February 2008

Android - Technically, What Is It?

Android - Technically what is it?
    (an overivew of what is Android and its uniqueness is discussed in another post below)

    1. It is an operating system for mobile
    2. Interestingly, it is not yet another OS, but component based
      OS
    3. It has an integrated Java Virtual Machine
    4. System interfaces are exposed only through Java libraries
    5. It is based on the Linux Kernel
    6. An Android SDK is provided to let developers build applications on top of the OS but not extend the OS itself
    7. The SDK includes

      • Android packages
      • sample files
      • Documentation
      • A Simulator
The offical site of Android broadly classfies the technical parts of the OS as
consisting of
  1. Linux Kernel
  2. Android Runtime
  3. Libraries
  4. Application Framework
over which the core applications run as well as the applications developed by anyone using this framework

2 comments:

  1. Sai, I found this interesting excerpt from Ken Dulaney's (Gartner VP) address at the Gartner mobile and Wireless summit

    "...As part of his “Annual Update on Mobile Devices,” Dulaney also expressed skepticism about Google’s forthcoming Android smartphone platform. He characterized Android as the latest champion of Mobile Linux, which has been badly fragmented and stalled out. He thinks Google will successfully lead the movement for Linux on mobile devices, but he also said that he doesn’t recommend Android for enterprises for the following reasons:

    1.Google is primarily focused on consumers
    2.Android will be ad-supported, but Google hasn’t yet explained how it will handle the ads, and mobile advertising is going to be a major challenge because of screen size
    3.Because Android is open source and could be potentially customized by vendors, it won’t have the consistency of BlackBerry or Windows Mobile
    4.It will be two to three years before it reaches a significant segment of the audience

    Our conclusion: [Android] is a consumer play and you should probably stay away from it,” he stated....."

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  2. It means that it is designed in such a way that parts of it can be invoked and re-used in a mix-and-match manner. I believe it has been inspired by the mash-ups of the web 2.0 era... but taken to the OS level.

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