Nowadays it’s almost impossible to write an article about mobile phones without mentioning the very successful iPhone. Apple had practically turned the mobile  industry upside down with its touch screen device. Some people will argue to the death about how the iPhone, or the “Jesus Phone” as some call it, is the best thing since sliced bread – and nobody can argue against how successful this device has become. But I am predicting a total onslaught of Android devices within 2 years. The Android army of phones will be everywhere you look and you will not be able to visit any cellphone store without running into at least 50 different phones running this OS. OK – maybe that is going a bit far but I think you get the message and already we are seeing signs of it. At the time of writing this article there are 16 official Android devices. How will this army of Android devices be created you ask ? Enter the Open Handset Alliance.

The Open Handset Alliance was formed in 2007 and currently has 47 members. It is a consortium of technology and mobile companies all dedicated to bringing us better mobile experiences, with Android being their first project . There are some big names amongst the 47 members, including Google, Intel, Nvidia, HTC, Asus, SonyEriccson, LG, Ebay. With so many big names dedicated to Android development, it is bound to be amongst the top mobile device OS’s. You can read more about this argument here, let me get to the Android architecture.

Android is a Linux based software stack. On top of the Linux kernel layer lies a layer for the system libraries such as SQLite, SSL, OpenGL, etc. This layer also houses the Android runtime, which runs the Dalvik Virtual Machine. On top of this there’s the Application Framework, housing the managers like the Activity Manager, Window Manager, etc. Then finally there is the application layer, which is the layer we are most interested in.

Android applications can consist of different sections, namely Activities, Services, Broadcast Recievers and Content Providers. Activities form the User Interface(UI) part of the application, Services run in the background similar to RSS feed readers checking for updates. Broadcast Receivers just listen for particular system broadcasts, for example , when the battery is low. Content Providers just provide content to any asking application , for example your application asking the contact book to provide the users contacts for use within your application. We will mostly be concerned with Activities.

Activities were designed to be totally integrated with one another. What I mean is that Activities can call one another and pass data to one another, basically  like an event driven system, but on a system wide level. An application is thus a group of Activities passing Intents to one another. It is then possible to include , lets say, a Google Maps Activity into your application by passing a Google Maps Intent to it and waiting for a result from it. It would seem to the end user that you created a Google Maps section to your app. I think this is pretty powerful.

To get started with creating these applications you need the free Android SDK, Apple iPhone developers need to register first($99!). Then you going to need an IDE, there is an Eclipse plugin, the Android Development Tools(ADT) plugin that has everything including the latest stable SDK. You don’t immediately need a phone to test on as ADT comes with an Android emulator that you can debug and test with but you will eventually need a phone to properly test with. ADT is pretty awesome as it comes with many tools to tell you exactly whats happening on the phone, which threads are running,it has code completion, wizards to quickly create sub classes and much more. It took me less than 30 minutes to get a “Hello World” application running on the Android emulator from the time I installed the ADT!

Since ActionScript 3 is a lot like Java I could easily jump in even though there were a few syntax differences – but after about 2 days and the help of ADT I had a basic application drawing a ball bouncing round the screen. But that was only the beginning and have rewritten sections of the game many times. Now after two weeks of lots of learning I have created the game and have it running on my phone. It is still a prototype and even though it needs weeks more spit and polish, after demonstrating the game I have gotten the thumbs up to turn it into a real game which we will be registering in the Android market.  There is still a lot to learn from this wonderful framework but the Android groups have been great help, as well as all the Android forums and of course, the Reference guide which ships with the SDK. It has been a challenge to get to grips with this entirely new development area but it was far easier than imagined it would be. I spent about 10 times longer getting to know Flash, and that was with people available to help me.

What about my experience using the phone? I can honestly say I am now more connected than ever before. My email, both gmail and exchange, is pushed to the phone. My Twitter application runs in the background constantly fetching  tweets, while my Facebook application gets all my buddies’ status updates to me as often as I want to see them. News and weather is updated all the time. My calendar and contacs are synchronised between my phone and my mobile. I never get lost anymore, maps are always available and my Gtalk status is always “available” and running in the background, unlike on some other phones Oh, and it makes phone calls as well.

I will follow up with another article of my findings, good and bad, this time focusing on the actual Android game development.

Looking at the graph, there is a slight upward trend, although any gain seen in Q3 2008 seems to have evaporated. Perhaps this is slightly counter-intuitive in light of the collapse of the world’s financial system – you’d think that people without cash would go for the free operating system. Please don’t tell me this is another incarnation of the “flight to quality” we’ve heard so much about. Quality? Microsoft?

Linux stands at less than 1% of total market share, with the Mac accounting for almost 9%, and Windows easily the most popular of all operating systems.

However, an interesting little nugget there is the share held by the iPhone. Bear in mind that this is a phone mostly only accessible in countries with ubiquitous, cheap and fast broadband access, with traditionally low mobile internet access rates, and the 0.37% market share is significant. Are we embarking on a slow but steady trend which will see us primarily surfing using mobile devices? Research seems to indicate that it will be. I wonder if the 2020 estimate is perhaps too conservative – 12 years is an extremely long time in Internet terms.

It was around that time, when I first installed Windows Vista, that I started to question the operating system I installed on my own machine. Vista was slow, unwieldy, clunky – a triumph of style over substance. Yet again, Microsoft believing that an upgrade in software warrants an upgrade in hardware (I can’t believe that that philosophy leads to good coding practices but that’s a discussion for another day). So I thought, 8 years after first attempting it, that it was time to revisit Linux.

Back in the late 90s I installed Red Hat on my desktop at home. The installation was relatively painless, but there was still a fair bit of tinkering required to get all my devices to work. And if I remember correctly, not all of them did. Some peripherals that I had were too new, others too old, a handful too obscure, and as a result I had a machine that was functional, but only just. I wasn’t bold enough to abandon my OS – NT at the time – entirely, so I dual-booted, always intending to play with Linux when I had the time. Time that never seemed to be there, so gradually my interest in Linux faded.

Back to the now, and my decision to reattempt Linux. I backed up all my important data, got hold of an Ubuntu Gutsy Live CD, and decided to bite the bullet. This time, no dual-boot. No hedging my bets. This time it would be a deep dive into the new and not-so-very familiar world of Linux. Back to real-world computing. I would get to grips with the command line and understand what was going on under the covers – covers that Windows had thrown between my computer and me over the years, taking me further and further away from the things I needed to understand to be able to troubleshoot.

Well, I was surprised to find just how easy the transition was. The Live CD showed me what Ubuntu would look like before I even installed it, and the installation process was simple. Things just worked. All my devices were picked up, and I found the process so pain-free that I even recommended the operating system to my father – a retired palaeontologist by trade and a bit of a hobby technologist – and he, too, has become an enthusiast.

I have since found myself a bit of an evangelist. Just ask my colleagues. But there is a nagging feeling at the back of my mind… can I yet recommend it to a non-techie? Would I tell my mother, or my wife, to install it? The answer here is no. And for very good reasons.

I have found that, for all the “it just works” philosphy of Linux, there are too many areas where “it just doesn’t”. Where you HAVE to venture into the command line to work out what’s going on. Where you need to sudo this, modprobe that, dpkg-configure the next thing…. things that I don’t mind (and to be honest really enjoy) doing, but things that I could not ask someone without my interest in the underlying nuts-and-bolts to do. I don’t see how Ubuntu can appeal to the average home user when it’s such a mission to connect your Bluetooth mouse (don’t select the Browse Device option, oh no… you need first to click on Input Service and then find your device), or when I have to reboot 4 times to get my wireless card to wake from a deep sleep.

But also, while the number of applications listed in the repositories is large, there are too many applications that the average user will expect to find in Linux that aren’t there. I haven’t yet found a suitable alternative to Visio. OpenOffice does a very good job with the remaining Office Applications – I don’t find myself missing Word or Excel – but Evolution is a pain when you connect to an Exchange Server. And if my nephew can’t run Spore – well, I just might find myself disowned as an uncle.

I really, really, like Linux. I feel that I understand the applications I’m installing now. I’ve had to learn – and that’s the problem. We’re a lot further down the road than we were when I first installed, but there’s still a long way to go.

This time, though – I’m sticking with it.