Posts Tagged ‘android’

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Kogan Agora – 2nd Official Android OS powered mobile phone

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Kogan just announced the Agora – the second official Android OS powered mobile phone in the world. We already know where to buy the Android powered T-Mobile G1. Like the G1 more and more real devices with Android running on it will definitely push the development of Android applications and services all over the world!

Highlights

  • 2.5-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen.
  • Integrated QWERTY keyboard.
  • High-speed 3G network connection.
  • One-Touch Google Search ™.
  • Easy Web Browsing.
  • Easy-to-use email with attachment support for images, videos, music and documents.
  • Customisable Home Screen with instant Email, text message and IM notifications.
  • Instant access to mobile Internet services (Gmail ™, YouTube ™, Google Talk ™, Google Calendar ™, Google Maps ™).
  • Music Player.
  • Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate.
  • microSD™ expansion slot for all your storage needs.

There are two versions available:

  • Base version: $192 w/o WiFi, GPS
  • Base version: $256 w/ WiFi, GPS

That are incredible prices!

Kogan Agora - 2nd Official Android powered mobile phone

More information at Kogan.

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Android on Openmoko / Neo Freerunner

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

OpenmokoOpenmoko Neo Freerunner
I just read on the German news service Golem that Koolu created git repository with Android sources and patches for Openmoko. The German article can be found here.

This allows to run the Android OS on the Openmoko phone Neo Freerunner. Openmoko itself has a similar approach compared to Android. It is also open source and is licensed under the GNU GPL. So if you are interested to check that out below are all the links you need:

Git Rep: http://git.koolu.org/
Koolu Forum: http://forum.koolu.org/
Openmoko: http://www.openmoko.com/

P.S.: If you have anything to share please feel free to drop us an comment here :)

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How to create and use the SD Card with the Android Emulator

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

By default the Android emulator does not have an SD card enabled. I was looking for this while I tried to save some images which I viewed on the Android browser within the emulator. The emulator told me that it can not download / save the image because there is no SD card installed. Well, I would also save this on the phone’s memory … but it seems the emulator / Android OS does not like that.

However, enabling the SD card is compared to other device simulators quite cumbersome but it works and if you did it once it is pretty easy though. In the end it is a runtime configuration (additional parameter) to start the emulator with an SD card image file. So this needs to be done just once for each runtime / debug configuration in Eclipse. I just made that and it works fine. As I am using Mac OS X & Eclipse the following examples are for this platform. If you are running Linux or Windows you might need to adjust the paths but it should be fairly easy.

1. Create an SD card image file

In the command line you just enter the following commands:

$ cd /Developer/android-sdk-mac_x86-1.0_r1/tools/

$ ./mksdcard 256M /Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Documents/workspace/android_sdcard

You can now check if the file has been created but if there is no error it should be there. You can also adjust the size if you want to have a smaller SD card image or even a bigger one. 8-)

2. Tell your Android emulator you want to start with that SD card image file

Therefor, go to: “Debug » Debug Configurations… » [select or create an Android Application debug configuration] » Target” and enter at “Additional Emulator Command Line Options” the following:

-sdcard /Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Documents/workspace/android_sdcard

Unfortunately, the Android debugger setup (at least in SDK 1.0 R1) does not take eclipse variables like ${workspace_loc} and therefor we need the full path in here. Anyway, this might look like:

How to create and use the SD Card with the Android Simulator

That’s it. Hit “Apply” and then “Debug” to start the emulator with your SD card.

Note: If your emulator is still running from the last test please close it first.

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Posted in Development Setup | 16 Comments »

Android Market Kicks Off!

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Android Market Kicks Off!
Attention developers! The Android market opened its doors and you can setup your apps in there now!

Android Market enables developers to easily publish and distribute their applications directly to users of Android-compatible phones including the T-Mobile G1.

Come one. Come all.
Android Market is open to all Android application developers. Once registered, developers have complete control over when and how they make their applications available to users.

Easy and simple to use.
Start using Android Market in 3 easy steps: register, upload, and publish.

Great visibility.
Developers can easily manage their application portfolio where they can view information about downloads, ratings and comments. Developers can also easily publish updates and new versions of their apps.

Android Market Publish: http://market.android.com/publish

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Android invasion

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I just read this article on the Financial Times site of the FT Techblog:

Tech blog (Richard Waters): I have to confess: Google’s mobile phone platform is getting off to a much better start than I had expected.

The generally favourable reviews of the first Android phone, the G1 made by HTC for T-Mobile, showed how well Google had done from a standing start in just a year and half.

Now comes news that Motorola is about to throw its lot in with Android, using the Google software for its consumer smart-phones. Given Motorola’s slumping market share, it certainly makes sense to consolidate on three platforms.

It’s too early to declare Android a winner, though. Google still has to persuade mobile phone companies that it is friend rather than foe. The T-Mobile device works best as a delivery mechanism for Google’s own services. How many operators are ready to throw their lot in with Google to that degree?
Full text: www.ft.com/techblog

IMHO, Motorola announcing to take a deeper look to the Android platform and supporting it is a quite huge step forward for Android. Not so long ago Motorola was the second largest cell phone maker in the world and it was about to push Nokia from its throne as the world’s larget manufaturer. But since the amazing Motorola RAZR they didn’t do anything special in the market and their products just didn’t have any flair. I still have my Nokia shares in my depot and not Motorola. Nokia is still one step ahead and they have a more innovative flair.

However, I think Google and Android will kick off soon. There just need to be more devices available, more users, more developers and more interest in the platform. Until now Google did a lot of good things and making the platform and free of charge means that manufacturers can build phones with the OS without paying for the OS. This is a huge advantage in point of saving per product costs in the first place. Furthermore, they have the freedom to customize the OS to their needs (say manufacturer / carrier branding, etc.).

Regarding 3rd party applications (that is our field guys!) developers just love open source software. From my point of view not that much that it is mostly available free of charge but it provides the possibility to look into the original source code and get a clue how the heck Google made this or that. I don’t consider this stealing of code. It is just a hint to crash my mental blockade which I guess everyone of you might have experienced some time ago.

Anyhoo, it is getting more and more interesting by every day that passes by. Share your thoughts – share your code – just if you want to, of course! :)

What do you think about that?

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Android is now open source

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Just saw this article on Golem. Check out the video:

Android Source: http://source.android.com/

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G1 will push Android development

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

T-Mobile, Google and HTC just released the new G1 – the first ever really working Android powered mobile device.

I am pretty sure that this will boost the Android development a lot in future. Right after the announcement of G1 Google released the new Android SDK 1.0. After many changes in the past (since the first beta version I tried) this seems to be quite final. There are not that many possibilities for Google anymore to change important programming interfaces within the SDK API. We will see and check out the new capabilities of this soon!

You can download the most recent SDK at: code.google.com.

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Hello world!

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

I believe this is the best for the first entry of a development blog!

www.AndroidDevelopment.org has just been born. This is huge!

Please let me first introduce myself: My name is Patrick, I am a software developer, addicted to every high tech gadget, non-smoker, and so on. I am a product made in Germany and studied “Communications and Informations of Computer Science” at a German university. After gratuating I started working in the field of mobile software by first becoming developer, then head of development, then founded and co-founded several software companies. When I came across the Android platform of the Open Handset Alliance I was very excited.

Since of my huge experience in mobile software development (which includes Symbian, Windows Mobile, Brew, Palm, BlackBerry, and others) I know excatly which platforms are promising. The Android approach is very – and I say very – interesting. As most of you might own a mobile phone, pda, smartphone, whatever for a long time, you might also know that there is a variety of platforms for mobile devices and every platform goes its own way. The unified approach of Android can only be a success when there are a lot of mobile device vendors who implement Android on their devices.

What this blog is about: This blog is meant to bring some personal experiences of me and the Android development to the community. This community is you! Besides the vendors implementing the Android platform, the most important factor of a successful mobile device platform is its compatibility. Compatibility in an open approach for more 3rd party applications. Those applications bring more value to a device and encourage potential users to get an Android-powered “GPhone”. While Google, Inc. is a great company with great developers and even greater applications and services; they cannot do all by their own. Especially the small gadget pieces of software we are looking are mostly not developed by companies. AndroidDevelopment.org is meant to provide you with ideas, code samples, small applications that are interesting to the Android platform.

I am very excited what we will see here in future! Stay tuned!

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