Google may have put to rest the notion that it will be creating a Google phone, but there’s still quite a bit of excitement surrounding the Android platform that it is championing. Among the companies that have signed on with its Open Handset Alliance are manufacturers like HTC, Samsung and Motorola, not to mention a host of semiconductor companies and software developers, too. Andy Rubin, the man heading Android at Google, was in town gave us a sneak preview of Android’s interface and some of the applications independent developers have created for it.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the platform, Rubin had with him a touchscreen-enabled phone. We were not allowed to take photos of the device, but were told that this is the same one used at the Google developer conference. It had a shape and dimensions very similar to the HTC TyTN II. Details were not given but the Android platform has a minimum specification requirement of 200MHz, so we know it’s at least that fast.

The Android user interface, like any other mobile phone’s, has an information bar at the top which tells you how much battery you have left, which network you’re on and what time it is. The main screen area is a blank slate much like the desktop space on a PC. Swiping the finger at the sides of the screen will move this desktop around as it is larger than the actual resolution of the LCD. As expected, there are many Google applications by default, 20 in total, according to Rubin. These include a YouTube program with which you can search and view all YouTube clips, a Gmail app and Google Maps.

Like many of the smart phone operating systems out there, more than one application can run at any one time. As some Windows Mobile users will attest to, this may cause problems for the end-user, especially if they are not vigilant about keeping running applications in check to conserve memory usage and battery life. Android handles that by putting all the apps running in the background in "freeze dry", minimizing the system resources that they consume even though they may not be completely shut down. In the demo, Google Maps ran smoothly even with a music player and a photo application running. The proof of how well this will work in the real-world by real users will have to wait till one of the manufacturers ships a real unit.

Notifications like system errors, warnings, new messages and so on appear as an exclamation mark unobtrusively on the top left corner of the display. This is not unlike the blinking asterisk we’ve seen in Palm OS since many revisions back. Pressing and pulling down this alert will reveal a list of notifications including mail alerts, error messages and also a list of running applications. It doesn’t bug you like some of the pop up notifications you may get in Windows Mobile, but we’ll be curious to see how a very crowded notifications list will look considering most people won’t want to scroll through a list of alerts.

One of the main draws of Android is being able to engage the developer community. To that end, Google has set aside US$10 million in awards for developers who submit their apps for consideration. The first round of this Android Developer Challenge (ADC) has already ended with some interesting submissions shown. Enkin, for example, was written by a couple of college students and makes use of the phone’s camera together with the GPS chip to provide a unique real-time, real-world navigation experience. It appends names of locations over what you see through the camera lens of your mobile phone using GPS navigation technology. Check out the video created by the developers to see how this works. 

                                 
Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.Rubin was not able to reveal when the first Android phone will be coming. But when asked, he does not think it will be a situation where those in Asia will have to wait long after an initial US launch. Asian software developers are also on the Android bandwagon, with over 20 percent of the submissions for the first phase of the ADC coming out of Asia. We’ll bring you more information about Android hardware launches as that becomes available. It won’t be long though, as we’re expecting the first ones to be out by the end of this year.

Source: Asia CNet