My first encounter with an Android (T-Mobile Pulse)

Recently I had a chance to try out my first Android device. It's called the "T-Mobile Pulse / Huawei U8220 ". Previously I tried an HTC Diamond, which was running on Windows Mobile, both platforms have a very nice UI.

At first, when the boot-up screen showed up, I thought to myself that these devices are just like PC-s from now on, rather than mobile-phones. Not to speak about those very high DPI values. It is also very comfortable and useful that you can rotate the mobile by 90 degrees both direction, the display is going to be rearranged. 

The Pulse has a version 1.5 of Android, and it features aGPS, 3.2mp camera, g-sensor, Wifi, etc...

About Andoid

just take a quick look at this chart...

android (blue) | windows mobile (red) | symbian (orange)

This chart shows you that Android really has future or at least, people are very curious about it. There is more and more Android devices on the market, which exactly the signal of that.

Although I got some errors from the system once in a while, generally I can tell, that the system is pretty stable. 

I like the idea of 'Market'. This little application helps you to download games and various applications from the Internet. 

Good news that most of the applications and games are free. The best thing is that the whole SDK is open-source, with tons of API-s.

Android User Interface's look nice, and it's fast. A developer can apply already existing themes, styles to an application's components and it is a big time saver.

Built-in applications

API levels

Android has API levels. The framework API consists of 
packages and classes, XML elements and attributes, etc..

The newest at the moment is API level 7, the platform version for this is Android 2.1.

For obvious reasons Android applications are not necessarily backward compatible. I think thats why the famous Barcode-Scanner wasn't working on Android 1.5. (It couldn't use the camera)

Fortunately, Android applications are generally forward-compatible with new versions of the Android platform.

Exciting applications on Android

Barcode Scanner (Free) Scan barcodes on CDs, books, and other products, then look up prices and reviews, or search for a word in a book and find where it occurs. You can also scan QR Codes containing URLs, contact info, calendar events, and more.

Wikitude World Browser (Free) Wikitude World Browser shows real-time information in augmented reality displayed on an improved user-interface and enriched with an enhanced search-engine. The user benefits from impressive new content-amount because everybody can easily make his own content available in AR by uploading a KML file on wikitude.me.

Summary

Android is a relatively new mobile platform, and even now there are thousands and thousands mind-blowing applications out there, most of them for free. I hope that those applications above give you the idea what developers can do on Android.

I am really looking forward seeing what's going to be happen to Android apps in the next few years.

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