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I spent the day at the Google I\/O developer’s conference here in San Francisco. What a great event and hugely popular. I attended all the mobile track sessions, three on Android and one on Gears for mobile.<\/p>\n
The day stared with Vic Gundotra’s keynote. Vince’s message was that Google wants to give developers the tools to build a better web, something Google and developers both stand to benefit from. He mentioned Google’s debt to the Open Source movement and said Google is giving code back to the community. The rest of the keynote was a series of presentations on specific Google platforms and APIs. I’m not going to go into detail on the non-mobile aspects of this as I want to focus on the mobile stuff.<\/p>\n
Android was one of the featured topics of the keynote. Android Engineering Director Steve Horowitz demoed an Android prototype running an as yet unreleased version of the OS. It was a touchscreen device with a new and very impressive version of the GUI. Very touch oriented and it includes several interesting UI paradigms.<\/p>\n
Steve also showed Google Maps on Android, he mentioned that the device was running on a 3G mobile network not WiFi. The map tiles loaded quickly as he scrolled around the map by dragging. This didn’t surprise me as I see similar performance from Google Maps on my N95 using ATT’s relatively slow, ~300Kbps UTMS network in San Francisco. Then he showed Street View<\/em>, something S60 GMaps doesn’t have. Street view supports a compass function on Android and as he panned the device around the the street view images scrolled to reorient to whatever direction the phone was facing – that was the real wow moment<\/strong> of the demo. Watch the full demo here <\/a>on YouTube.<\/p>\n There’s a lot of interest in Android, the afternoon Android sessions were so full that Google had to turn people away to keep the fire marshals happy, something that didn’t happen to any of the non-mobile sessions<\/p>\n So when can we expect to see Android phones on the market? The Google reps I talked to are sticking to the official “second half of this year”. The only actual device I saw at the conference was the one shown in the keynote. That indicates to me that the release is still months away, probably not until late in the fourth quarter. I also heard that there would be no early access to hardware for developers and that there would probably only be one Android model released this year, but that a year from now there should be quite a few. One of the Android team members mentioned that T-Mobile had committed to offering an Android device this year. I’m not sure if that means T-Mobile USA though.<\/p>\n To be continued…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent the day at the Google I\/O developer’s conference here in San Francisco. What a great event and hugely popular. I attended all the mobile track sessions, three on Android and one on Gears for mobile. The day stared with Vic Gundotra’s keynote. Vince’s message was that Google wants to give developers the tools to build a better web, something Google and developers both stand to benefit from. He mentioned Google’s debt to the Open Source movement and said … Continue reading