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So, I promised you all a post on the Android OS. As I’m sure most of you know, the Android Operating System is Google’s smart phone OS. Unlike, the iPhone OS, Android is EVERYWHERE and the software development environment is very friendly. Not to mention, the app store is open to anyone who wants to write an app and there are no restrictions placed on what compilers may be used.

I’m going to start with the software side of things since I have actually had some experience writing applications for Android. The first day that I sat down to learn how to write applications it took me about 4 hours to get the dev kit set up. This was a little bit annoying, but I blame it on the Windows distribution of Eclipse (I was at work) since it took me less than an hour to set up the dev kit on my Macboook. Anyway, the recommended development environment consists of Eclipse, the android SDK, and a plug-in that is download from google (how convenient) to put it all together. Once I got everything up and running it only took me about 20 minutes to get a “Hello World!” application running on the Android simulator that comes with the dev kit.

The thing that I think makes the Android development environment so nice is that all Java classes are allowed. Thanks to UAB, I know Java. In addition to the already powerful Java library, Google provides developers with some very useful and convenient bonus classes. For example, say you wanted to write a GPS app. Guess what, there is a command to initialize the Google Maps interface. Then you might want to say “find my current location”. That takes one line of code that says getCurrentLocation(). I’m sure you can imagine creative things to do from there.

Another very cool and easy to use bonus class of the Android OS is the textToSpeech class. When I was at the SoutheastCon 2010 Software Competition last month, we were challenged to write 7 applications in a day. One of them required taking text as user input and making the phone read it back to the user. It took me and my teammates about 45 minutes to write that app. Thanks for making things so easy Google.

In addition to having a great development environment, there are a whole lot of phones that run Android. So if you write an app for Android, it is available from the app store on not only the Google Nexus One, but on phones from several other manufacturers (HTC, T-Mobile, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and a couple more). So unlike the iPhone, you get several choices for the device that runs the operating system. Which is really nice because once you’ve chosen your phone OS you have the option to choose from several different form factors. I, for one, hate that fact that the iPhone doesn’t have a hard keyboard. Some people don’t mind so much. But if you like the Android operating system you can pick whether you have a real keyboard or touchscreen only. More options are always better.

As far as cell phone market domination goes, I think Google has set themselves up for a huge success. Android is lightweight, great to program for, and widely available. Google might not beat out Windows Mobile, or RIM, but I certainly think that Android OS will soon be more widely used than the iPhone OS. The future of Android devices looks promising and I certainly look forward to seeing how well Google can do in this market.