Major mobile phone companies have joined the Open Handset Alliance to promote the development of Android, which is intended to be a "truly open platform for mobile devices." The objective of Google's new phone operating system is to simplify software development for wireless devices, make it freely accessible to everybody, and promote improved services to the estimated three billion mobile phone users on the planet.
Android is a Linux-based operating system designed primarily for mobile phones, although it is also being adopted for other small devices such as netbooks. Currently there are only a couple of mobile phones running Android: the G1 by T-Mobile which is sold in the United States, and the Magic, made by HTC for the European market. However, Google, the developer of Android, says there are eight or nine mobile phone manufacturers that are planning to release 18 to 20 Android-based models by the end of the year.
In addition to the Software Development Kit (SDK), which was released a couple months ago, the Android team has also released a "Native Development Kit" (NDK). The SDK allows developers to write software for Android devices in Java. The system is designed for platform independence, so that no or little adjustments are required to run the same applications on different devices. The NDK on the other hand enables Andoid developers to access native code, which in general is not platform independent, but may be more efficient in some cases.
More details and download information for the SDK and NDK is available at the Android web site.
