- Smart virtual keyboard
- Home screen customizable with widgets
- Live Folders for quick-viewing your data
- Video recording and sharing
- Picasa image uploading
- Faster, standards-compliant browser
- Voice Search
- Stereo Bluetooth and hands-free calls
- Snappier overall performance
- Nice-to-haves
- Symbian OS from Symbian Ltd,
- RIM BlackBerry operating system
- iPhone OS from Apple Inc.
- Windows Mobile from Microsoft
- Linux operating system Palm webOS from Palm Inc.
The second Android Developer Challenge has begun! In this contest, real-world users will help review and score applications and the overall winner will take away $250,000 (read more...)
Develop Android Applications With Eclipse
You can develop your first android application using the below steps.
- Create Emulator using the android toolkit
- Configure Android SDK with your Eclipse
- Create a demo Application
Create Device Using The Android Toolkit
1. Go to the SDK/tools/
2. Open a SDK Tool and run android.bat File
3. You can see the Android SDK and AVD Manager and Click "New"
4. Enter Device Name & Target Version and Click Create.
Configure Android SDK with your Eclipse
1. Open Eclipse
2. Go to preference : Window -> preference -> select Android
3. Browse and select the SDK Path (You can see the SDK version)
4. Apply and Close the preference popup
Create a demo Application
1. Open Eclipse and Create a new Android Project : File ->New -> Project -> Android Project
2. Enter the following data
1. project Name : Demo
2. Select Build Target : Android 1.1
3. Application Name : Demo
4. Package Name : com.demo
5. Create Activity : Demo
6. Min SDK Version : 2
3. Finally Click Finish
4. Check you application in project explorer
5. Run the your application : Run-> Run
About SDK Tool
You can find the following tools from your android sdk location
1. emulator – the emulator executable, that runs the APK files
2. adb – android debugger bridge, which is used to communicate with instances of the emulator
3. ddms – this is the debugger for the emulator executable
emulator – run your APK files
Run this program to launch the emulator that you can run your APK files in.
When you use plugins in your IDE to launch APK files, the emulator is started and the APK files are loaded it by the IDE.
otherwise you can using the below commands to install your application.
adb – install and uninstall APK files
The adb program is used to install APK files into the emulator that’s running.
Command : adb install
For example: “adb install SomeAndroidApp.apk”
To uninstall an APK file you have use adb to remove the file from the emulator itself.
For example: "adb shell rm data/app/SomeAndroidApp.apk"
*NOTE: To install or uninstall an APK file, please make sure that the emulator is already running.
ddms – debug and monitor your Android apps, and the emulator
This is the Android SDK emulator debugger. This is what you can do with your ebugger:
2. You can set the telephony status of your emulator. You can control the network data i/o speed and latency. You can even fake an incoming phone call into the emulator. You can even create an incoming SMS message.
3. You can take screenshots of the display of the emulator at any given time.
4. You can view the contents of the emulator’s filesystem. This is useful if you want to see where files are stored (that you download in your apps for example).
Here’s more information from Google Android docs on ddms.
The Eclipse plugin gives you full access to ddms functionality inside the IDE itself.
Emulator performance
To get an idea of what CPU speed your emulator is emulating try this:
1. start a shell session (adb shell),
2. then run "cat /proc/cpuinfo" to get the BogoMIPS.
