Over the past few years in sure we have seen this little robot in many blogs and news posts. It is all the rage with the geeks and techies these days. Although it is a simple design, it stands for something that is quickly becoming the biggest thing in the mobile phone industry since the, well, mobile phone itself!
As some of you probably know by now, Android is Google's proprietary operating for touchscreen smartphones. It was first developed by Android Inc. a firm that was purchased by Google in 2005 for an undisclosed amount of money estimated to be around $50 million which is peanuts compared to its current worth. The OS was launched 3 years ago on the first smartphone and is a very young OS in the smartphone stage. Even than, it is the most sought-after and rapidly spreading OS. It is proving as a worthy competitor for industry heavy weights from the market leader Symbian from Nokia to iOS from Apple. The most novel property of Android is that it is open source which means that besides certain limitations, the complete code for the OS is open to the public for alteration and improvisation leading to endless possibilities.
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As of now, a large number of manufactures have taken up this OS for their devices including HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, Huawei, Dell, Acer and many more. This OS has helped companies like Motorola and Sony regain market share after years of loss of market share. Statistical data has shown that Android is the top selling OS in USA right now and the popularity is growing exponentially. This year sales of the OS have increased over 800% over the last year! Although this figure is slightly misleading since Android is a very young OS, it does show you a lot about the direction things are heading in.
In 2007 Google launched the first version of Android (1.1) later it launched the second version and started the trend of giving interesting nicknames to the versions. Right now the latest version is Android 2.2 aka Froyo, short for frozen yogurt. Its the strongest competitor to the market leader for touchscreens, Apple's iOS, right now. It has innovative features like 720p high definition video recording and a very innovative UI. It has live wallpapers which are different your everyday animated wallpapers because of the fact that you can interact with them through touch! This is a very appealing feature for the geek in all of us.
I'm sure you are wondering that any OS would need a bevy of Applications if they wanted to win over Apple's iOS. The Android App store is the one of the leading stores in the market today. The amount of Apps available has increased from 50,000 to 100,000 in the last 3 months alone! By comparison, iOS has a total of 300,000 Apps accumulated over the last 3 years! Basically the open source nature of Android is a magnet for application developers plus the sheer magnitude of innovations within the OS hit the sweet spot for companies as they can develop highly innovative software.
Another edge that Android has is that it has lead the market leaders in a sort of a scramble to get the best hardware to run Android to show their technological prowess and to make best in class hardware. HTC is one of the companies leading the Android frenzy from the front. The HTC desire HD comes with a 1GHz processor bundled with a just under 800MB of RAM , 720p High definition video recording and an 8 mega pixel camera with a behemoth of a 4.3 inch touch screen! Such features are simply not found running any other OS by any other manufacturer today! Such hardware combined with Google's innovative software spells heaven for geeks and nerds who are the segment of the market that have contributed most in bringing Google's Android OS into such a strong position in such a short period of time!
With the bevy of new Android phones being launched every other day and further addition to the number of manufacturers jumping onto the android bandwagon this OS shows no signs of cooling off for now. Furthermore, with the highly anticipated launch of Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread by the end of this year and further improved functionality for smartphones and compatibility with tablets, you will surely be hearing a lot about Android in the times to come! So keep this blog as your homepage if you love android because believe me when I say this, its just the beginning!
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