Android, meaning a robot resembling a human being, is an operating system developed by Google for mobile devices such as mobile phones, laptop and note book computers. Android is an open source operating system using Linux kernel. Open source software is a computer software that is available for free. That is, its source code can be used or distributed with out paying any bucks. Actually Android was initially developed by Android Inc, later Google purchased the firm and developed the OS under their brand name. n 16 February 2010 Google announced that 60,000 cell phones with Android are shipping every day. According to the latest review of NPD (formerly National Purchase Diary) , Google's Android operating system edged up into second place in the US smartphone market during the first quarter of the year, moved ahead of Apple's iPhone OS for the first time. RIM's BlackBerry OS still occupying the first place.
If we are into a little technical perspective, Google's Android OS software subsystem consists of Java applications running on Java based object oriented application frame work, on top of Java Core libraries Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT (Just In Time) compilation (also known as dynamic translation), which improves the runtime compilation of a computer program. Dalvik is a virtual machine on Android mobile devices. The Android OS consists of nearly 12 million lines of code. Majority of code is of XML (about 3 million lines), C and Java shares 2.8 and 2.1 million lines respectively and C++ with 1.75 million lines of C++, once again proves the fact that C++ can never replace C.
If we are away from the technical side, the main specialty of Android is that its an open source Operating Software, as I told in the first paragraph and rapidly developing. If once you have a hardware for Android OS, you can keep updating firmware with latest release and get new features and enhancements so your phone features will keep updating always and mobile will be never boring.
Currently there are two versions of Android OS are available in the market- Cupcake 1.2 and Eclair 2.1.
You can download Android Applications from Android Market.
As for every best things, Android also have some worse effects also. A spyware is reported on the Android devices. The spyware is made disguised in form of a Tip Calculating application. Google and the other 3rd party Android application developers should consider this facts before they flooding the market with their latest applications as these things may threaten the privacy of Android users.
Before concluding, I have to say, once you use Android, you will forget all other mobile OS. It turns you mobile into palm computer.
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