The Android Devices Blog

Google has announced the final results of the Android Developer Challenge. 10 finalists were awarded US$ 275000 each, 10 more received US$ 100000. A gallery with screenshots and short descriptions of all the 50 finalists is available on the Android website.

The winning applications are a pretty balanced mix of productivity and entertainment applications. cab4me for example, one of the US$ 275000 winners, developed an application that will get a taxi to wherever you are at the press of a button. You don’t even need to know your address. Two applications, CompareEverywhere and GoCart use the phone’s builtin camera to scan barcodes and get additional pricing and/or review information online, a nice way of combining shopping at a store with the convenience of being able to compare prices and read reviews.

Have a look at the entire application gallery here. Many of the apps, if they don’t show up preinstalled on the first Android phones, will be available through the Android Market mobile store, which was also announced yesterday.

The register has an article on unhappy Android developers threatening to abandon development for the Android platform if Google doesn’t at least explain why there have been no updates of the Android SDK since February. They are especially upset because they know there is a newer version of the SDK, but Google isn’t sharing it with everyone. So far only the finalists of the “Android Developer Competition” have had access to it so far and they had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

It’s a rather weird situation – on the one hand, there’s a good number of developers who are really enthusiastic about developing for what The Register calls “the most closed open platform to not yet exist”, but they can only test their applications in an emulator and what they have worked on so far may need major modifications once a new version of the SDK is released. Google needs to get their act together quickly – this is mainly a communications issue. Google needs these developers, so the least they can do is to keep them happy by communicating clearly why newer SDK versions are not available, give them a timeline they can work with, let them know at least what changes they can expect from newer SDK versions.

If this situation isn’t resolved quickly, the Android platform may lose a number of key application developers before it even launches. The iPhone may be a lot more restrictive and closed – but it’s available now, sales are looking good and Apple is a lot more helpful than Google is proving to be at the moment.

Techcrunch are running an article today stating that the Gphone may really happen. Basically what they are saying is that the speculation about a phone from Google, which pretty much died down since they announced the Android platform, may gave been right after all. They have even managed to track down the design company that is supposed to be designing it.

Techcrunch usually have very reliable sources, so if they quote someone off the record as saying this company is doing the Gphone design, I take that as a credible statement. Of course it may never make it to the market, but the idea is certainly exciting…

Time magazine in a recent article talks about the price of iPhone applications and speculates that rather than having users pay for applications, Google’s approach for Android will be to run ads across its inventory of applications and provide them to the user for free. We’ll see how that works out, but it does make sense considering that advertising is Google’s most profitable business.

Technorati : Android, Google, Time, advertising, iPhone

The Android platform, provided by Google as part of the Open Handset Alliance, is getting closer to its release. So this blog is trying to track news about the platform, give opinions on the directions taken and will eventually (I hope) be able to provide reviews of Android-enabled devices as well. These are interesting times… a lot of platforms are competing for market share and seem to be trying to out-open each other. So far, Android seems to be a very good solution, but we have yet to see the first devices hit the market, whereas other platforms have estbalished themselves already. A lot will depend on the carriers and on the way software can be deployed on the Android platform. The big question is, is it really going to be as open as most of us think it will be, or will carriers once again place restrictions on what you can actually do? Only time will tell…

Technorati : Android, Google, Open Handset Alliance, carriers, mobile phones