Google just announced it will make Android, its free Java-powered smartphone platform, available to run as a computer operating system. This pits Android against Windows and Linux in the battle for the netbook market. Asus plans to release an Android-powered mini laptop next quarter. Bloomberg has a good writeup.
I’m just getting familiar with Android. Our team has been getting up to speed in the development environment this week. Today I made a simple app that uses the GPS sensor to plot your location on a map:
I’m just hoping the Android netbooks have a GPS unit.
#1 by Prasanna Gautam on June 3, 2009 - 3:29 pm
You can get a cheap USB GPS unit for less than $50 or get one of these things, or modify it somewhat to give you data over USB (using the RS-232 to USB converter shield). On a large enough scale, I like the second option better for netbooks as you can tweak with a lot of features and do everything in very open source way. You probably would need to work a little bit on interfacing or at least recompile the OS to play nice/be fast.
However, on the notebooks that sprint/verizon are selling, you can just use the cell id for the nearest tower to find a good enough location data.
#2 by Prasanna Gautam on June 3, 2009 - 3:30 pm
whoops. forgot the link to “these things” http://www.ladyada.net/make/gpsshield/
#3 by ram on June 8, 2009 - 8:01 pm
Nice post. I added an Android category. Hopefully others will post their news and ideas.
#4 by mx123mobile on November 22, 2009 - 2:04 pm
android 2.0 is great
#5 by mx123mobile on November 24, 2009 - 6:33 pm
The apple iPhone has nothing on android 2.0. the new google maps on android 2.0 is great