Android

Whats got me really interested these days ? Mobile OS.

Yes thats the piece of software that runs your mobile.
The famous OS for mobiles includes the symbian OS that power the Nokia, some SE(Sony Erikkson), and a few other brands, the Windows Mobile OS that powers the HTC,Asus, DOPODs, HP, Motorola Q8 .etc, the Palm OS that runs the palm treo and some asus phones. Then you have the proprietary OS that comes installed on many phones doesnt conform to any particular family but is made just to suit the device.

But what's really got me excited is the Android OS. Although it is still in development and will hit the markets a little later, the OS from Google has created a lot of excitement in the mobile industry as it will be an open source OS based on the Linux kernel.

The OS architecture is similar to other Linux architectures with a kernel directly running on the hardware, the drivers and the system software running on top of this and applications running in user space. Here all the functionality of a mobile is considered as an application. The phone for example runs as an application on the user space instead of running directly atop the hardware as in the conventional mobiles.

Although Android is not the first Linux based OS for the mobile it has generated interest because of the fact that it is an effort by global search engine major Google and mobile manufacturers like HTC have agreed to bring out phones using the Android OS. The earlier Linux ports usually voided the warranty and suffered from the problem of lack of drivers and lack of developers. And porting Linux to mobiles was left to the top level experts. With the advent of Android, Linux based mobiles are believed to be commonplace. Google provides a SDK for creating software for android. The SDK is eclipse based and uses JAVA programming language.

The Android SDK is freely available for download here.

An obscure phone called Neo ran OpenMoko, a linux port for mobile. This port had drivers specifically written and the OS kernel itself specifically compiled for the mobile. But Google plans to bring out the OS as a more abstract entity that is supported by a wide variety of mobiles.

People have already ported android to run on a host of mobiles. Just search for Android on youtube and you see a plethora of videos of Android

Long Live Open Source....