Android - new big thing on the mobile sky?

It seems that Google is trying real hard to round its strategy with mobile telecommunications - and their new toy called Android could start make some real impact. Whatever the next big mobile thing is going to be, it will need an application platform. The only reliable system that is working on practically all mobile platforms was and is the Java ME, but it lacks some things that are vital for mobile application survival today (modern apps are surely not an XYZ-version of some 1980-es arcade game).

So, enhancing Java ME was an obvious choice… but how to do that, if there is not one widely accepted standard (not to mention that the mobile phone producers are playing their own little games)? Well, if you know something about the open source (and you have some money in the piggy-back as Google has) first you need to build some basic tools, and after that, to promote the SDK and APIs – and this was done through the android developer challenge with the budget of 10 million $ (that's peanuts if you want to promote any new product on the mobile app market). Besides, it builds up the basic developer community too: 0 developer => 0 market impact today.

No one can tell yet, what was the real response to this action, because there is a lot of media buzz around the Android developer challenge, but my bets are that it is going to start roll – and some of the mobile phone producers like Samsung, LG, HTC and Motorola have announced their first Android devices for the mid 2008 (although I would take that with some reserves).

OK – some of the low-level APIs (like the Bluetooth and WiFi), probably critical for the Google’s GPhone marketing strategy are still missing. But I have look a bit through the Android’s GUI APIs. Who ever have tried to start width Java Swing (been working with it for the last 6+ years), would appreciate it, because the Android’s designer have obviously learned something from other people’s mistakes...

So I expect that by the end of this year, the Android would probably start to make some serous impact on the mobile app market.