Mobile carrier T-Mobile is going to announce the first mobile phone to carry Google's Android mobile OS Tuesday (tomorrow).
The event is a ritzy affair in New York City. We can only assume a device will be there, giving journalists their first in-person view of the new Google operating system.
What can we expect? This is what we know:
Beyond the calculator, dialer, camera and music player displayed in the screenshots, when the device was displayed at May's Google IO conference, we know the device has Google Maps. We also know to expect a fully powered browser in the device – one that is pulling technology from Google's Chrome browser.
We also know applications have been developing for the Android system since the first SDK was made available. We have a clue of which applications will be available for the device at launch thanks to Google's Android Deveoper Challenges – a chance for third party developers to submit their applications and get a head start programming for the device.
The winners of the developer challenges have already been announced. See the full list at the ADC site.
Even though tomorrow's announcement will be in T-Mobile's house, Google will have a pretty heavy hand in spreading the branding love. According to Wired's Gadget Lab, the phone will have a Google logo on its back.
Google has a pretty big hand in the device. The company has been developing the operating system for over a year, while mobile technology and software has grown leaps and bounds, thanks to rapidly developing competition. For example, there's the obvious example, the iPhone, which basically increased mobile web usage dramatically. We expect the playing field to get pretty crowded soon, too, when current industry leaders start updating their offerings. Nokia's Symbian operating system is set to join Google and go open source and a new version of Windows Mobile is rumored for release early next year.
According to Google's Eric Chu, the first mobile phones will be installed with a beta of Android Market – Google's answer to the iPhone's App Store.
We know Google Market will supposedly be more friendly to developers and to those who want to give out free software, but we don't know what the registration process will look like.
Tomorrow's announcement opens the floor for application vendors to start asking questions about the process and how to get their phones on the devices when they finally start shipping.
The big question is, when will the OS be available for installation so we can hack an install on our Symbian, Windows Mobile and iPhone devices? This was the original and supposedly primary goal of the open source operating system.
Despite a couple software development kits (SDKs) with an emulator, the OS is still being tuned up for a final 1.0 release.
Google is staying quiet and haven't responded to multiple inquiries to its progress. To save you a trip to the Android website, there have been no updates on the discussion forums or on the blog.
To the best of our knowledge, Android is still planned for a late 2008 release. Google better hurry up though. 2008's days are dwindling. It's already the first day of Fall and time is ticking.
Not too long ago, we finally saw a major upgrade to the iPhone SDK. There have been small tweaks to some of the included APIs since then. However, we're set to see some unseen features in tomorrow's first announcement. This is T-Mobile and Google's chance to wow us with new technology that couldn't be included in the SDK.
Developers working on the Android OS have been known to get a little impatient with SDK upgrades. If there's new features in the OS tomorrow, I'd expect developers to get ansy. The SDK is now at 0.9. If there's not a 1.0 release with the hardware release, developers may start pouting.
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