The Indian market has just seen a few Smartphone’s being launched, notably the HTC Wildfire, the Motorola Milestone, Sony Xperia X10 and will see a few more ones which include the Sony Xperia X8, HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S.
What’s common in all these phones is that all are Android operated. Finally, since Android became the largest selling Smartphone operating system in the USA, India is getting Android Smartphone’s friendly too.
Since the launch and later the success of the Android platform, phone and gadget enthusiasts in India have been waiting to lay their hands on it. Some have gotten them imported. Others have been waiting, till now. But, what’s surprising is the fact that apart from gadget geeks, no one has any idea of what an Android phone is.
While this may come as a surprise for some, the fact is, like our laptops and desktops; phones too need an operating system to run on; the reason why Nokia’s interface looks different from a Samsungs or Motorola. Till recently, most phone manufacturers had their own operating systems to run their phones on, the most notable and successful among them being the Symbian platform used in Nokia handsets. Probably the only popular platform, which could be seen on multiple phone manufacturers’ handsets, was the Windows Mobile platform – and though a great business tool, it was never very successful.
In 2005 when Google bought the startup company, Android Inc, no one expected things to change, and that too, so rapidly.
While taking over the Internet, Google had also decided to take over mobile phones. And through the technology they had acquired with Android Inc, they started developing an open source mobile platform knows as, Android.
Since then, Google with their Android platform has come a long way. Global market leaders like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC and Motorola have adopted Android as the OS running their Smartphone’s leaving aside their own traditional platforms which they were developing for all these years.
So what makes Android so popular, and what can we expect from it?
First of all, Android is open source. So any developer can modify the platform. Thus, all the Smartphone makers have modified the platform to suit their phones the best way they can. Also, developers all over the world are working on applications for this platform.
So once you have an Android-run phone, you have access to all the applications developed for that platform. You are not bound to any particular set of applications, which was the case earlier as each Smartphone had its own set of applications and was pretty difficult to locate one that suited a specific need. As of August 2010, the Android marketplace has more than 100,000 applications for download.
It supports all features a Smartphone is expected to have, including connectivity options for Bluetooth, WiFi, etc and can playback and support a wide range of media files. It also supports multi touch features, making the phones very easy to use. Supported phones like the Samsung Galaxy S also supports video calling features and the Android platform also supports other devices like PDA’s, accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc, so soon it seems we’ll see Android on a range of other devices too, like tablets which seem to the technology of the year. What has gotten introduced to the iPhone just this year; multitasking, Android has been supporting it since inception.
With 3G networks, that will be soon be coming to India and many homes and offices already having WiFi networks, an Android Smartphone will be able to take advantage of it all and give you an edge in your business needs while being one of the most customizable phones available in the market. So if you’ve ever felt frustrated with the range of applications you get for your phones and other lack of features to take advantage of, while having a fast performance, go get an Android-based phone.
