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You might have heard, Google's offering $10 million in total prizes for savvy programmers willing and able to make kickass apps for the Android platform. Why so much when other dev communities are getting into the groove for free? A Google rep told me, "We wanted to provide a big enough pool to reward and recognize as many developers who do interesting things as we could." How's that for appreciation? Here's a summary of the Android Developer Challenge.

•Programs, built by using Android's SDK, can be submitted January 2nd through March 3rd 2008.
•The top 50 programs earn $25K to continue development.
•Those in the top 50 are entered into a final round where ten $275k prizes and ten $100k prizes will be awarded.
•A second round of the contest starts in the second half of the year, when handsets running Android launch.
•"We believe that developers will be drawn to, and flourish in, the open and collaborative environment offered by the Android platform. The Android Developer Challenge is designed simply to catalyze that reaction."

Andy Rubin, who spearheaded the project, writes on the Google blog:

The first handsets are likely to be available in the second half of 2008, the company said. Other partners in the alliance include Sprint Nextel (S), Telecom Italia, NTT DoCoMo, Broadcom (BRCM), and a slew of other technology companies.

Who is missing? Quite a few large carriers, including Vodafone (VOD), Orange, SK Telecom, AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ). Nokia (NOK), Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are among the handset makers not part of this alliance.

My Take: This is one massive PR move, with nothing to show for it right now, and it seems like there are other unknown reasons (Facebook ad platform launch perhaps) for the motivation here. No phones till second half of 2008 — in our ADD culture that is a lifetime. The partners — with the exception of HTC and T-Mobile — are companies who are, in cricketing parlance, on the backfoot. Motorola, for instance is not exactly a bastion of handset excellence. Sprint — we know how well they are doing.

MyTake #2: Following the press call, I actually have more questions than answers. They completely dodged my question about how does it reconcile with other mobile linux efforts which are backed by none other than partners like Motorola. Andy Rubin replied that all the software is available for the developers in a week, which is non-answer if there is any. Funny - no phones till second half of 2008 and they want developers to shift their attention from iPhone, Symbian, other Mobile Linux and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Even more convinced that this is a PR move. Not clear how this helps Google from a fiscal sense and its business implications for the company. Oh well, time to hound their press department.

What Others Say:

Chetan Sharma of Chetan Sharma Consulting: Google definitely assembled an impressive list of partners for this initiative. On a fundamental level, it still remains to be seen if this move is going to be transform the industry. Of course, everyone wants to be seen supporting openness, proof will be in the implementation and the business models that support this vision, otherwise this is just yet another initiative.

The initiative does help lower the cost of the handset due to cheap licenses for the stack and if this proves successful, some device manufacturers might give up their own efforts to minimize cost and focus more on hardware features that integrate well with Android. This is more an answer to Microsoft than to the carrier fragmentation Google has talked about. Is this going to be a successful Trojan horse strategy for Google remains to be seen.

Forrester Research wireless analyst Charles Golvin: The impact is broad across all players in the mobile environment, driving innovative developers to craft new applications that leverage both the mobile networks and the Internet, and helping to change the way consumers behave when on the go. Google is far from the only beneficiary, as competitors like Yahoo (YHOO) and even Microsoft (MSFT) stand to benefit should they embrace this approach; the impact will build slowly over time as initially the devices using this platform will form a very small percentage of the market.

Version m3-rc20a

For more information on the SDK:

• Development Requirements
• Guide to Installing the SDK

Using Eclipse? Install the plugin

Android provides an Eclipse plugin to help make programming and debugging easier.

OK, you've downloaded the SDK and are now ready to build the next killer app for mobile (and maybe win some $$$ in the process ;)

API Demos

A 'kitchen sink' application that covers the most useful aspects and components of the Android APIs. You'll see different implementations of Activities, Services, Notifications, Layouts, as well as methods for working with graphics and text. This application provides a good source of templates for your projects as well as a reference to 'How do I do this?'-type questions.

Lunar Lander

A game which demonstrates how to load and draw graphics, animation techniques, taking user input, saving state when the user pauses the game, and more. Coding shouldn't be this fun!

Note Pad

You'll learn how to use Intents to open a new screen, access a local database, and more. This sample is a good introduction to application flow and life cycle management, which are vital in developing more complex applications.

• Read through each application's manifest file (AndroidManifest.xml) to learn about the typical structures in an Android application.
  
• Modify the code to familiarize yourself with the building and testing process.
  
• Use a particular code snippet as either a base template or to get some needed functionality for your own project (why reinvent the wheel?)

Today we wanted to test ways, to optimize the download of files to android phones.
The first way we tried, is the most obvious method of using a little less of everything (bandwith, battery, cpu, backlight, time? etc), compression.

Image source.

But what about speed? Is it worth to sacrifice the app's speed for using less bandwith? How much slower is compressing/decompressing files on a phone anyway?
Read on to find out.

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Last time I wrote about UDP connection. I got some comments about the problem, that UDP packets are not guaranteed to be delivered. This time I’m going to show you the safer option, the TCP connection. TCP is probably the most commonly used protocol, simply because it is used for so many applications such as HTTP, POP, SMTP, etc. TCP is a protocol which guarantees that the receiver will receive exactly what the sender sent - there will be no errors, it will be in the correct order, everything will work just fine.

TCP communication time diagram.

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Previously I wrote about, that slow operations must be runned in threads. Now I would like to present some example code, how to use threads in Android.

Under the android system an user interface element can only be accessed from the thread that created it (the main UI thread). Thats where handlers and messages come in.

The user interface defines a handler like below:

Then the thread, which can not touch the user interface, sends a message to this handler instead.

The following example code, that implements file downloading from net, represents how I usually use the threads:

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- Two Android phone are walking in the desert. Which of them is 2.2?
- The one who called "Froyo".

How many Android user does it take to change a light bulb?
One. He puts the bulb in and lets the world revolve around him.

Question: Definition of an upgrade?
Answer: Take old bugs out, put new ones in.

Chuck Norris runs Android on his I-Phone.

- What does a slow & lazy Android phone say?
- Force Close.

- Do you want to hear a dirty joke?
- Ok
- A white HTC Hero fell in the mud.

- Did you Nexus One help you with your homework?
- Student: No, it did it all by itself

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Today I’m going to show you how to create a really easy and simple UDP message sender and receiver.

Udp communication time diagram.

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network without requiring prior communications to set up special transmission channels or data paths. /wiki/

First of all let’s see the server side:

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As a possible solutions mentioned in previous article Leaving an Android application the Application object can come handy. If you want to store data, global variables that needs to be accessed from everywhere in the application, from multiple Activities, in other words is you want to maintain a global "state" of the whole application the Application object can help.

For this we must make a class which extends the Android.app.Application class add our own methods to it, and define this class in the AndroidManifest.xml as below:

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If you got sick and tired of the default style/behavior of the title bar in your apps, or just need something different, than here is a little snippet for You.

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This article was requested by some of our community members. It is based on the Android Gallery, ImageView Example tutorial by Sasikumar (Part 1 is here). I extended his example with a new function. If you long click on the big image, an alert dialog show up and ask “Do you want to use this image as a wallpaper?". If you click yes, the actually image will be your new wallpaper.

I only changed the Activity class:

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First of all, define what do we mean under "speed": in one hand its the time that the code needs to execute, on the other hand its the time the user needs to wait for the user interface. The two things can greatly differ, of course you must optimize the code performance, but the most important is what the user sees from it. Don't make the user wait, unless its necessary.

Do not pull back the ui thread
The very basic principle is to never run slow operations on the user interface thread! If you do this the interface will freeze until the operation is executed, which is not a nice user experience. If the execution takes too long the android system will detect it and offer the opportunity to the user to force close the frozen application:

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Last week, our award for 4th Place in the Move your app challange, a Nexus one has finally arrived. The shipping took 2 months, and we were surprised, that the phone came in without any damage.

I won't go into detail about unboxing, and reviewing all the little details, the gadget sites already tore the nexus one apart months ago anyway.
Lets take a look at it, from the developers point of view.

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Droid X battery tab gets a face lift

Verizon begins offering 25MB and unlimited pre-paid data plans

Asus 10-inch Tablet to be Released in Q1 of 2011

Samsung Fascinate coming to Verizon in early September (Rumour)

Sears announces lowered prices on the Droid line

Specs: Folio 100 vs Galaxy Tab vs iPad

Samsung Galaxy Tab hitting Vodafone in October

T-Mobile confirms G2 will have 800MHz Scorpion processor

Samsung discusses tablet future at IFA

Vlingo adds support for Foursquare