Part 1: First dabble with Google Android

Index:
1. First dabble with Google Android
2. That Sample
3. TipCalc Sample

After avoiding the subject for a long time, I finally decided to upgrade my smart phone from a Palm Treo running Windows Mobile 6 to a newer model. Since I am generally not a fan of Apple's lack of openness, this left me with only one viable alternative, our friend Mr. Google Android.

I spent some time doing some research and decided on the Samsung Galaxy S (also known as Captivate and GT-I9000). Now normally when one wants to buy a new toy, you build it up in your mind quite a bit. So when you end up getting the new toy, it never really lives up to expectation. Sometimes it bombs out completely, other times it gets close enough to your expectation to be satisfied. When it comes to the Galaxy S, the entire thing blew away all my expectations. It was so awesome that I cannot stop talking about it.

So what makes it so awesome. That's a difficult question because I have not played with other Android phones before (I have played with iPhones and iPads though). I think it is a bit of everything, the hardware is substantial (although the battery life suffers from the standard smart phone curse), Android is very useful and the Android Market Place has so many apps that it is impossible to make a top 10 list.

I must say that the only issue I have is that the Android Market itself is a little hard to browse because of the broad application categorization. That said, if you know what you're searching for, everything is at your fingertips.

Now, with the preamble out of the way, I decided to try my hand at developing an Android Application. While I have several years development experience, most of that has been in Microsoft technologies, so I knew I had a big learning curve ahead of me. The first thing I had to do was read the Android documentation. There is a lot to learn, and simply reading the documentation without really having a baseline was never going to go down well. So I decided to find a sample application online and see if I can recreate it. I stumbles onto this blog and decided that this is a good starting point to give me an introduction to the Android SDK, Eclipse and any other Android tools.

In my next blog post, I will post my experience from the sample application above.