Since there was a Google (and before it was more than a search engine), I've wanted to be employed there. Alas, I certainly am not the best of the best, and probably would settle for someone to call me a mediocre developer (for now). I'm always so fascinated at some of the things Google does, so when Google released their Android SDK yesterday, I jumped at the chance to install it and play around.

First thing I took noticed is the Java. I'm not really a Java guy, and haven't touched it much since I was in school. However, for some reason, this time around, it felt better. Maybe it's because of my deeper understanding of object oriented programming now, or my love for python, but it was actually quite fun to be writing Java code. It required I install eclipse, which, from apt, was 100+ MB of packages, but it looked easier to do with Eclipse than without Eclipse.

I went through their documentation, installing the SDK and Eclipse plugin, and immediately went to the "Hello Android" application. I learn better by diving in and asking my own questions rather than looking at tons of sample code. This whole time, I found some features in Eclipse that I actually liked as well. While the code was simple, it was enough to make me hungry for more.

The best part of this whole process was compiling. Using the Eclipse Android plugin was a breeze (read: EASY BUILD MANAGEMENT!) After compiling the app and running it, I got a pretty little window pop up with a software phone, complete with pushable buttons. The phone's buttons resemble my Samsung Blackjack, but something tells me an Android-based phone will be so much more fun.

I ran into a little snag, however. The emulated phone wasn't running my app. It was just defaulting to the standard Android interface. This was frustrating. It seemed that no matter how I wrote the code, it just wouldn't run what I wrote. A quick hop over to the Android Google Group got me pointed in the right direction. The Android Debugger seemed to be getting in the way. I killed the process and ran my application again. Voila! I got the image you now see above you!

Having dabbled in J2ME, I must say that this is quite a step up for the mobile world. In fact, it's so easy that I'll probably start churning out little apps before the week is out! Great job you Googlees!

Edit: After digging down through documentation and dabbling some more in Android, I've discovered a few things of interest. First, the virtual machine running Android is not J2ME at all, but Google's Dalvik Virtual Machine. There is an entire media library set that supports H.264, AAC, and mpeg-4. That's actually a pretty wide range of media types. The last thing I was rather excited about is the data storage library, which is SQLite. It's constructed in a manner that allows all applications to interface with the SQLite database. My one fear is that the filesystem will turn out like the filesystem on the old Palm OS, where the entire thing was a database. It was kinda ugly...

29 Nov UPDATE An article was posted on LinuxInsider.com detailing the reasons why Android will change the market. I felt that when I started with Android, I still feel that now. Even if it fails miserably, Google's money went into making other businesses sit up and take notice of a platform that eases development.