After walking you through Google’s interface, we have more news to share with you. They have released their programming tools for their Android mobile-phone alliance for download, giving developers the ability to start writing software for phones due to start shipping in 2008. The software development kit or SDK is an open-source package available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X machines. The phone is likely to support a webkit-compatible browser, WiFi, GSM technology (like EDGE and HSDPA), 3G, threaded text messaging, a photo gallery (with a filmstrip plus grid album view), plus a touchscreen. Though not much is known about the hardware involved but one can assume that a QWERTY keyboard will be the norm. Apparently from the prototypes spied by sources, one has a full QWERTY keyboard and the other has a touchscreen. The SDK also includes an emulator allowing you to check out the user interface without having a phone.

To kick-off the Android programming effort, Google is offering $10 million total in prizes, each ranging from $25,000 to $275,000, to programmers picked by a panel of judges. Android programmers can use the open-source Eclipse programming tool, founded by IBM and now supported by many companies, along with an Android plug-in for Eclipse. The SDK describes application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows programmers to benefit from the underlying support for location-based services, video and audio streaming and playback, and 3D graphics. However, support for Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless networking APIs isn’t yet available, though they’ll be added to the SDK, the site said. Google Maps and XMPP for device-to-device communication tasks are the two Google APIs that Android will support.







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