Hi I’m Jay Goldman You’re watching Mr. Mobile on butterscotch.com. Today, a look at the Android operating system. Now some of you may be thinking operating system, I think I’ve heard that term before and in fact, you probably have. The software that runs your computer so if it’s Windows or Mac OS or Linux is an operating system and if you have a smart phone like an iPhone or a Blackberry it’s got have an operating system as well called respectively iPhone OS and Blackberry OS. Android is a new sort of species in this whole operating system on mobile devices because it’s not actually owned by one company. It is started by Google and a lot of people still call it Google Android but it’s actually now owned buy the open handset alliance which is a group of mobile companies who have sort of teamed up together to make a new operating system for phones that’s a lot a better than what’s been out there in the past from other players than in fact Rim and Apple. So you won’t see any iPhone running Google Android anytime soon and it’s in fact a quite unlikely that you’ll see any rimmed devices, Blackberry’s running but you are going to start seeing a lot of other devices as more and more that you come to the market.

The phone that I’m holding in my hand is an HTC dream or as it was known in the U.S. when it came out on T-mobile, the G-1 it say, pretty descent smart phone it’s got a touchscreen on it, it also got a keyboard so you can pop it open and type on it and it runs Google Android. It was in fact the first phone available in the market that run Android but you’re going to start to see a lots of things that aren’t necessary phones popping up. Android has in fact rumored or in fact spotted at some things like big trade shows where people announce this kind of things running on stuff like touchscreens that you might use while sitting on your couch and surfing the web, so, not necessarily limited to a mobile phone OS.

It’s a pretty great experience especially if you use some of Google’s other software, so if you have a Google accounts set-up already and you have maybe G-mail for you mail, Google calendar for your calendaring needs that kind of stuff. When you set-up an Android phone for the first time it will prompt you to run through a bunch of or it will sort of prompt you to enter your Google account information and then it will go and run through a bunch of set-up where it actually can figures those services for you on the phone. So, your G-mail will pop-up in the G-mail application and your calendar will be in calendar. If you use Google application, that’s fantastic if you don’t, it does support things like syncing to somebody other stuff out there like exchange it’s not quite good as the Google support so, I would say if you’re a Google fan and you use a Google apps. You should definitely look for an Android phone. If you’re somebody who’s on a more corporate environment and you’re stock to an exchange server, you probably wanna think about sticking with your Blackberry or maybe Windows Smart phone or the new iPhone 3.0 surfer that which makes does a much a better job as syncing to exchange.

This does as I said support touchscreen and keyboard entry. The touchscreen on here is actually really good. They aren’t as far as I know right now in a multi-touch devices using Android but it is rumored to becoming in some subsequent updates to the software so you will be able to do some the neat things you’ve seen on a Blackberry Storm or in the iPhone where you can sort of get two fingers involved in rotate photos on that concept.
It does have an App Store so following on the footsteps of both Rim. In fact Rims’ App Store for Blackberry’s came or app world for Blackberry came out after Android did with it’s marketplace. So you might say that rim is following in their footsteps, not as nearly as big as Apple’s iPhone apps store which is definitely the reigning champion as far as that goes. But it is really nice to be able to jump in the apps store on your phone, grab some applications. Right now in fact, all of Androids apps in the marketplace are free. So you can just jump in there and grab them but they have talked about providing support for developers who want to charge for applications down the road. You find most the typical sort of things in there so there’s a lot of IM clients, there are some games. You can pretty well outfit your phone to do sort of whatever you like and in fact the included software is pretty descent. It’s got maps application, so it’s very similar to maps application on the Iphone supported by Google and is Google map since running inside of it. It got a You Tube player if you like to watch videos. No flash support in this Smart phone OS yet, so you can’t watch videos from inside of web pages unless YouTube videos in which case they will launch any included player and you can watch them in there.

Web browsing is actually really good. The browsing here uses Web Kid as a rendering engine. So every web browser uses what’s calling rendering engine so it knows how to display what’s on the pages. And wed kid is actually an open source-rendering engine provided by Apple. It’s the bases for safari on the Mac and Windows platforms and is actually the basis for Google chrome on Windows and maybe on the Mac version when eventually comes out. So, Web Kid is the browser of the choosing here as well. And that means you got a really good rendering experience very similar in fact to what you would see on an iPhone and Mobile Safari but without the multi-touch support. So you can zoom in the pages but you can—to zoom in and out.

Over all Android is a very capable operating system. One of the nice things about it is that an open source which means that anybody can actually build stuff on top of it. There are no limitations like there are on a close proprietary system like iPhone OS or on Blackberry OS. And that means that developers can be a lot more free and the kind of stuff that they are building on the phone. They can do things like background their application, which you can’t do on an iPhone, you can on a Blackberry. And so, there was actually a great competition that Google held when Android was coming out. And the people who won the competition for new Android application had built a carbon footprint calculator. If you wanted to measure your carbon impact and it run on the back on the phone and use the GPS to determine how far you are travelling and how fast and that kind of thing. And actually goes and calculate your footprint for you.

Over all I would say Android is a great operating system. It’s a definite contender in the marketplace. Some of the more exciting hardware that’s coming out on it makes a really realistic choice if you’re looking at a Smart phone. So you should take a look to see what’s out there in the Android world when you are considering a phone upgrade. Again, if you’re in the corporate market might not be your first choice but if you’re an individual user and you like to use your phone for all kinds of different applications definitely take a look.

I’m Jay Goldman this is been Mr. Mobile, thanks for watching check out some past episodes on butterscotch.com and we’ll catch you next time.