Android Application Development

There’s alot of momentum around the Android platform and we’re thrilled to be an Android application developer. Most of the Android sessions we attended were standing room only, and the Android development team fireside chat proved to be one of the best sessions.

Over 20 New Android Handsets

Google announced that there’s over 20 new touch-based Android handsets expected to ship in the next year across all major carriers at many different price points. That’s a huge number and means that if you’re considering writing a custom application for your business you should make sure that Android falls into your top 2 or 3 platforms to deploy for after the iPhone.

We got our first taste of one of these new handsets from the HTC that Google gave to each attendee. It’s a great phone and the Android apps that ArcTouch has developed look and work great on it. We’ll have a full review of the phone in an upcoming blog post, but if the other new Android phones coming this year look and work the HTC then Google has a winner.

Google Wave

One of the most interesting sessions was the unveiling and live demonstration of Google Wave, a three year old research project that blends various forms of online communication and information into a unified form. Think of it as a stream of email, instant messenger, Twitter style posts and more for real-time communication and group collaboration. It’s first available as a series of developer tools and APIs and consumer oriented applications should follow later.

We imagine various ways we can leverage Google Wave in custom mobile software applications for our customers. The best part is that Google Wave isn’t limited to our Android development, but we can also leverage it in the software apps we develop for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm and other phones.

Overall a great conference with an abundance of smart people and great food and drink (and robots!). Next up on the mobile developer events calendar is Apple’s WWDC!