The road to Google I/O 2010 (Part II)

Here we are, less than 48 hours way of the opening keynote of Google's most important developer event of the year. What awaits us, good or bad, we don't know yet. There are rumors about a new home TV system made by Google, with Intel and Sony, which are getting stronger by the hour. Rumors are also pointing at a revamped Android Market, due to the recent changes in the webpage. 

However, what we're most interested in, is in the latest and greatest release of Android, which we're expecting to see on Wednesday's opening keynote; it might not be the star of the show, but we just can't wait. If FroYo is nowhere to be seen in Wednesday, then we can expect it to be the star of Thursday's keynote, like Google Wave was last year. Smart Mobile World will be reporting from San Francisco to bring you the news and our thoughts on the matter. Until then, here's the ending of this two part series on what we've covered with Android so far.

The road to a 9%+ US market share

From October 2008 onwards, Google Android stopped being a promise, and became a platform by itself. Most handset manufacturers & carriers set themselves the goal of selling a million devices with their new flagship products, and with the HTC Dream (also known as G1), American carrier T-Mobile achieved that goal, but the Dream, running Android 1.0, was not widely accepted. The OS was new, introduced new concepts, and allowed users connected to Google services enjoy them in their smartphones, but it had flaws. There were many bugs, specifically related to email protocols, and the Android Market did not support paid applications. With version 1.1, released in February 2009, Google fixed these issues, improved the Maps & Dialer applications and added support for saving attachments in MMS'. In the Mobile World Congress, the second Android device, the HTC G2/Ion/Magic/myTouch 3G was unveiled, and unlike the HTC Dream, it did not have a hard keyboard. The prototype was running Android 1.5, the first Android release that was christened with a dessert's name, which included an on-screen keyboard, or "soft-keyboard". This device was set to introduce Android 1.5, which would add widgets to the Android home screen, the soft-keyboard, recording & watching videos through the device's camera (albeit at a very low resolution), uploading functions to both Picasa (pictures) and YouTube (videos), Bluetooth A2DP support for audio streaming (data transfer protocol was not included in this release), new animations in the OS and cut, copy & paste functionality added to web pages. Android 1.5, or Cupcake, proved to be one of the most successful releases of the platform. It was officially released on April 30^th 2009, and debuted with the release of the HTC Magic/Ion/G2. Google even gifted free Ion Developer Phones (HTC Magics with unlocked bootloader and root access, both covered later in this chapter) to each and every attendee of their main developer conference, Google I/O, where they previewed some of the features of the next Android release, codenamed Donut. Android 1.5 became the first mainstream Android release, since until Cupcake, there was only one Android device in the market. With Cupcake's release, came the HTC Magic, the HTC Hero (also known as Droid Eris), the Samsung Galaxy & Motorola Cliq. Both the Hero/Droid Eris and Motorola Cliq are important because they both introduced modified versions of the Android 1.5 release; HTC built upon Android a new interface or User Experience (UX) called "Sense UI", which took many elements of the similar interface HTC provided to Windows Mobile devices and added them to Android, making the Hero the best Android device at the time of its release, only hampered by its hardware. With Sense, HTC made Android a lot more consumer-friendly, and by adding a lot more eye-candy, the future of Android looked brighter than ever. In September, Motorola gathered the press to make one of the most important announcements of the cell phone inventor, its first Android device. The Motorola Cliq introduced Motorola's own UX, called MotoBLUR. MotoBLUR made similar improvements to Android like HTC's Sense, but was a lot more focused at leveraging social networks, allowing the user to know what's happening in their favorite social sites by simply unlocking their device and looking at their home screen.

September was the month in which Android's 5 month rally began. After being previewed at Google I/O in May, the Android 1.6 release (Donut) was finished, adding a Text-to-Speech API, a revamped Android Market app, improved speed and OS stability, the new Quick Search Box, support for multiple screen resolutions and for CDMA networks. With 1.6, Android began suffering from one of its most criticized aspects: fragmentation. The HTC Hero was released in July of 2009, and today, as of May 2010, HTC Hero users are still stuck with Android 1.5 in Europe, with the update being pushed backwards to June (it was expected for May 2010, but got delayed). HTC released the first non HVGA resolution Android device, the Tattoo, which sported a low resolution screen (240x320 pixels) and ran Sense UI above Android 1.6. Both the HTC Dream and HTC Magic received the 1.6 update by the month of October, while a new iPhone-like ad started airing in the US, where the features not supported by Apple's platform were pointed out, finishing with a "Droid Does" statement teasing an Android device with a "Coming in November" message. On October 26^th, Google shocked developers announcing the release of Éclair, also known as Android 2.0. Éclair added many awaited features, such as a unified inbox for email, support for multiple Gmail accounts, a more user friendly UI, an improved browser with HTML5 support, improved Google Maps, support for flash cameras, support for Microsoft Exchange accounts, a multi-touch API (all Android handsets were rumored to hardware-support multi-touch, but the OS did not have that capability), Bluetooth 2.1 supporting the data transfer protocol, and optimized hardware speed, beyond Donut's optimizations. However, what was most surprising was Google's introduction video to Éclair's features, which clearly showed a device with a very big screen which had not been seen before. Two days later, Motorola announced at a press event the Motorola Droid, the first Android 2.0 powered device (without MotoBLUR), which would be released with Verizon Wireless in early November. The Droid would also feature Google Maps Navigation, a free augmented reality GPS navigator built by Google using both Google Maps and Google Street View, which was received with mixed feelings by companies like Tom-tom and Garmin. The Droid was the first second generation Android device, and was miles ahead any other Android device not only because of its software, but also because of its hardware.

On June 2009, Apple unveiled the third generation iPhone, the iPhone 3GS. The two previous iPhone generations shared exactly the same hardware, except for the radio chip, which adds 3G bands in the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS included next generation hardware and twice the amount of RAM, hence the S for Speed. All Android devices, before the Droid, were based on the same hardware platform as the first two generation iPhones, the ARM11. Performance on Android devices had been heavily criticized for crashes, slow apps, slow browsing, phone restarts, and many other inconveniences related to hardware. Due to reasons we'll discuss later in this chapter, Android requires more horsepower to deliver the same performance as the native iPhone OS platform, and thus, first generation Android devices suffered from old hardware. The main reason why Android devices took so long (a year since the HTC Dream's introduction) to make the necessary shift to the new hardware platform was because it wasn't supported by the OS until Android 1.6, and with the Droid, Android finally got some hardware to properly drive the OS. The Droid kept being heavily marketed, and went on to become a success for both Verizon and Motorola, whom had forgotten about the last time it was actually praised for a device. The Droid introduced a whole new concept of high end smartphone, with its 3.7" WVGA (854x480, 16:9 format) screen, touch-sensitive buttons, Motorola ClearTalk Technology and its hard-keyboard, which earned it the title of "thinnest QWERTY slider". Devices like the Droid Eris (HTC Hero for the US), Samsung Spica, Samsung Moment and Acer Liquid were released, but all of them (except the Droid) used either Android 1.5 or 1.6. The Droid's release prompted questions about when Éclair would be released to the first Android devices, but Google kept silent, while rumors suggested Android 2.0 was exclusive to Motorola and the Droid.

Between the Droid's announcement and December, Sony announced its Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10, which would include the (by then) latest version of Android (Donut), sporting a 4" screen with same resolution as the Droid's. On December 3^rd, a minor release (which was hinted by Google when Éclair was made public), 2.0.1, was announced, fixing many bugs which were found after the Droid's release. When the update was complete, three separate Android versions were out in the market at the same time; 1,5, 1.6 and 2.0.1, and in just 3 months, Android had seen 3 releases. Christmas was expected to be quiet, but it wasn't. The alarms fired when, one evening, several employees at Google wrote on Twitter that they had the real "Google Phone", and hours later, pictures of a big phone with four colored lines drawing a nexus started surfacing. A couple of days later, several employees released pictures of the phone at Googleplex, and Google released an official statement talking about "trying their own dogfood", which did nothing but heat up even more the situation. By Christmas, the press had got its hands on the phone, which was built by HTC, and Google wanted to call Nexus One, as well as release it on early January. The whole web knew about the phone, but Google made it public on January 5^th, 2010, when it was announced alongside Google's store. Nexus One is supposed to be the first of a series of phones sold by Google exclusively through their online store. It's powered by a new release of Android, 2.1, which is still part of the Éclair branch, and added a more appealing home screen and applications launcher. Besides having now four versions of the platform at the same time, it took nearly two weeks between the release of Nexus One and the release of Android 2.1's SDK, which had never happened before.

Since then, Google's been mostly quiet. Sony Ericsson released its Xperia X10 with Android 1.6 (promising to update it to 2.1), HTC released an updated version of the HTC Hero, the Legend and its own version of the Nexus One, the Desire (in the US it was released as the Droid Incredible with some hardware improvements), all running the new version of HTC's Sense UI. Motorola released two new Android devices, the Backflip and the Devour, both of which are not Android 2.x devices, but run Motorola's custom UX. At this year's CTIA, two new Android flagships were announced, the HTC Evo 4G and the Samsung Galaxy S. The Galaxy S runs Samsung's custom hardware (expected to be the same chip powering Apple's iPad), and has the best hardware specs we've seen so far in any smartphone, while the Evo 4G is the dream of many Android & HTC lovers come true; an HD2 running HTC's Sense UI, plus it'll be America's first WiMAX smartphone (although it's being marketed as America's first ever 4G smartphone). 

The latest rumors suggest Google has ready the next release of Android, 2.2 or FroYo, which should be released (or pre-viewed) on the opening day of this year's Google I/O, May 19th. Both FroYo and Android's next release, Gingerbread, are expected to improve Android's fragmentation, whilst FroYo should speed up execution and improve the UI experience.