Android: Introduction to android platform - framework

Brief Introduction

Android is an Operating System for mobile devices developed by Google, which is built upon Linux kernel. Android competes with Sambian OS,
Apple's iOS (for iPhone/iPad), RIM's Blackberry, Microsoft's Windows Phone (previously called Windows Mobile), and many other proprietary mobile OSes.

Android Platform

Android is based on Linux with a set of native core C/C++ libraries.

Android applications are written in Java. However, they run on Android's own Java Virtual Machine, called Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM), which is optimized to operate on the mobile devices. The DVM, unfortunately, is not binary-compatible with the standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM) provided by Sun Microsystem (now Oracle).

Android supports the core Java SE API (aka JDK), except the graphics packages AWT and Swing. Android supports 2D graphics via its custom library, 3D graphics via the OpenGL ES, databases via a lightweight SQLite, web browser based on the open-source WebKit engine. It supports common audio, video, and image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF), GSM Telephony, Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi, Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer.

The mother site for Android is www.android.com. For developers, visithttp://developer.android.com to download the SDK, tutorials and sample codes.