Android is a Linux operating system based on mobile devices of the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. Android is used primarily in Smartphone and tablet PC. Android is open, i.e., its features can be extended to incorporate new technologies that emerge.
Android, Inc. was founded by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sear and Chris White in Palo Alto, California. On August 17, 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. became a subsidiary of Google Inc.
November 05, 2007, Open Handset Alliance publicly announced their first product, Android, a platform for mobile device in Linux 2.6 kernel version.
Android provides a wide range of applications and services to its users. Users can completely customize their phones to their interests. The first mobile phone that has used Android was the HTC Dream, launch on October 22, 2008.
Here are some features of the Android operating system.
Design: the design is mainly based on VGA, 2D graphics library and library based on OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics.
Storage: data storage uses SQLite.
Connectivity: Android supports GSM/EDGE, IDEN, CDMA, EV-do, UMTS, Bluetooth, WI-Fi, LTE, NFC and WiMAX connectivity technologies.
Multi Lingual support: supports several languages.
Messaging: Android supports SMS and MMS, including messaging linked text and cloud to device messaging (C2DM).
Web browser: is mainly based on the open source WebKit rendering engine and Chrome V8 JavaScript engine.
Compatibility with Java: the majority of the applications are written in Java, but they run on Dalvik, a specialized virtual machine specifically designed for Android.
Media support: supports Android WebM, H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 SP, AMR, AMR-WB, AAC, HE-AAC, MP3, MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WAV, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and WebP media formats.
Hardware support: can support wide variety of honorees including cameras for video and still, touch screens, GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, barometers, magnetometers, controls of dedicated games, proximity sensors, thermometers, accelerated 2D bit blits and 3D graphics acceleration.
Multitasking: Android supports multitasking.
Multi-touch: natively supports multi touch, but it was previously disabled at kernel level. An update was released by Google that enables multi-touch natively.
External support: now the majority of Android devices support microSD slot and can read microSD formatted with FAT32, Ext3fs and Ext4fs card file system.
There are millions of applications available for Android that can be downloaded from Google Play, formerly Android Market. The latest version that is available for mobile is 4.0.4 Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
Learn more about Android game development and mobile games development
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