Android is an operating system for mostly used on mobile devices. Android was initially developed by Android Inc., which has been acquired by Google Inc. in 2005. It is now under active development by Google. The Android operating system is based on Linux and most of its source code is open source and available under several types of licensing.
Because of the wide adoption of smartphones by the general population, competition between mobile operating systems is strong. Besides Android, the following operating systems are:
The latest market information suggests that Android gained the first place of sales in the US and is still expanding globally. In Japan all of the main carriers, namely NTT DoCoMo, KDDI (au) and SoftBank, are proposing devices running Android, and a strong marketing effort is in progress so we can expect the Android market share to rise in Japan as well. The rather recent success of Android is widely due to the large community of developers that create applications which can be run on Android devices, allowing users to customize their devices. There are currently about 150000 applications available for Android devices and those can be easily downloaded and installed via the Android Market online store (applications can also be installed by other means, such as through third party websites or internally to a company, which is the biggest difference with applications for the iPhone and iPad of Apple Computer Inc.). Android applications can either be free or require a payment (one-time payment or membership). The applications for Android are written in Java and have access to a wide range of libraries to handle multimedia, 3D, networking and many other features easily. The software development kit (SDK) is available for free and includes all necessary tools to fully develop Android applications (it includes the libraries, the compiler and debugger as well as an emulator).
In the case of Forum 8, porting UC-win/Road or UC-1 products to Android would require too much work (and the result would not be very good since Android is mostly used by mobile devices which are much slower than a computer). Nevertheless, we are investigating and planning to provide Android clients for our UC-win/Road for SaaS as well as VR-CloudTM online services. This is important for Forum 8, as more and more users of mobile devices are using Android. |
