“based on unit sales to consumers last quarter the Android operating system moved into second position at 28 percent behind RIM’s OS (36 percent) and ahead of Apple’s OS (21 percent).”

While I had no doubt this would occur eventually, I am surprised (sceptical?) that it has happened already. NPD’s methodology is…

“The NPD Group compiles and analyzes mobile device sales data based on more than 150,000 completed online consumer research surveys each month. Surveys are based on a nationally balanced and demographically-representative sample, and results are projected to represent the entire population of U.S.”

The only skew I can possibly see is that the survey was online. How did people find the survey? Might this have affected the results?

Whatever the real figures, it’s clear that Android is becoming a strong competitor to the iPhone.

It’s free and comes with full source code. All you need to do is mention Arno den Hond in your About screen.

I personally, don’t think Android apps should have an Exit option. It’s not an Android Idiom. People should just (expect to) use ‘Back’. However, I can see why users might think there should be a way of closing apps. This has been a issue under Windows Mobile for a decade and a half. Microsoft have fiddled with this over the years but there are valid arguments on both sides whether users should be able to close apps. I personally think Android is different in that there’s no shared idiom from the desktop and people should learn to use Android as it was originally intended.

These are the only paid apps on the Android Market that have achieved 50000-250000 downloads…

• Better Keyboard $2.99
• Open Home $3.99
• Beautiful Widgets €1.49
• Power Manager Full $0.99
• DocumentsToGo Full $14.99
• Advanced Task Manager $0.99
• PicSay Pro - Photo Editor €2.99
• WeatherBug Elite $1.99

My first observation is that these are not $0.99 apps. People are willing to pay more for the right app. There are no games selling over 50000 copies - they are all utilities. Controlling and customising your phone seems to be popular.

The author of the code is Chris Pruett a Developer Advocate at Google. He presented on the code and writing real-time games for Android at Google I/O last year. There’s a video of the presentation at YouTube.

Here are some tips from his presentation…

• You can get away with using Canvas rather than OpenGL if you have of the order of about 10 sprites.
• Prefer use of Draw Texture extension (but also check it exists on the phone).
• Avoid allocating anything so as to avoid Java garbage collection which can take up to 300ms. This means don’t use collections, enums, arrays.sort in your time sensitive code loop.
• Don’t call interface functions in your time sensitive code loop.
• Sleep momentarily in onTouchEvent to prevent flooding of MotionEvents when the user touches the screen.

However, what if you want to go one step further and debug into the code from your applications? Attaching Android platform source in Eclipse provides a great tutorial. There are even some pre-created zip files for Cupcake (1.5), Donut (1.6) and Eclair (2.1) containing the Android source code.

It’s interesting to see a small company getting into the Android device market. It shows that a small company can compete with the big handset OEMs. If GeekPhone can do this, there’s no reason why such companies can’t exist that provide very different handsets for vertical markets. For example, rugged handsets (this is already happening), handsets for elderly/disabled, handsets that run just one main application (e.g. for ticketing) or any other market that needs a cheap device targeted at a special group of users.

• Low-level RF control
• NFC Forum-specified tag handling
• Peer-to-peer communications
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi pairing
• Interactions with single-wire protocol SIMs and other secure elements
• Compatibility with smart cards and RFID tags based on Felica, Mifare, and ISO 14443 standards

At one time people thought NFC was the future of payments but increasingly, due to non-adoption by phone OEMs, there hasn’t been much uptake. Phone OEMs have been waiting for network operators to order the phones. Network operators won’t order because they have been waiting for a non-fragmented ecosystem to evolve.

Today, NFC is more viable for security, stock control and ticketing applications.

On my mobilephonedevelopment blog I have previously written about the need for phones to police themselves. I think Android could do more to proactively alert the user to apps that are consuming unreasonable resources.