Over the edge

Gone are the days of snapping your fingers in sync with the music playing on your walkman.

Gone are the days of snapping your fingers in sync with the music playing on your walkman. Today,the snapping may have remained,but the technological advancement has made the walkman a thing of the past,a fitting display at the technology museum,perhaps! Its the age of the Blackberrys,iPods and Kindle BookReaders. And if youre nodding in agreement to that,stop! Because theres a new addition that has just upped the competition the Android. Too fast,too soon,eh?

Technology seems to be outdoing itself in every sphere,the smart mobile phones in particular. Just when you buy the latest 3GS model of the iPhone,youre bombarded with news of the launch of iPhone 4! And just when you think a touch-screen phone couldnt get cooler,Googles Android makes an entry. Apple came out with the iTunes store to sell music online for the iPod in 2000. Then,Sony came out with a PlayStation store,Nokia with the Ovi store,and now even Samsung is out with its Samsung Apps Store. A complete boost to the market that leaves the user spoilt for choices. Take the case of 23-year-old Rohit Shankar. He literally cannot get his hands off his Motorola Milestone. The phone that works on the Android Platform is one of the many high-end and mid-segment phones that have come to adopt the operating system developed by Google. One can navigate ones way around the phone with great ease, he says.

A hardcore tech junkie,Shankar says the operating system will pip the Apple OS in the eventual race for mobile phone operating system dominance. The Android Open Source network,unlike the closed network models for other platform developers,allows users to develop a wide variety of applications that can be tailor-made to suit individualistic needs, he explains.

Yves Marshall,a city-based application developer,adds,Androids are here to stay for a very important reason. It can allow developers to work on a wide variety of applications and the Open Handset Alliance has a large number of companies like Broadcom Corporation,Google,HTC,Intel,LG,Motorola,Nvidia,Samsung Electronics,Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile on board to adopt the operating platform for their products. That will give a huge boost to the next generation phones that will be developed by them.

Currently,in India,phones like the Samsung Galaxy and Wave,the HTC Aria,Dream and Desire and tablet PCs like the Samsung Galaxy Tab,the Dell Streak and the Olive Pad are in vogue. An average consumer is undecided when it comes to purchasing a mobile,and big words can easily confuse them. They would prefer to go with the crowd rather than go into the details of the product and what it does or can do, says another mobile phone application developer,Raxit Sheth. For starters,it is the demand of a jet-setting generation that has pushed developers and mobile companies to keep outdoing one another. Mobile companies are obviously going to jump in on the bandwagon to provide users with the best, he adds.

When one says that phones and their apps are constantly upgrading and outdoing themselves,it is backed by solid proof. On the official Android blog,Xavier Ducrohet,Android SDK tech lead,writes,The new version of the Android platform Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) includes many new platform technologies and APIs to help developers create great apps. For precise motion processing,developers can use several new sensor types,including gyroscope. New video formats like the VP8 and WebM,as well as support for AAC and AMR-wideband encoding will provide a richer multimedia experience and newer forms of communication like support for front-facing camera,SIP/VOIP,and Near Field Communications (NFC),to let developers include new capabilities in their applications. The too-technical sounding paragraph points to two aspects: one being the birth of the Open Source software-based technologies,and the second,the heated race for supremacy that is fueling these tech wars.

And we,the users,are the overseeing force the deciders of who wins and who dies a sad death in the battlefield.

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