Android on your desktop!

Nobody can deny the glamour surrounding the word Android. May be it is because word Google is associated with it! The android is an operating system primarily aimed at embedded devices and smart phones. Google made it open source to encourage the adaption in developer community instead of keeping it closed and come out with a Google phone. People might recall the confusion that lasted few months back on Google Phone. Google had to come out in public to deny all the rumors associated with Google Phone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU9nRgT5Cy8

Android is great platform for resource limited devices especially mobile phones. Major telecommunication companies like HTC, Samsung, T-Mobile are coming up with their own versions of Android based phones. Android is still being looked as a developing mobile phone platform and it will be quite some time when we see plethora of Android phones in market.

Some of laptop companies like Asus are even thinking of putting Android on their netbooks as an alternative OS to Microsoft Windows.  The business rational here is to make the netbooks boot in no time and offer user the functionality to get things going. It seems that everybody wants to get on the Android bandwagon to capture the market share in respective areas, be it smart phone or netbook.

The reason behind a surge in adaption of Android is the Google's confidence in Android itself. If Google vision is to be believed then Android OS will be an integral part of most of the embedded devices in future. Android being the first open development platform for mobile devices, it will spawn a major adaption in developer community leading to tons of applications to be developed for Android. It will open a new era of open source movement in embedded devices similar to Linux in desktop computers.

If you want to give android a try without buying an android enabled smart phone just download LiveAndroid from http://code.google.com/p/live-android/, burn to CDROM and boot off it!
(The LiveAndroid ISO image can also be booted in virtual machine like VMWare, VirtualBox and Microsoft Virtual PC)

Android provides application like Web Browser, Email Access, Music Player, VNC and Games out of the box.

Here are some screen shots of Android running on Compaq Presario C700 laptop.

  

 

These are the few applications that comes bundled with Android OS but there are lot more being developed, that can be easily installed on Android. Looking at the above applications it seems Android is all set to become one of the major portable OS in near future!