onandroid – all things android

As covered by Techcrunch this morning, Dave Burke, an Google engineering manager, talked about Android before a seemingly enthusiastic group. While he didn’t seem to cover much new territory, he did take on a couple of tough questions, including how OpenMoko fits into the equation. His response was direct indicating that Android was “real” (sorry OpenMoko) and that Google has put together the resources and partners to actually make it happen. While Techcrunch generally felt that the presentation was a recruiting exercise for some engineering talent in Europe, Google is definitely out selling the platform to the developer community.

Another interesting question raised was which applications, by default, would end up on these devices that OHA partners will be releasing in the second half of 2008? While Burke indicated that this would be up to the manufacturers, the jury is still out. Clearly Microsoft will support it’s Windows Mobile OS and Yahoo! is late to the party, if invited at all. So, mapping (which leads to local search) and generalized web search will end up Google by default. No doubt about it.

The video posted below, again from Techcrunch, doesn’t cover much new territory either particularly for anyone who has gotten the Android emulator working on their machine.