COURSE DESCRIPTION

Smartphones have full-fledged operating systems that support a wide variety of applications. This means the software on these phones are a lot more complex than that on the other phones. Smartphone users usually are technology enthusiasts, who tend to install lots of applications on their phones and like configuring their phones with different settings to suit their needs. Users who are not tech savvy are unable to utilize all the features and this may cause the Smartphone to be very annoying and frustrating.

This is an indispensable course designed for people who want to do develop mobile applications using Android technology. AndroidTM, a Linux powered operating system backed by Google Inc. is the fastest growing Smartphone/Mobile device platform that is creating waves in the mobile phone industry on account of its ease of use, rich GUI and mind boggling features.

The Android OS also boasts of a huge array of connectivity options, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and wireless data over a cellular connection (for example, GPRS, EDGE, and 3G). A highly popular technique applied in Android applications is the ability to link to Google Maps in order to display an address directly within an application. The new OS also has Support for location-based services such as GPS and accelerometers if equipped with the required hardware.

Some of the features offered by Android OS include:

• Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
• Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
• Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
• Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
• SQLite for structured data storage
• Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
• GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
• Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
• Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
• Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE