Speaker : Navin Kabra

Google’s Android is a brand new platform for mobile phones, and has been created from scratch specifically for this purpose. This means that it is a ‘modern’ system that does not suffer from any legacy issues, and has taken the best ideas from various other projects to build a system that is arguably better than any of the other, competing, systems. Thus, for example, it uses the Java language as the development language, but has rejected the rest of the Java ecosystem. Specifically it uses a completely new virtual machine (Dalvik) which is redesigned with mobiles in mind – and has a number of very interesting design decisions that we will discuss. Similarly, the Android application framework represents a departure from the traditional way of doing things, and has a learning curve, but once you get used to it, it is great, especially for allowing different apps to share data, code, and in general co-operate. We will explore and discuss this and various other design decisions in Android. This talk can serve as your introduction to “”What is Android”", and more importantly, “”Why is Android”

Speaker : Rohit Nayak

The iPhone revolutionized the world of mobile application development. However the iPhone’s proprietary hardware and software development environments are a roadblock to many.

Google’s Android platform with its promise of open standards for hardware and a free and familiar development environment make it a strong contender for competing with the iPhone platform.

After introducing the Android platform we will discuss the paradigms and constraints in building a mobile application. We then dissect a simple “social” Android application which uses a REST-based webservice to communicate. This will help us understand the core components of an Android application and the Android SDK functionality.