Introduction to Android Platform for Beginners

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In this post ,I am going  to share some of the interesting facts about Android platform which was discussed in an introductory session conducted by worldlinkat le meridian,Bangalore.

• Though Android platform is basically for mobile phones  it has been successfully implemented in  various other devices such as E-book Readers,Navigators and Netbooks.
• Android runs on Dalvic Virtual Machine,which is a register based virtual machine developed by google , unlike the usual one which is stack based.
• Android requires high-end hardware i.e a minimum of 400Mhz  processing power and 128MB RAM and efforts are made to minimize high-end hardware dependency.
• Every App on android  has memory isolation,so ensures high reliability.
• On Android every application has its own Virtual Machine.
• Did you know? A standard linux kernel supports 65k user ids.In Android  every app has its own user id.
• ARM is RISC based CPU
• There are actually 2 reasons why Register-based  Virtual Machine was used for Android.

1. Register-Based Virtual Machines can be mapped well to RISC based CPUs.
2. Using Stack-Based  Virtual Machine for Android would have violated patents of Sun Microsystems( as told by the speaker)

Issues:

• Currently ,no debuggers are available for native libraries.
• Noticeable performance lag .apps take more than a second to start after they are activated.(Latency in Starting Applications inspite of Ghz processing power,clearly evident on Nexus One)
• User Experience is not on par with other devices such as blackberry.
• No HotKey Support.
• No Performance Measure Tools as of now.
• No JIT in Dalvik VM. (Register based RISC like instruction set (x86 types))

Android runs on top of linux.

For Further Reading,

Android