Aux

Specially for those who live outside of T-Mobile network coverage Google started to sell developer phones without any strings attached. This dev phone (currently only one priced at 399$) not only free of SIM lock, but also free to change its firmware and every piece of software inside at developer's wish. A trully open mobile phone! More information is available on Android Market. You should pay initial 25$ fee to become a developer and access Android Market as a developer.

Yep! You have seen a lot of such titles in last few days. And this is another one (: If you are interested in what software developers think of iPhone SDK and Android SDK, then you should read this Slashdot article. It has a lot of links! But my post will be about my personal experience with Android SDK.

First of all developer use Java to write apps for Google platform instead of Objective C for iPhone. And Java in Android is a full-featured Java, not a J2ME cripple. Actually, Google did not put true Java inside, but their own realisation, very compatible though. And Java is much better then Objective C. You see, no one use OC outside of MacOS, but Java in contrast is a highly used programming language, so Android developer gets access to much more helpful resources (libraries, docs, etc).

Next thing is that with Apple you are totally locked. That means you can not easily distribute your iPhone software without Apple permission. But you can with Android.

And what I personally liked about Google OS is that they use CLI tools and Eclipse. First thing means that we can hope that someone will make more great tools for Android developers, second one is an IDE, which I'm used to. So with Android SDK I feel at home (:

It seems like many people still don't know how to customize Opera browser user inreface. So I wrote a short guide how I enhanced UI to match my needs. It is in Russian, my native language. Actually my Opera UI looks like Google Chrome UI (: But I'm using it since Opera 8.0. Screenshot is there too!