Android Q&A

Google I/O sure as heck didn’t disappoint. Some lengthy Q&A about Android dropped some really, really interesting tidbits. The excitement regarding Android continues to build and these videos illustrate that the Android concept is finally maturing into a solid product. The excitement!

Scroll down for a condensed transcript of the Q&A session:

Q. Do you have a more specific release date for Android now?

A. [Android should launch in the] second half of this year. What you saw on stage looks pretty good, but we want to make sure it’s perfect and that people have a really good consumer experience with it.

Q. Will you have to buy the device with Android on it, or will you be able to load Android onto an existing device.

A. The software will be released as open-source when the first handsets are available … so people can do with it pretty much whatever they want. We don’t dictate how it’s used.

Q. Touch is heavily featured in the demo today, but Android is extensible to all sorts of different platforms. Were you just showing off the most flashy parts … how did you make those choices?

A. The platform is designed to be very generic, it has to work with touchscreen devices, D-pad devices and trackball devices. Some devices might not even have a screen. We chose to show a demonstration with a device that happened to have a trackball; we have other devices with a trackball. We could’ve shown that exact demo completely driven by the trackball. That’s pretty compelling as not a lot a lot of platforms have that flexibility.

Q. Could you tell us more about the hardware of the touchscreen handset?

A. The specific OEM who made built that hardware we’re under NDA with, but I can give you some details on components. It is a UMTS handset, the demo was on HSDPA 3.6Mbps. It was a Qualcomm MSM7201A [Ed: 528MHz] processor, it had a Synaptics capacitive touchscreen, 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash.

When we announced the product and soon after we posted some videos, some of our partners demonstrated the platform at at MWC at Barcelona in March. This is the most recent stuff; literally the finishing touches were put on the device last night. The clock didn’t exist last night.

Q. What was shown here first?

A. I’m not totally sure if I’m right here, but notifications we hadn’t shown before, the desktop-like launcher of applications where you can put alias and icons on the desktop and get a spatial-representation of workflow. The compass and accelerometer based Street View was a new application. The unlock mechanism – letting the device learn the user’s gesture to unlock it for security and sleep purposes. And Pacman was shown for the first time too!

Q. The unlock gesture would only be available on the touchscreen?

A. You could select each of the circles using the trackball, but it might make more sense using the touchscreen.

[Via AndroidCommunity]