Android story......interesting... Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California in October 2003 by Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger),Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc.),Nick Sears (once VP at T-Mobile),and Chris White (headed design and interface development at WebTVto develop, in Rubins words, smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owners location and preferences.The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, when it was realized that the market for the devices was not large enough, and diverted their efforts to producing a smartphone operating system to rival those of Symbian and Windows Mobile.[33] Despite the past accomplishments of the founders and early employees, Android Inc. operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.[24] That same year, Rubin ran out of money. Steve Perlman, a close friend of Rubin, brought him $10,000 in cash in an envelope and refused a stake in the company. Google acquired Android Inc. on August 17, 2005; key employees of Android Inc., including Rubin, Miner, and White, stayed at the company after the acquisition.Not much was known about Android Inc. at the time, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market with this move.[24] At Google, the team led by Rubin developed a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel. Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradable system. Google had lined up a series of hardware component and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation on their part. Speculation about Googles intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006.[38] An earlier prototype codenamed Sooner had a closer resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen, and a physical, QWERTY keyboard, but was later re-engineered to support a touchscreen, to compete with other announced devices such as the 2006 LG Prada and 2007 Apple iPhone.In September 2007, InformationWeek covered an Evalueserve study reporting that Google had filed several patent applications in the area of mobile telephony. Eric Schmidt, Andy Rubin, and Hugo Barra at a press conference for the Googles Nexus 7 tablet On November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of technology companies including Google, device manufacturers such as HTC, Sony and Samsung, wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile, and chipset makers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, unveiled itself, with a goal to develop open standards for mobile devices.That day, Android was unveiled as its first product, a mobile device platform built on the Linux kernel version 2.6.25.The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, released on October 22, 2008. In 2010, Google launched its Nexus series of devices – a line of smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system, and built by manufacturing partners. HTC collaborated with Google to release the first Nexus smartphone,the Nexus One. Google has since updated the series with newer devices, such as the Nexus 5 phone (made by LG) and the Nexus 7 tablet (made by Asus). Google releases the Nexus phones and tablets to act as their flagship Android devices, demonstrating Androids latest software and hardware features. On March 13, 2013 Larry Page announced in a blog post that Andy Rubin had moved from the Android division to take on new projects at Google.[46] He was replaced by Sundar Pichai, who also continues his role as the head of Googles Chrome division,which develops Chrome OS. Since 2008, Android has seen numerous updates which have incrementally improved the operating system, adding new features and fixing bugs in previous releases. Each major release is named in alphabetical order after a dessert or sugary treat; for example, version 1.5 Cupcake was followed by 1.6 Donut. The latest released version, 4.4.4 KitKat, appeared as a security-only update; it was released on June 19, 2014, shortly after the release of 4.4.3. As of October 2014, newest version of the Android operating system, Android 5.0 Lollipop, is available only as a developer preview. From 2010 to 2013, Hugo Barra served as product spokesperson for the Android team, representing Android at both press conferences and Google I/O, Google’s annual developer-focused conference. Barra’s product involvement included the entire Android ecosystem of software and hardware, including Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and KitKat operating system launches, the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 smartphones, the Nexus 7and Nexus 10 tablets,and other related products such as Google Now and Google Voice Search, Google’s speech recognition product comparable to Apple’s Siri.In 2013 Barra left the Android team for Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 11:42:02 +0000
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