That's one REALLY brilliant move from Google's side! ... Very well done, guys! We are with you!

So what we actually have here is an Android on steriods :)-

this is an interesting read and i tend to agree with you.. goog's is removing the bar on Licence and IP's per sec and in that manner they lock on users / developer's onto thier own platform which directly or indirectly can integrate into any tier.. the ulitmate nTier model in the making.. ?

<<"They are using Java, but they aren't implementing any well-known Java framework, and really that just creates another standard to support. The risk they take here is that they might fragment the market further," [said] Benoit Schillings, Trolltech chief technology officer.>>
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9815495-39.html

> "The risk they take here is that they
> might fragment the market further"

Microsoft also implemented their own JVM variant before, right... that always made Java more annoying to deal with, on the client-side, some years back (when people still used Java on the client-side!)...
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/howto-21.html

I have to say though, the ability of Java on my current phone did not automatically turn it into a good cross-phone platform to run any kind of applications... e.g. the Java apps I installed were having access problems, like popping up a permissions dialog every single time the app wanted to connect online...

>>"...not only unlocks development abilities on the mobile phone but also unlocks millions of potential Java mobile programmers from Sun’s grip on it."

That is to say, if you don't mind Google's grip on it :)

Seriously though, does this mean Google will be continuously updating the Dalvik code to match the latest Java changes? Otherwise things could get out of sync pretty easily. And how would they push those updates to users?

Screw the iPhone for a platform which is not even out yet?

A little bit of vapor love there.

I will wait and see. I admire HTC's phones quite a bit, but WM6 has a poor interface and takes too many clicks to get anywhere. Will Android's interface actually be any better?

I think we will end up seeing feature overloaded phones that don't consider the user at all. The iPhone has its flaws, like lack of a real keyboard, lack of 3G, and the crappy web-apps only, but most everything else is designed to be simple, and that is why it deserves the praise it gets.

I have high hopes for Android, but nothing I have seen thus far seems to indicate that the products will actually be good from a user standpoint, rather it is a long tech-fetishist wish list.

"Screw the iPhone for a platform which is not even out yet?"

Depending on your point of view, the Android platform (because it has an SDK and a virtual machine you can run code on) is more "out" than the iPhone is. Hardware is a null entity if you can't run your software on it.

Except that J2ME and J2SE are going to gradually merge as devices get more capable, according to James Gosling
(see http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/javame_is_not_dead).

What's interesting about Android is that, "real" Java or not, its certainly not J2ME so they're a step ahead of Sun in not confining java on mobile to a limited VM.

Thank you for this wonderful article. Thank you very much

I'm with Brock.

The iPhone DEVICE is here, but the only iPhone platform is for web apps optimized for it. Apple has promised an SDK for native applications, but it isn't here or useful, now.

The Android platform is here and useful now, even in beta. Devices are coming (we think) and are not.

I think I'll download it and play around.

How breathless and over-excited can you get ...

Dalvik may well turn out to be important, but unlike Dalvik it is difficult to take seriously an article that is in essence about Intellectual Property when the author seems to have little idea what a patent actually is ...

Stefano's a member of the Apache Foundation and the inventor of Cocoon, a large Java application framework. He's very familiar with intellectual property and patents, particularly surrounding Java.

I cant wait until there is some android compatible phones released and an os to load up on it! Anyone know if the os will be released to flash on to bare devices?