So let’s start with this funny blog post, i will update it while i discover both the source as well as the application inside the emulator. I just write down what i find interesting and let you know!

The first thing that immediately caught my attention was a Day and Night mode. I did not hear of that before and therefore i thought i’ll put it on here:

Night mode of the Honeycomb sample SDK

Day mode of the Honeycomb sample SDK

It definitely seems like the sample application is the best place to start learning more about the new ActionBar, the Fragments system and how to structure your future Android projects (if they all will be based on fragments, which is my best guess).

Aaaaand i just found the first example for the new animation framework. If you click on the ActionBar on “Hide Titles” an ObjectAnimator will be used to fade away the list (the ListFragment on the left).

Just looking at the MainActivity.java you can find out quite some stuff. For example look at the management of Fragments:

final FragmentManager fm = getFragmentManager();
final TitlesFragment f = (TitlesFragment) fm
                           .findFragmentById(R.id.frag_title);
final View titlesView = f.getView();
...
 if (shouldShow) {
          fm.beginTransaction().show(f).commit();
...
 fm.beginTransaction().hide(f).commit();

It looks like they implemented some kind of Transaction management for showing and hiding fragments. What you can also see from this code is that a Fragment is not a View. It’s some kind of wrapping element around views.

It even looks like you can search for fragments that were on the previous activity stack and not in the current, see this documentation of the function findFragmentById (int) inside the FragmentManager:

Finds a fragment that was identified by the given id either when
inflated  from XML or as the container ID when added in a
transaction.  This first  searches through fragments that are
currently added to the manager's  activity; if no such fragment is
found, then all fragments currently  on the back stack associated
with this ID are searched.

I just discovered yet another feature of the app – or an animation – or both, whatever you call it. If you click (well – tap) on the right fragment (the view with the image) the ActionBar actually hides after a smooth animation. This way you get even more space to use for your application content. I wonder if this will be the case with all honeycomb apps, or if it is hidden somewhere in the example code. See the following picture that shows the UI without the ActionBar.

Example app without the ActionBar

I just decided to have a closer look at the developer documentation that comes with the SDK. As it is not yet available online i thought i post some interesting snippet about Fragments here:

A Fragment is a piece of an application's user interface or behavior
that can be placed in an Activity. Interaction with fragments is
done through FragmentManager, which can be obtained via
Activity.getFragmentManager() and Fragment.getFragmentManager().

The Fragment class can be used many ways to achieve a wide variety
of results. It is core, it represents a particular operation or
interface that is running within a larger Activity. A Fragment is
closely tied to the Activity it is in, and can not be used apart
from one. Though Fragment defines its own lifecycle, that lifecycle
is dependent on its activity: if the activity is stopped, no
fragments inside of it can be started; when the activity is
destroyed, all fragments will be destroyed.

All subclasses of Fragment must include a public empty constructor.
The framework will often re-instantiate a fragment class when
needed, in particular during state restore, and needs to be able to
find this constructor to instantiate it. If the empty constructor
is not available, a runtime exception will occur in some cases
during state restore.

And even more, the documentation covers the Back Stack and Layouting for Fragments.

The Back Stack directly relates to the FragmentManager and the transaction based view stack of fragments (remember show().commit and hide().commit()?). Fragments can be pushed onto this stack and are removed if the user triggers the “back” button. This is a totally different approach as the current system. Right now back moves through activities. With Honeycomb you will be able to move through several parts of an activity by using the Fragment system.

Fragments layouting. Yeah this one is a definite must read! With honeycomb you can now use a new tag inside the activity layout XML. See this example from the documentation:

<FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent">
    <fragment class="com.example.android.apis.app.FragmentLayout$TitlesFragment"
            android:id="@+id/titles"
            android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent" />
</FrameLayout>

Besides the standard fragment class there is also a ListFragment which is used inside the sample application. The API documentation also covers some more code about the ListFragment, see the following ListFragment example:

public static class TitlesFragment extends ListFragment {
    boolean mDualPane;
    int mCurCheckPosition = 0;
    int mShownCheckPosition = -1;

   ...

    @Override
    public void onListItemClick(ListView l, View v, int position, long id) {
        showDetails(position);
    }

    /**
     * Helper function to show the details of a selected item, either by
     * displaying a fragment in-place in the current UI, or starting a
     * whole new activity in which it is displayed.
     */
    void showDetails(int index) {
        mCurCheckPosition = index;

        if (mDualPane) {
            // We can display everything in-place with fragments, so update
            // the list to highlight the selected item and show the data.
            getListView().setItemChecked(index, true);

            if (mShownCheckPosition != mCurCheckPosition) {
                // If we are not currently showing a fragment for the new
                // position, we need to create and install a new one.
                DetailsFragment df = DetailsFragment.newInstance(index);

                // Execute a transaction, replacing any existing fragment
                // with this one inside the frame.
                FragmentTransaction ft = getFragmentManager().beginTransaction();
                ft.replace(R.id.details, df);
                ft.setTransition(FragmentTransaction.TRANSIT_FRAGMENT_FADE);
                ft.commit();
                mShownCheckPosition = index;
            }

        } else {
            // Otherwise we need to launch a new activity to display
            // the dialog fragment with selected text.
            Intent intent = new Intent();
            intent.setClass(getActivity(), DetailsActivity.class);
            intent.putExtra("index", index);
            startActivity(intent);
        }
    }
}

The most interesting piece here is something that i hoped we – as developers – can avoid. You need to decide for yourself if you have multiple fragments and want to display a View on a fragment, or if you want to start this in a separate Activity. This is, what i believe, the system to handle both phones and tablets in the same code. I hoped for a better solution to handle this, for something that just works automatically.
From the looks of that code you need to handle dual panes on your own. Let’s see if the team at Google comes up with an even simplier solution to that.

edit:

some more stuff i just discovered:

There is a FragmentBreadCrumbs class which can be used as a view inside the ActionBar using the method ActionBar.setCustomView (). This i really cool if you have an application that uses the fragment system heavily. Think of an file browser where you open folders in fragments recursively – you get the breadcrumb navigation for free! … Can’t wait to see that in action in other applications.

And yet another thing that is actually also inside the sample application. Tabs on the ActionBar! Yes, they just work like traditional TabHosts, with the one difference that you can combine them onto the ActionBar together with other actions and menus. I like this idea.

Alright. That’s it for today. I will finish this post now and start trying to write some of my own fragments. Maybe i write something again when i got my first own hands on impressions on how honeycomb code works.

released here. And just to let you know, i am totally excited. I am so excited that i even started writing this blog post while i am still downloading the new package. Before i start – my dear Apple friend be warned – i am slightly biased towards Android.

Honeycomb is the version we waited so long for! An Android version specifically tailored for tablets and larger screen devices. There were rumours going around for months, many thought Gingerbread could be very well the tablet version for Android. But nah, nothing. Finally it’s here and the wait is over. The masterpiece from Matias Duarte (see an interview with Josh from engadget here), the former Senior Director of User Experience from HP Palm, who left the company for a much bigger opportunity: Bring joy in use and visual appearance to Android.

The new holographic UI of honeycomb

I guess most of you know this already, but when it comes to mobile devices i am a total uber-nerd. I don’t care who makes the device, if it rocks and shines, i am in!
I, being and android-developer, am even bowing down to Steve Jobs and his Apple armada for giving the iPhone and the iPad to the world. Introducing the masses to a much more modern and intuitive way of mobile computing could just not have been accomplished by one of the other guys that were around at that time (Nokia, nod nod). Revolution and innovation is what shapes the future of our industry, hardware and specifically consumer devices will be a big part of it.

That, just as a little disclaimer to let you know that i am open to any other competitor that’s out there and that i have a close eye on everything that pops up in that space (hello Bada… where are you?).

Let’s get back to the reason i am writing this tonight. Android. It has been around for quite some time. I looked at many devices before i finally made the decision to pile up some money and get my first Android Smartphone.
But for quite some time now i also wanted to have a tablet. When the iPad came around i was quite interested, even without being a Mac user it just had this special feeling and we knew it does something right. I could have bought the iPad but i decided not to. It was around the time where i was just diving into Android development. I wasn’t sure if Google would ever focus tablets with Android and no one really knew that a year ago (remember the rumours for ChromeOS on tablets?). Nevertheless i decided to wait and see if there will be competitors to the iPad running Android. And there even were some tablets running standard versions of Android, but none was really quite up to the game. The only one that

My game Droidkoban 3D running on the GalaxyTab

really felt like it could be as usable as the iPad was the GalaxyTab from Samsung. They did a good job tailoring Android for phones to their tablet. But nonetheless it was still a phone OS and there was not much support for developing applications.

But finally we’ve seen plenty of real competition at CES 2011 and my guess is that we will see even more at MWC 2011 that will be at least on par with the iPad 2 regardless of what features and hardware Apple plans to ship.

So let’s have a sneak peak at what’s coming for honeycomb, specifically what Google brings with the preview SDK (see here http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-3.0-highlights.html).

Android 3.0 – The consumer perspective

Say it out loud: Android for Tablets IS NOT like iOS for the iPad. Apple stuck to a very minimalistic approach to the tablet. They focused on the apps, certainly they did and they did great. But when it comes to the overall feeling and main user interface (home screen, etc.) it’s just a big iPhone. It’s their approach and it works nough said, they make tons of Benjamins with it.

Android 3.0 did use this opportunity to finally make up for what they missed in the first place. A cool looking user interface and a unique experience. If you look at that vanilla Honeycomb images i most certainly feel like using a device from Star Trek. It looks totally futuristic. Somehow it’s Android, but somehow it’s not. It comes with all the Android stuff we know and love like multiple home screens, the notification bar and widgets. But it also comes with a lot of new stuff.  Action Bars by default (you know THIS pattern presented during Google IO 2010). A completely redesigned (and greatly welcomed) new keyboard. New Google applications tailored for tablets. USB connectivity to sync media files with a PC or a camera. But what’s really cool: USB connectivity for standard Desktop Keyboards! Wow. Now that’s really cool. Get yourself a dock and a normal USB Keyboard and work productively on texts and similar stuff. Definetly a great enhancement – trash all that proprietary (and very expensive) accessories!

Camera and Gallery

Looking really good so far, this holographic UI seems to be quite consistent on some of the new Google Apps. It definetly works for the ones that already featured darker UIs. I hope to see more of that stuff and really like to see how it feels in my hands.

the camera view

A new Browser

The browser really got some love from the android developers. Other sites also mentioned that. It feels much more like a modern desktop browser and is not as stripped down as the normal browser that comes with Android smartphones. But for sure there are always alternatives. And probably there will be also specific versions of this alternatives for Honeycomb.

The new Browser

Google Mail

Google mail got, of course, also a revamp of its UI. It comes close to what i’ve seen for the iPad. But when it comes to traditional Multipane Applications that support touch support – what could be done different? It’s a good approach, putting lists to the left and the content to the right. What i really like is how the new ActionBar comes into play. It’s a much cleaner way of accessing actions and Menus. I really hate the way menus currently work on Android phones and i hope they bring the same system to the phone version of Android.

Games

Something that is not on Googles preview page. Games. The processing power and the power of the GPUs of the coming honeycomb tablets will bring RICH – really bad ass – power to game developers. Nvidia Tegra 2 baby. Yes it has a huge amount of computing power, two cores, and will be even clocked at 1.2 GHZ on each core (at least the ones coming in summer/late summer). But that’s not all. Nvidia has made a very good decision by putting a “desktop” like graphics card on this chip.
What? How could that be done you ask? Well, let’s nail it down a bit. For sure it’s almost nothing like a traditional graphics card for the desktop as there are totally different requirements for power consumption and heat. But Nvidia brought the same features of modern graphic cards to its mobile lineup.

What’s so interesting about that you ask?
Well. It enables developers to reuse their already existing assets! Textures, Shaders and alike – they run without huge changes on a graphics card inside a tablet! And that’s the big thing. Thanks to Tegra 2 there will be tons of new high end 3D graphic games for tablets featuring this particular processor. And i bet we will see a lot of stuff that’s just not possible today with the iPad.

Dislike

Well, almost nothing. But yes there is something i would really like to complain about even before using it. I really really really hope the icons and the style of the new status bar is not final. Come on guys, everything looks really stunning, but you can do really better than that icons and this clock style.

I played around with the Samsung GalaxyTab before, and i really like the size and the form factor of this 7 inch device. After testing Honeycomb for some time in the emulator i figured that it does not really do the best job on the 1024×600 resolution. There are still some things that just don’t scale very well. I really hope Google can work this out and their focus is not only on 10 inch tablets.

That’s it for the consumer perspective. I am pretty sure that there are more than enough people around who will write much more about it than me. Let’s got to another really interesting topic for me.

Honeycomb – what’s in there for me (as a developer)

Yaaaay, finally. I guess if you came here to read this post, you came for this. My take on the developer side of the Honeycomb additions. As mentioned before, Honeycomb is meant for larger screen devices (than phones) specifically for tablets. And it of course also ships with new APIs to leverage that screen size and the capabilities of the hardware that comes with larger devices (oooh Tegra 2 – i will love you ).

As a little warning, i did not yet work with the API itself – i just had no time yet (i needed at least some hours of sleep tonight). But i might write another post about the APIs itself – and maybe a first test application i write.
Therefore i can only write about some of my own rants and about what’s listed here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-3.0-highlights.html#DeveloperApis.

Alright, let’s go quickly over some cool new concepts that will be introduced with Honeycomb:

Activity fragments

Andy Rubin already spoiled that one during the All Things Mobile conference. But by that time i knew this is something essential, this is something Google needs for Android to give it the capability to function on a smartphone, a TV and a tablet with NO (or almost none) code changes (at least that’s the plan for some point of time in the future).
Activity fragments are Activites broken up into multiple columns or parts, whatever you want to call it. To get a more visual idea just think of the most common iPad UI: A listview on the left and the content to the right of this listview. That’s essentially two fragments. The phone could only display one at a time, but the tablet and the TV could display two or maybe even more, who knows.
It creates the ability for true multipane UIs where each part can be controlled independently. It opens up for more modularity and is most certainly more flexible than what Samsung was doing on their GalaxyTab UIs. This new Activity fragment system is what i will have a look at first!

Redesigned UI widgets

For sure! We all have seen that one coming. The current UI – even on Gingerbread – does not really look like it could do the job on the tablet. Just have a look on some EditText entries on 7 or 10 inch android tablets. Almost all look ugly as hell.
I really like where Google is going with the UI on honeycomb – and remember it’s only the first version. If they keep up the pace they will refine and perfect it in a really short time.

Home screen widgets

Well, that’s pretty much a no-brainer. A lot of android applications come with custom Widgets to fill up you home screens with fast access to some of the applications functions. It’s a concept that not many other platforms have copied or imitated as of now. It’s something that definitely adds more complexity for the average joe user. But there are a lot of power users who really dig this kind of functionality for their home screens.

Developers can now use more UI elements than before for widget development. 3D Stacks, Grids, Lists, etc. can now be used to add new concepts to your widgets and hence the home screen itself!

Action Bar

As mentioned before, they introduced this pattern on several of their own applications and presented it during a lot of talks. They knew that they somehow had to fix the “menu button” issue on Android. It always was some kind of hidden functionality, not really discoverable for all the Android users out there. Merging menus and actions onto this Action Bar is a really good idea imho. I did not yet look at the API, but i am most certain that it will be as easy to use as normal Menus.

Graphics Graphics Graphics

You probably know that i did more than just one application powered by rich graphics or animations. As i wrote quite some OpenGL code in the last years i am totally in for some news about Graphics. Honeycomb introduces a new animation framework. And who else better than Chet Haase and Romain Guy (who wrote the book Filthy Rich Clients and currently work for Google) could fit the job of designing this particular library! I will definitely spend some quality time to find out what fancy animations i can create with that framework.

Besides animation Google did everything in their power to bring the Graphics processor finally to some good use on Android. They implemented hardware-accelerated 2D graphics (which means hardware-accelerated UI like on the iPhone) and give the developer the full control over it. Enable it for the whole application, only for some parts of it, or disable it – at your will.

Multicore

With all that new rising mobile multicore processors there was a huge need to have a proper multicore ready mobile operating system.  The new developer device – the Motorola Xoom – comes with a Nvidia Tegra 2 processor which by default has two cores. We will see even more cores coming as soon as the Tegra 3 hits (maybe next year). Support for that kind of computing power was imminent, it is essential to move on to new frontiers of mobile computing. The desktop has shown us an tremendous increase in computing power while reducing heat and power consumption at the same time. This change will bring more battery life and faster processing during the times we need it (games, nod nod). I am really excited to see what the next Apple processor for the coming iPad 2 looks like – if they are also going multicore or not.

And now to the best thing on the planet:

Compatibility with existing apps

Yep! Yes, it is a go! Compatibility is something that is written in BIG letters when it comes to the Android team and to Android development. Yes there is fragmentation, but that only means that SOME users don’t get the latest and greatest system image (i still do not have gingerbread as many others – see me complaining?). It DOES NOT mean that they can not run new applications. Because most certainly they can.
But whats even better is the support for already existing applications. Without any code changes (apart from an entry to the Android Manifest) existing apps SCALE to the new UI and integrate well with tablet specific Apps. And i am pretty sure that you can easily add just another .xml to deliver this specifc tablet UI as you can already target different screen orientations and sizes.

Dislike

The SDK is definitely a preview, it feels like a preview, it functions like a preview. During my journey through this refreshingly new system i already uncovered several bugs – maybe they only exist in the emulator but who knows (other than for example Romain Guy).

The SDK and the emulator

Well, long story short. The emulator is still slow like hell, even worse, now that you need to run it at a tablet resolution (either 1024×600 or 1280×800) it’s even worse. You could use it with really low resolutions like 320×480 but everything higher is just unusable.

Nevertheless i run it for some time just to test things. As i said, some things are still broken and well, did i mention slow? …
Anyway you can use it to get an idea how honeycomb will feel like in your hands. Besides i also managed to do some screenshots while testing. And of course as i totally like 7 inch tablets i needed to run the emulator at 1024×600 just to get the right feeling… well it also let me discover quite some scaling bugs. Maybe you see something that wasn’t shown somewhere else before (probably not).

Settings in portrait looks somehow a bit tall

landscape is doing a much better job

GMail on hcomb

the holographic UI while placing a widget

Writing an email

An opportunity ahead

Just to add something else that’s in there for me as an Android developer. The right time! As with the release of the iPad preview SDK, now is the time to jump on the train. There are almost no tablet specific apps for Android right now. And there is a huge opportunity to be one of the first to ship one as soon as the first tablets are ready. I really wish i had some time left right now to work on something like that. I hope that you do!

Summed up

Two things. First, i can’t await my own REAL honeycomb tablet. After playing with it around in the emulator it just feels right. It still has some issues (in the emulator), sure, but Android always looks and feels much better on a real device than in this really slow and buggy emulator. I definitely look out for MWC 2011 and hope for a nice 7 inch Android Tablet to spend my money on.

Second, i really would like to work on some tablet focused Android applications. Let’s see what the coming months bring for me. Only time will tell. But i have high hopes and am pretty sure that something will come up and i find some time for it.

That’s it for now pals. I hope you are as excited as me and if not head over to http://d.android.com/sdk/android-3.0-highlights.html#UserFeatures to get some hcomb taste.

Last friday me and some colleagues from university attended the german Samsung Bada Developer Day held in Frankfurt am Main. Some of us already had quite some experience with Android and mobile in general, therefore it was definitely an interesting event for us.

What did i expect from the event?

• Outstanding talks – I basically love tech talks and presentations – i hoped they were really cool
• Lots of developer topic coverage, less focus on consumer and advertising of the devices. Give us hints why we should consider bada at all.
• My highest hopes were to receive a free Samsung Wave phone. That would actually motivate me to participate in the developer challenge. Google did this on almost every occasion during the last year. And as it turns out some sources say that there will be (at least) 100 Samsung Waves drawn between the 200 attendees of the event.

Before I came across the news that there will be a Samsung Bada Developer Day held in Germany, i already invested some hours of my precious spare-time to hack on some bada stuff. I have quite some background in C++ and therefore this was not really a problem for me. Strangely to run the code, bada compiles a new simulator each time you want to execute your code, and links in your own app via a C++ lib file. It also means that each time you want to change and test something you need to restart the whole simulator. Compared to the Android approach it looks kinda one-legged to me. Anyways, i am not that kinda guy that wants to write mobile applications inside an emulator or simulator. It’s a good thing to test different settings, but it’s not the best approach to work productively on mobile applications. At least as of now (bear in mind – i did not yet work with the iPhone SDK). I have high hopes that we actually can leverage future simulators when developing mobile applications.

Even before the event itself the winners of the 100 Samsung Waves were contacted via email – three of us (including me) received a winners email and we were really happy about it.

Arrived at the parking lot across the Cocoon Club

Long story short, let’s move on to the event itself. We met at the main station in Heidelberg and drove approx. an hour to Frankfurt. With a navigation system in each of our pockets and another one built into the car this is not really troublesome nowadays. We reached the event location quite early and got ourselves some cool seats.

First of all the location was really awesome. The event was held inside the Cocoon Club, which normally hosts techno and house music events. Beamers to each side displayed huge Samsung logos and a lot of ocean themed Images onto the walls. Everything else, including the toilets!, was also really cool.

DevDay Screens in the toilet!

Big thanks to Samsung and the team that held the event. They did their jobs very well.

The talks?

Yeah, let’s move onto the talks. Sadly they didn’t all fulfill my expectations. The talk of the first Samsung Developer Advocate (the guy from Samsung London) was kinda interesting. Lots of stuff i already knew, but it was one of the very few talks where I at least got some new information.

Bada Developer Advocate from London

There are a lot of concepts you need to take into consideration when working with the bada SDK, for example you need to delete objects yourself that were returned by functions with a trailing N (something like getMediaManagerN ()) and you also need to work with result values instead of exceptions. There is no exception support in bada so far, and I guess there will never be one. To work around the missing exceptions when constructing objects you need to call a ->Construct () Method after the constructor itself. This function will tell you if you successfully created the object. This is one of the things that makes you guess this API is around for much longer than Samsung wants to make us believe. This does not look like a modern C++ API to me.

My shiny new gadget

Finally during the lunch break everyone that won the free Samsung Wave was able to queue for the device at the entrance. So did we. Actually I was first in line and dropped out after they said it would take a bit longer … and then others queued in front of me, damn! After some minutes of waiting I finally held the device in my hands!

The laptop I brought with me was kinda useless. They planned for half an hour of coding and we even had to leave quite early due to our driver. Not a big problem, as it turned out that almost no one worked on an application anyways. At least that’s what I got from some people. The time was way too short to hack on something and I guess, a lot just were at the event for the free phone…

At least we got into some talks with one of the Samsung Developer Advocates, namely Markus Junginger from greenrobot who himself is more known for it’s work on the Android platform. We learned quite some insightful information, for example why there will be no German Local Developer Challenge (i hoped that they would announce one). One thing we definitely can take away from this discussions is that there are a lot of possibilities on bada due to a really small developer base.

Lets sum up the event. Good food and beverages, really good organized and cool location, free Samsung Wave at least for many of us and some new information. Lots of cool people and some good talks. When I compare what I got to what I spent on this event it really payed out well. I even got a device so i could work on some bada stuff.

Finally even more pictures from the event:

What does Bada hold for the future?

Will Samsung get something in reward from me? This is still unsure but I consider taking part in the global developer challenge as I have a cool mobile game that could really attract a lot of gamers on bada. There won’t be many developers taking part and therefore only little competition, and there is only one target device at the moment, so you really can bring your contest entry to glare on it. I will invest some more days trying to figure out how easy my OpenGL ES code can be ported from Java to C++ and then decide, based on how far I get, if I will continue to work on a submission for the contest. I have also a lot of other ideas for the contest but just too little time, it does not make sense for me to start with a whole new project right now.

But how does Bada gets away in general you ask?

The consumer perspective: Well, this really depends. For someone who experienced Android or iOS (or maybe even webOS?) before – Bada might be disappointing. Someone who came from a feature phone or a sub-par “smartphone” might like the Samsung Wave and its Bada system. It has a unique way with a heads on approach on widgets. It basically has a really sharp and great display (remember Super AMOLED? – it’s definitely a step ahead of what I’ve seen on other devices). The multimedia capabilities, namely video recording and playback are plain awesome, I like it a lot.

The developer perspective: From my point of view this is a two-edged blade for developers. Developers who have a large C++ background and like to dive into new experiences will see a platform with almost no competition. Even better: The applications that come with the Samsung Wave preinstalled are really disappointing and therefore there is a lot of room for improvement (with little or no effort even).
But on the other side bada has not many users right now and an uncertain future. Samsung mentioned during the event that they want to go ALL BADA with all its handsets but I doubt this will happen anywhere soon. I even think they will learn how successful Android can be after selling the Galaxy S now.

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this really strange review of the bada developer event mixed in with some other thoughts. As hint for every developer who received the device during this event, go ahead and try to code something for it, maybe it’s a missed opportunity if you just sell it on eBay or give it to someone else.

Disclaimer: bada and the Samsung Wave are copyright by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd

There goes my idea. For quite some time i wanted to put up a website that features every Android based device that is out there. Plain simple, a picture, the core specs and maybe a release date.
Unfortunately it seems someone else had that idea before me…

Nevertheless, the folks at http://android-devices.net/ look like doing a great job. Therefore i am not going to waste my time reproducing what is already there. But i wanted to share the site with all of you who didn’t already know it. Pay them a visit, rest assured you will most likely see some Android based devices you haven’t heard of before!

Anyways, here i am again doing it. Hopefully this time i will find some spare time to work on articles and posts i would really like to share with the internet. These will mainly cover topics like programming, software, operating systems, mobile devices or projects i work/ed on. Sometimes there will be also some rants about my personal life or stuff i encountered on the internet.

What’s so special about it? Hei – don’t ask me, you are currently reading it! But don’t be deterred, come back later. I promise to work on some posts that might interest you.

Posts i want to work on would be android and android game development related or maybe something about my head start into Scala, a language i recently discovered for myself, and what i like about it.

Besides traditional blog posts i will also try to move my project descriptions i hosted on my personal page leihwelt.de over here. I just have way better possibilities to write about them on wordpress than editing plain html files.

I hope all that will sooner or later contribute to fill up the empty space on here. In the meantime, if you don’t already do, follow my microblog on twitter.

Hell, it’s about time.