Filed under: Cellphones

Apple’s App Store, with its millions of downloads, is clearly a hit with consumers. But with developers? Not so much. Like a dashing hero to a scorned mistress, Google’s Andy Rubin is pledging a different, more loving and respectful relationship with those who would fill his company’s Android Market with selections — and his pockets with royalties. He indicates that the Market will enable free downloadable trials, something that Apple is stubbornly refusing to add, and that those downloads would not be subject to any arbitrary bandwidth caps. Meanwhile, T-Mobile at least will be levying a $2/month fee on developers of free apps expected to use more than the (somewhat arbitrary) amount of 15MB of data per user per month, though how they’ll be keeping track of that data outside of their own content stack is unclear — our guess is that they can’t.

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Filed under: Cellphones

We’ve already seen plenty of screenshots and videos of Android in action, but it’s not every day Andy Rubin, Google’s Senior Director of Mobile Platforms, is behind the controls, and he recently demoed the open-source phone OS to a group of reporters. Rubin specifically demonstrated non-touchscreen versions of the platform, showing off a browser designed entirely for button-based navigation, and also hit upon Android’s ability to multitask, using Google Maps seamlessly with a media player and a photo app running in the background. Take that, iPhone. Of course, the hardware itself was kept super-secret, but since Android is designed to work on any phone with at least a 200MHz processor, it’s understandable that Google isn’t interested in distracting us with specific phone models when the focus is clearly on the OS. We’ll just have to wait until later in the year to get our hands on an actual device — hopefully the screenshots at the read links will tide you over.

[Thanks, Tarek]

Read - CNET Asia
Read - HardwareZone

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