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I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights page.

With the introduction of Android version 1.6, support was added different screen sizes.  The platform does a nice job of letting developers tell the market what size screens their app supports, but that’s only half the story.

This means that every game will have to support 6 unique screen configurations in order to look its best on every phone!

The Android UI team has begun developing guidelines for the interaction and visual design of Android applications. Look here for articles that describe these guidelines as we release them.

It’s detailed. It’s long. It’s probably overly-detailed and overly-long. But, unlike the Apple docs, it contains every single step necessary for any developer to implement in-app purchases.

In this article we ‘ll review the present state of the market, the key App Store building blocks and where will the market be heading in two years.

And while technical openness was established 7 years ago, what was lacking all these years was commercial openness; the funnel between external developers and in-market handsets was so thin that very few software players could pass through. It took Symbian six years to reach 10,000 applications, while it took Apple only 6 months (see our earlier analysis). In the first year of operation, Apple’s App Store brought in 65,000+ apps, 100,000 registered developers, 1.5Billion application downloads and availability to consumers across 77 countries through 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold.

n this historical context, it is easy to see that App Stores are a developer-to-consumer merchandising channel; a go-to-market vehicle for allowing consumers to distribute and retail their applications directly to the end-consumers, while taking out the middlemen from distribution and retailing.

Last week, Six Voices released Discover Rockford Michigan, the first of what it hopes will be a series of city-themed apps that provide maps, business directories, history, points of interest and other functions. The app was developed in conjunction with marketing and advertising firm Fluis Inc.

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter. The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years. Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices. Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented. Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization. Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers. Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile.

Android 1.5 31.0%

Google provides a Java version of his App Engine solution (GAE). It is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution that offers massive and flexible scalability for your Web applications by hosting them on the Google cloud (based on Google computing infrastructure). For more details, you can read our blog post with the official announce. Due to the restrictions of the GAE, we need to provide an adaptation of Restlet for this environment. GAE is based on Java 6, with a restricted list of APIs. See GAE developers documentation for details.

What is the best way to use Restlet in Eclipse? Of course, you could manually use the JAR files in your Eclipse projects, but the most flexible way is to rely on Eclipse's plug-in infrastructure.

Read this document to learn about the range of application types you can develop for iPhone OS and the human interface design principles that inform all great software.

If Microsoft is looking for a differentiating feature for a mobile platform, promoting .NET makes a heck of a lot of sense…particularly if Silverlight is supported in the next version of Windows Mobile (which based on this year’s PDC, seems to be turning into a development platform in its own right).

XBOX is confusingly closed. For the only true TV-attached device in the Microsoft product catalog, it is perplexing to me that XBOX isn’t trying to encourage third-party developers to make non-game network-capable apps that run on the XBOX (well, unless you are Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, or another “big” company).

Google showed off on December 7 a prototype of its mobile tagging technology. The company is “QR” barcodes to more than 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. Mobile users can snap a picture of the bar codes and obtain information about that business — including reviews, coupons, and other information. (Smartphone users need an app on their phones that can read the QR codes.) In January 2009, Microsoft launched a beta of its own bar-code search technology, known as Microsoft Tag. It also introduced a free mobile tag reader. Microsoft, being Microsoft, couldn’t simply rely on the QR standard. Instead, it announed it was creating its own bar code technology that stores more information, more dynamically, offering more user choice. It’s cool that Microsoft Tag allows developers to determine the content and experience users will have by allowing choices of text, video, maps, discounts, promotions. But the lack of QR support is a deal breaker for some.

In large stores, such as Apple’s App Store, it is easy for an application to get lost in the crowd. To avoid that problem, brands and agencies should develop strategies for increasing discoverability, such as using other mobile or non-mobile channels to build awareness of the application so that consumers will seek it out.

AppMakr is a streamlined system that creates a native iPhone application out of your existing RSS feeds. You can customize elements of the app and the artwork and then submit it directly to the App Store. You can even embed ads from places like AdMob directly into the app.