The Androids! They're compiling!

I'm here at the Google IO conference in San Fransisco, and in the morning keynote we saw a real android phone. My father thinks that it is an HTC Dream. However, the coolest thing was not the way in which the internal compass communicates with Google Street view to provide a three-hundred-sixty degree street view that depended on which direction the phone was oriented; the coolest thing is that it is relatively fast. This is compiled Java. Naturally, this also makes the footprint smaller, as all of that unnecessary stuff that makes the files human readable have been stripped. This is going to set an example for how mobile phones use Java in the future, no more of these silly slow interpreted things.

One more thing: The Android multiple home screens seem like a Frankenstienian monster of the iPhone home screen and the KDE plasma widgets. It is kind of cool how the background moves half a screen when switching home screens to give the illusion of the widgets being closer to the front. Of course, the idea of using a high res panoramic shot for the background and moving it right and left when the home screen is switched is brilliant in itself.