Introduction 

The Google Android OS is quite interesting as it will allow any hand set vendor to make their phones run on Google Android, thus bringing about a uniform user experience and feature sets across phones. On the programming side, I am excited because it leverages my Java knowledge for building mobile applications.

I have programmed, long ago, on the Palm OS 3.0 for the Palm Pilot PDA. It was quite interesting to code for a handheld device. After that, for many years, I never had an opportunity to code for handheld devices. Just in September 2008, I got a chance to dabble with Android. I am glad that Google has made Android SDK open source with no fees required of developers to download the SDK and build applications.

I had downloaded the version 0.9 of the Google Android SDK and dabbled with the tutorial examples. Currently I have updated to the 1.0 version. After following the Google tutorials and some other websites, I was quite interested and hooked. Here is my attempt to present a typical utility found on most mobile phones - a calculator to divide a restaurant check and tips. The tutorial demonstrates some of the layouts, widgets, event listeners, etc. which make the Android OS rock!

Development tools

Before you get started, please visit Google Android page and download the necessary jars and plugins. I am using the following

Tutorials

This is my first attempt at publishing a tutorial for Android OS. Please do send your feedback. All tutorial source files are available for download at the end of the tutorials.