Technology update: Android operating system

Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc., a firm purchased by Google in 2005. Android is based upon a modified version of the Linux kernel. Google and other members of the Open Handset Alliance collaborated to develop and release Android to the world. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android. Unit sales for Android OS smartphones ranked first among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the second and third quarters of 2010, with a third quarter market share of 43.6%.

Android has a large community of developers writing application programs ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 100,000 apps available for Android. Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can be downloaded from third party sites (except on AT&T, which disallows this). Developers write in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.

The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 78 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license.

The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, OpenCore media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc. The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++. (Wikipedia)

AlSultan Kelantan, Sultan Muhammad V

Sultan Kelantan Sultan Muhammad Ke V akan berangkat ke Mekah untuk menunaikan haji Rabu ini, menurut Pengelola Istana Diraja Kelantan, Datuk Abdul Halim Hamad.

Baginda akan berangkat bersama Menteri Besar Kelantan Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat dan Menteri Perdagangan Antarabangsa dan Industri yang juga Pengerusi Perhubungan Umno Kelantan Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed.

“Ini menunjukkan sikap Tawadak KDYMM Tuanku yang begitu memberi perhatian kepada agama,” kata Abdul Halim dalam kenyataan di sini hari ini.

Sultan Kelantan, Nik Aziz dan Mustapa yang akan ke Mekah menaiki pesawat Malaysia Airlines (MAS) dijangka pulang ke tanah air pada 23 Nov ini, katanya. (Bernama)

Technology: HSDPA

What is HSDPA?

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a mobile telephony protocol, also referred to as 3.5G (or usually call it "the next step for 3G") technology, which provides a smooth evolutionary path for UMTS-based 3G networks allowing for higher data transfer speeds, up to 14.4 Mbit/s per cell in the downlink and 2 Mbit/s per cell in the uplink.

An evolution of the W-CDMA standard, HSDPA achieves the increase in the data transfer speeds by defining a new W-CDMA channel: a high-speed downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) that operates in a different way from existing W-CDMA channels and is used for downlink communications to the mobile.