Google's Android App Inventor is great fun to play with and I think represents a fascinating leap forward in mobile application development. It provides a whole toolbox of ready to go functionality, but sadly missing from this toolbox are facilities to interact with web sites and services (with the exception of Twitter of course). However there is one component that provides a glimmer of hope and if you want to publish data in a way that can be used by Android App Inventor developers then you can use this component with a PHP script to easily pass data to the mobile device.

Recently I got my invite to try out the beta of Google App Inventor for Android, a simplified environment to enable people to create applications for Android based phones using visual building blocks instead of a programming language. Google have written extensive set up instructions to get your computer and phone set up: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/setup/index.html but also on this page is a bit of text that could cause us trouble: "If you are using GNU/Linux, then you should use Sun Java rather than OpenJDK. App Inventor does not work well with OpenJDK." Unfortunately OpenJDK is the default for Ubuntu 10.04 and it might not be obvious how to get the Sun version, so I thought I'd better document what I did to get it working.

Today (Sunday 18th July) Techcrunch published a story about how the Android operating system, which is now spreading beyond the mobile phone, is poised to take over China and said this will have global implications. Coincidentally yesterday I took delivery of a device, made in China, that is maybe not too well known: the Eken M001 Android Tablet. This gives you a WiFi enabled Android computer with a seven inch touchscreen that has 128MB of RAM, 2GB of storage and an SD card slot. None of these specifications are particularly remarkable, but what is astonishing was the price: £85 (about US $130) from a reseller on Amazon. Even a 7” digital photo frame would typically set you back £30! (about US $46)

Being a developer type I couldn't wait to start experimenting with coding on my new HTC Desire. Being Android powered it is very friendly and coding mainly takes place in Java, which I'm familiar with. This class of mobile device is incredibly powerful of course, armed not just with portability and web access but also decent processing power and a variety of sensors. We're still learning about what exactly this means and what opportunities it can bring and so it is very important to be able to experiment, try out ideas and build rough prototypes. This is where the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) comes in, and I used it to build a prototype application to scan a barcode on a book and use that code to see if it is in a library. Handy when deciding whether to buy a book!

Just over a week ago I walked into a mobile phone shop and handed over my own hard earned cash and bought myself an HTC Desire. I'd thought long and hard about what phone to get. The HTC Hero I had on trial last year was great, but had a few problems that put me off. The Desire has addressed these problems though and added more features, so after reading up on it and seeing one in real life I knew this was the phone for me. A few people have been asking about the phone, so I thought I would share some first impressions.

Google have now announced that they are to move into the Internet TV market with a platform named “Google TV”. This will aim to bring the world of web content to your TV screen in an easy to use way making video podcasts as easy to find and watch as regular TV programmes. It will not be a single product, but will be available in various products from set top boxes to televisions with the functionality built in. The announcement also came with the news that Google is working with big name partners such as Sony, Intel, Logitech and Adobe to make the product a reality. Engadget has a pretty good round up of the news in its article: Google TV: Everything you ever wanted to know. I believe that this is a very significant announcement and here is why.

I am a huge music fan, I'll listen to all sorts of music ranging from the pop to opera and this is my experience of Spotify, a service that truly is a “game changer” meaning you can listen to virtually any music you like without having to go buy a download or a CD. I've been a Spotify user for quite a while and am now a premium (subscription) customer. There is one snag though, I am also an Ubuntu user, a platform not supported officially by Spotify. Despite this, it is possible to get Spotify up and running on Ubuntu and a few mobile devices. This is my experience so far of using Spotify.

Smartphones are computers that happen to be able to make phone calls, and that leads to some interesting possibilities. I've been trying out the new HTC Hero thanks to the lovely folk at 3MobileBuzz who sent me one to have a look at for a week. The Hero uses Google's open source operating system Android, which is based on Linux and is optimised for smaller devices. HTC mobiles are available on many of the mobile phone networks, and they are not alone in using the Android operating system on certain models, manufacturers such as Motorola have recently joined them. The Hero is 3's first Android device and the model I looked at also has a bundled Spotify subscription (worth £9.99 per month), it currently costs £97.86 upfront with a two year contract that will cost you £35 per month, so this is toward the premium end of their range. Quite a bit of cash to hand over, but what do you get for your money?

Twitter is a never ending stream of information, some of it useful, some maybe not so, but one bit of useful information that did come to my attention today was a tweet from @IanEHarris mentioning that a Live CD image of Google Android has been developed that will enable you to try this new operating system in a virtual machine environment such as VirtualBox, or any other computer that could be booted of a CD or a USB stick. It's been known for some time that it is possible to run Android on x86 hardware with a port for the Asus EEE PC appearing earlier this year, but it was very difficult until now to get Android running on other hardware or virtual machines.