Special article: Android OS

Android

 Android is a software stack for mobile devices. Android includes an operating system,middle ware and key applications. Android OS smartphones are one of the best and most selling phones in the world. It's the best-selling Smartphone platform. All prefer smartphones with Android OS because of the large extent of apps or applications. Google Inc. purchased the initial developer of the software, Android Inc., in 2005. Android's mobile operating system is based on the Linux kernel. Google and other members of the Open Handset Alliance collaborated on Android's development and release. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android. 

 Android has a large community of developers writing applications ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 200,000 apps available for Android, the main reasons why people prefer Android smartphones. Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can also be downloaded from third-party sites. Developers write primarily in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries. 

 Voice recognition, hand-writing recognition, smart virtual keypad, many free and fun widgets on your home screen, Quick look features, faster and compliant browsers and many other superb features! are on Android. 

 Games and other apps like angry bird, entangled, Blosics etc. improve the touch experience and make it a place of fun. Special Ringtones, sound effects, 3D effects also enhance it. 

 Over 5MP cameras with auto-focus,  HD cameras, secondary cameras over 1MP, at least 760 MHz processors, LED Flash etc. are also some of the amazing features of Android smartphones.

 The Android open-source 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, including the Linux kernel, consists of roughly 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++.

 All smartphones being capacitive touch, multi-tasking or multi-touch is also available. This brings a whole lot of fun in the ouch experience. 

Recent Versions of Android OS are: 

1. 2.0/2.1 (Eclair)
2. 2.2 (Froyo)
3. 2.3 (Gingerbread)
4. 3.0/3.1 (Honeycomb)
5. Ice Cream Sandwich

 2011, Motorola will be releasing the worlds most powerful smartphone Motorola Atrix 4G. 2011 is awaiting the release of 4G phones. Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson are some of the leading world phone producers who are releasing 4G phones.

Competitors:  There are many competitors for Android like Mac, Nokia(Symbian) etc. which threaten the company. But the recent growth of android has pushed back its competitors. To compete back with the Android, Nokia is making a new OS which could compete with Android and Mac is upgrading its apps, environment and experience.