Google Android: What to expect? SDK available

Some minutes ago Google sent out a press release, announcing “$10 Million Android Developer Challenge“.

Google today announced the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Android(TM), the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. The Challenge is designed to support the developer community and spark innovation on the Android platform by awarding cash prizes ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

Sounds cool and great. But the really cool part is the SDK they have launched as well. You can get the SDK on Google Code. I had of course to try and play around with it and guess what, there is an emulator included:

Features I have discovered until now:

• Touchscreen
• Built-In XMPP support
• AppleKit/Safair Brower

The webbrowser identifies itself as Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 0.5; en-us) AppleWebKit/522 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3, so it basically will be Safari (wait, whats the iPhones browers?). Does that mean, all iPhone optimized websites are optimized for Android at the same time?

XMPP is pretty cool. You can chat directly via Jabber/Gmail servers.

I am back to Eclipse, playing around with the SDK a little. You can find the documentation again on Google Code.