Google CAB

Today I've come down to the Google CAB,(Customer Advisory Board) at Google HQ in London. This is a good opportunity to act as advisers to them and have a two way conversation. There's about 400,000 plus students represented at here at CAB, so its quite a big audience.

So far we've met Android, (the green fluffy thing above), seen few android tablets, and listened to a presentation on android and seen a demo of some apps. Tomorrow is the real meaty stuff.

The presentation on Android focused on it being a complete technology stack, open source and free.
There was a lot of focus on numbers, and it cant be denied that Android is the most popular mobile platform at the moment. There's c310 different android devices available, and c100 million devices activated. They plugged a number of things - it provides powerful browsing including flash, it is highly personalisable, it handles true multitasking, and there's a wealth of apps - about 200,000 at the moment.

It all leverages the power of the cloud, and allows you to access your google account across devices and platforms.

We saw a few demos including Google translate, Honeycomb which is their multitasking service, and the touchscreen control, which looked remarkably like gestures on iOS. We also saw some apps, including Google body which is like Google earth but for the body!

There's some great stuff, but the only worry I expressed, was that they made it clear that they're optimising some apps to work much better on Android than on other OS. I hope they don't do that for the apps suite we use. One of the reasons we chose Google was they didn't have an operating system at the time, so we knew they would be optimising their products to work on any browser or OS. We'll be pushing for them to continue that.


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