David Flynn03 January 2008, 2:24 AM
Well, notexactly, but a clever VNC hack lets developers (and highly curious mere mortals) test drive Android apps on a Windows Mobile smartphone. It's the next best thing to having a real prototype 'gPhone' in your hand!
A picture is worth a thousand words, so we'll let this picture below start this story.
 Motorola's Google Phone?: No, this isn't a spy shot - it's just a standard off-the-shelf Motorola Q9 smartphone running Android via a Windows Mobile VNC viewer! |
Yes, it's a Motorola Q smartphone - a device that usually run the Windows Mobile OS - but now sporting Google's Linux-based Android mobile phone OS.
The app on the screen is an Android RSS Reader, one of the many third-party Android apps that are beginning to appear as developers programmers experiment with the Android SDK (no doubt more than a few have their eyes on the prize of anywhere from US$25,000 to US$275,000 which Google is offering for the best Android apps).
Here are a few more screenshots of the RSS Reader created by Josh Guilfoyle, who is also behind the canny hack that makes it possible to run the Android platform on a smartphone rather than the SDK's own PC-based emulator.
 Choosing channels: the Android RSS Reader looks and works like a regular RSS feed reader so you can get updates while you're on the go |
 Get the good oil: the latest RSS updates are fetched over the air using your smartphone's 'always on' capabilities |
 Changing channels: You can also add new RSS feeds on the fly |
So how do you get this Googley goodness onto your Windows Mobile smartphone? Guilfoyle's tweak, called android-vnc, includes a customised version of the open-source Android kernel as well as a bespoke VNC server (which is an Android port of fbvncserver) which is loaded through the PC emulator.
Meanwhile, an open-source .NET VNC Viewer is installed onto the smartphone and runs in full screen mode.
The result? Developers can see how their Android apps will look and feel on an actual phone. After all, there's nothing like the real deal when it comes to vital aspects such as fine-tuning the UI.