Who's Using Android?

When I tell my friends I took an embedded-Android course, they say, "Isn't all Android 'embedded'?"

Well, yeah. But it started out as a phone OS, and the title emphasizes the fact that it's moving off into other embedded systems, like tablets, ebook-readers, washing machines, ....

Karim's slide 23 lists some manufacturers using Android. Now that I'm reading them at leisure, I'm poking around and learning things I didn't know.

That Barnes-and-Noble Nook color that I re-flashed to run Cyanogenmod? It was already running Android -- just not one that was very accessible.

But the coolest Android platform today? It has to be the Joint Battlefield Command-Platform (JBC-P/JBC-P2).

The US military ("joint") is turning out a slew of devices, running Android, that do things you'd want to be able to do in the field, like letting everyone else in your unit see your position using GPS.

The article points out that this has many side benefits, which include letting our armed forces field their own app stores for military apps, and letting them create equipment that requires almost no training, because they have the same basic UI's as civilian devices.

This choice of Android, instead of iOS, for the platform base is an historical echo: it mirrors the DoD's choice of Unix over VMS in the early 80's.

The argument then was that even though the DoD was buying VAXs as fast as Digital Equipment Corporation could sell them, there might come a day when DEC was no longer the top gun. Unix offered robustness: it could run on VAXen, but it could run on other manufacturer's hardware, too. That's important to the DoD.

Remember Digital Equipment Corporation?