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Acer have officially announced their first Android smartphone called the Acer Liquid A1. Interestingly, it is also the very first Android handset to utilize Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. The capacitive touchscreen has the impressive 800 x 480 WVGA resolution (same as in Nokia's N900 Maemo 5 device). Liquid runs Android version 1.6 a.k.a. Donut. The speedy Snapdragon chipset also means that the Acer Liquid can feature high performance 3D graphics. Acer has also developed some proprietary extensions to Android platform including, for instance, geo-tagging, Spinlets™ application providing free streaming of worldwide music and video, and smart integration of the most popular social services (seems to be the trend for Android platforms nowadays). Release dates and prices were not yet revealed by Acer.
If you are planning (like me) to start game development either using Android's 2D graphics API or OpengGL ES APIs, I highly recommend you to take a look at this excellent The Light Racer 3D Development Journal written by Robert Green. Robert discusses in detail the software development process he is going through in developing his Android game entitled Light Racer. I found this well written and illustrated journal to be very interesting and useful introduction into Android game development. Robert addresses many problems he faced during the development as well as describes the solutions he used in detail with code samples. This is very useful for other Android game developers, because the problems he describes, are quite typical when developing game applications with Java language for Android platform. In addition, the journal provides a nice collection of useful web links for more information.
Robert is developing both 2D and 3D versions of the very same game. The first 20+ journal entries fully cover the development of the 2D version. At the moment, Robert has published the first two entries reporting the first four days of the development of Light Racer's 3D version. It will be very interesting to see how much 2D and 3D application development differ on Android platform. I am also looking forward to read Robert's experience about the performance of Android's OpenGL ES 1.0 implementation . Briefly - a great tutorial and introduction to the wonderful (but challenging) world of Android game development. Thanks and kudos to Robert :)
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