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It's been more than a week since the curtain fell on the so-called GPhone and it is time to make a tie all the loose ends about it. It has been rumored for years that Google was about to release the 'GooglePhone': a revolutionary handset that would be free of charges and payed by customized advertising provided by Google. After a lot of such rumors, finally the thing was revealed at the beginning of November: the Open Handset Alliance and its relative, the Android platform.

It was finally revealed that the GPhone actually evolved in an alliance of handset manufacturers, mobile operators, semiconductors producers and software companies. It is notable that the members are among the biggest companies in the world and they span three continents. It is also equally interesting seeing three important missing members: Microsoft, Apple and Nokia, thet all dismissed the creation of OHA as a minor challenges to their business. Many commenter wonders if these statements are genuine or just a low-profile answer to a yet-to-identify new challenger in the mobile arena.

OHA aim to create a platform (Android) that contains specification for hardware devices as well as an open operating system based on Linux kernel with a full Software Development Kit available for coders. The most part of the people think this SDK is based on Java, but this is not entirely correct. The virtual machine that will run application on Android is called Dalvik, a VM developed at Google specifically for Android. Applications for Dalvik are written in a language that has identical syntax to Java and the compiler then translate the Java classes in specific Devlik classes. Apart from the core SDK, a plug-in for Eclipse environment is available to make development easier, considering that Eclipse is one of the most used IDE in the World it is not difficult to guess that Android SDK will gain momentum very fast. There is already a wide, enthusiastic developers' community that contribute to the base code and to some groups on the dedicated Google platform, but there are criticisms, too.

I am a long time .NET developers, so I was almost immediately interested knowing if .NET support will be available for the SDK and in the final environment via some framework like the Mono Project. From the discussion on the group I saw that a conflict is already raising: it is clear that this project is seen by the most as the 'good' alternative to 'evil' Microsoft business in mobile product, so Android is rapidly evolving

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