Google Unveils Android@Home

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Google designed Android to enable developers to build applications beyond mobile phones and tablets. At the Google I/O conference Tuesday, the company released the Android Open Accessory project to help developers start building new hardware accessories that work across all Android devices.

As part of the project, an initiative dubbed Android@Home makes Android the operating system for the home. It will discover, connect and communicate with appliances and devices in the home. For appliances that do not connect to Wi-Fi, Google designed an open wireless protocol that allows Android devices to talk to them. It enables low-cost connectivity with any electronic device in the home, such as alarm clocks, lights and dishwashers.

As a first step, Google partnered with Lighting Science Group to make intelligent LED bulbs that will communicate in an open-source platform through the new Google Android app. It will allow consumers to remotely control lighting in the home. The app talks to bulbs that will begin selling in grocery and home improvement stores later this year.

Through the Android app, the bulbs communicate with each other, along with the home's wireless router, which communicates with the mobile phone to turn on and off or dim the lights. The Google Android application will also recognize when someone is in the home or away, and adjust the lights accordingly, per a Lighting Science Group spokesperson.

It took engineers at Google and Lighting Science less than two months to develop the application and product, which proves that product development cycles for electronics have dropped from years to months. The combined work brings affordable home automation to the masses. The energy-efficient bulbs will be comparable in price to ordinary LED bulbs available today.

An Android@Home hub for the home enables Project Tungsten, devices that run the Android OS and Android@Home software framework. It is always powered on and connected to the cloud. For the music hub, it has an audio-out connection that connects, for example, either to speakers or a home stereo system demonstrating the cloud-based music system.

Using near-field communication technology to demonstrate future possibilities, Google showed how Project Tungsten might play music. Tapping a CD to a Tungsten device activates the music on someone's cloud-based music library, notified by a chime. Tapping it again starts playing the music.

This is a concept -- when ready, Google likely will make the same thing available for movies, but getting CD and DVD makers to embed NFC chips into hardware will take some convincing. The chips cost money, which would bring down profits unless they could prove increased rentals and streams.

Today, Google counts approximately 100 million activated Android devices; 400,000 Android devices activated every day; 200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market; and 4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market.

Google also announced the next version of Google's Android operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich. It combines mobile phone and tablet versions of the OS, and enables the rollout of Android 3.1 to the Motorola Xoom tablet and Google TV. Ice Cream Sandwich will have open-source APIs for face-tracking and other new features. Hugo Barra, director of Android product management, demonstrated the use of a Microsoft XBox 360 console controller with an Android game.

Android version 3.1 will also come with support for Google's long-awaited music service that provides consumers with a locker in the cloud to store music files. Users will get space for 20,000 songs, but will only have access to stream them, not download them again. It will also support streaming movie rentals in the Android Market to tablets, phones and laptops. Users can "pin" the movies for offline playback or stream them over an Internet connection.

It's all about building out Android-supported devices through a developer network.

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