Just Published: MoovieSurf Android App for easily searching for movies

The MoovieSurf Android app allows users to quickly search for movies.

It allows the user to do a "live list" search for a movie within a movies network given a search term such as "the", "man", "furious", etc. or for a specific movie name.
"Live list" search means the list is updated as the user types.

If the search term or movie is found, it displays a list of movie thumbnail images along with the movie title and the year released in a card layout.

If the user selects a movie from the displayed list, then a detailed description of the movie, including the movie cast, critics score, user score, rating and the runtime for the movie is provided. A synopsis or description of the movie is also provided if available.

You can download the FREE MoovieSurf Android app which is available in the Google Play store from http://bit.ly/1WRYcY1.
Try out the MoovieSurf app, rate it and add a review!  Feel free to add any comments :)

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Google I/O 2013: An In-Depth Developer's Perspective

In comparison to last year's Google I/O featuring the spectacle augmented reality Google Glass  announcement via a breathtaking sky-diving presentation, this year's Google I/O may have seemed to lack luster with no new hardware.

Nonetheless, Google I/O kicked off a record 3.5 hours Keynote with a heavy focus on software and services. The Google I/O Keynote discussed services and feature upgrades for both Android and Chrome. If you were expecting a brand new Android phone or tablet announcement, then you may have been disappointed. However, a major takeaway was a unified user experience for Chrome and Android platforms through shared services.

According to Google, Android was at 100 million activations in 2011. And, it was at 400 million in 2012.  And now in 2013, Google released the numbers for the Android activations at an incredible 900 million!   Now that's no small feat...

A huge applause from the audience came when Google mentioned the introduction of Android Studio IDE based on IntelliJ!  The Android Studio IDE tool has more options for Android development making the process faster and more productive. A live layout was shown that renders your app while you are editing it in realtime. It allows you to see a variety of device layouts (i.e. different form factor phone devices and tablets). Refer to TechCrunch's excellent review on Google Launches Android Studio and New Features for Developer Console Including Beta Releases and Staged Layouts for further details.

There were several other significant announcements made at Google I/O including:

• Google Maps gets a complete overhaul and is released as part of Google Play Services.  Three new Location APIs introduced include:
• Fused Location Provider API utilizes all of the communications sensors in the phone including WiFi, GPS and Cell network while significantly saving battery life. This is a new service that greatly improves any application that uses location services.
• Geofencing API allows apps to inform the user entering or exiting a configured virtual fence. The API allows each app to define up to 100 geofences simultaneously. Apps utilizing this service will provide better battery life and performance.
• Activity Recognition API utilizes the device capabilities of the hardware and machine learning to determine whether the user is walking, cycling or driving. This allows apps utilizing the service to adjust their behavior depending on the user's mode of transport. It is done in a very battery efficient way as no GPS is required.
• Google+ Single Sign-in API is a cross-platform Sign-in API.  Fancy was used to demo during the Keynote that if you find a cool website that you like, you can sign-in with Google+ and then you will automatically be asked if you would like to install it. If you indicate yes, the the app will download and log you in automatically on your current device and other Android devices on your account - now that's very cool!
• Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) for Android gets an overhaul. GCM is a service that allows you to send data from your server to your users' Android-powered device, and also to receive messages from devices on the same connection. The new features to GCM include:
• Faster, easier GCM setup
• Upstream messaging over XMPP. GCM's Cloud Connection Service (CCS) lets you communicate with Android devices over a persistent XMPP connection. The primary advantage of CCS are speed and the ability to receive upstream messages (i.e. messages from a device to the Cloud).
• New API for Synchronizing Notifications. Maps a single user to a notification key, which you can then use to send a single message to multiple devices owned by the user.
• Google Play Music All Access was launched in the US at I/O. It allows you to buy a music subscription from Google and costs $9.99/month and comes with a 30 day free trial. It allows you to explore millions of music tracks so it seems great for music discovery than its competitors (i.e. Spotify, Pandora). It is a simpler on-demand-meets-radio service with various personalization features, and works on phones, tablets and web browsers. From a design and UX perspective, it makes it easy to switch between the hands-on and hands-off experiences. If you are not sure of what you want to listen, you can just hit "Listen Now" and start listening to something right away. And, when you want to search on Google's huge on-demand catalog, you have that option as well.
• Google Search. Google I/O 2013 marked the "end of search as we know it". Google announced that it is looking to change the way users go about finding information by expanding its voice search capabilities and through its various services such as Google's Knowledge Graph and Google Now with a credo the company has labeled "answer", "converse" and "anticipate". In other words, the company's core product will eventually respond better to naturally phrased questions. Anticipate means that Google Search will be able to guess what information users need the most and provide it for them easily via its Google Now service. The Google Now service pulls information from across Google services to act as a personal assistant of sorts by offering information on users' commutes, appointments and news from their favorite sources in the same place. Conversational Search was announced to be coming to all desktops and laptops via Chrome.
• Chrome. Google announced that today there are 750+ Million active users of Chrome and that Chrome is increasingly used on mobile. Chrome design goals are: speed, simplicity and security. Google's Sundar Pichai said, "The same capabilities that you're used to using for Chrome on a desktop are going to be coming to Chrome on Android." Thanks to WebGL and Web Audio APIs, you will start seeing quite impressive web experiences including games and rich interactive environments that were typically limited to the desktop environment.
• Better Web Imaging. Google compared JPEG vs WebP images. The quality of the image was indistinguishable, but it was about two-thirds in size (i.e. 31% reduction in file size). This will significantly improve the load times on websites as well as help users to not exceed their data plan limitations. Furthermore, WebP supports animated images as well.
• Better Video compression.  Google compared H.264 vs VP9. It was noted that the quality of the VP9 video is the same as H.264. However, the size of VP9 comes in at less than half the size (i.e. 63% reduction in file size).
• mCommerce. Google reported that when it comes to shopping on your phone, the percentage of people that come to the purchase screen and then get out from there is incredibly high in the 90%. Google made 3 key announcements around mCommerce:
• Consumer launch for pay by Gmail which is rolling out slowly with initial rollout in US
• Two new APIs announced for developer launch:
• Google Wallet Object APIs. The vision is to digitize whole Wallet by allowing insertion of any kind of Objects into Google Wallet
• Google Wallet Instant Buy for merchants selling physical goods. The goal is to allow consumers to make purchases within 2 clicks thereby improving the user experience.
• Google+  Google introduced 41 new Google+ features at I/O!  First of all, Google+ gets an overhaul on its design. It is a multi-column design where its width will scale depending on the device that the user is on. It includes animations, flip and fade. It can do image analysis, recognize the image and hashtag it automatically.
• Google Hangouts is now a standalone app that will work on the web desktop, Android and iOS all announced starting at I/O. This will provide an on-going conversation within the hangout and doesn't end when you sign off. Also, RealTime Communication, that is, group video is available at no charge.
• Google Photos: Google announced earlier that in addition to unlimited backup of all of your standard sized photos, it will now give you 15 GB of storage for full-sized images. Google also announced machine learning algorithms that help to create a highlight reel for all your photos. The service will check all your photos in the album for blurriness, smiles and several other criteria (learnt by hundreds of actual human photographers, and produces a highlight reel.) Google also introduced an "auto-enhance" feature that will instantly adjust tonal distribution, red-eye reduction, skin softening, noise reduction and several other criteria to automatically enhance the picture. And, finally, Google introduced a new "Auto Awesome" mode. That is, if you take a burst of photos, it will make an animated gif out of them. If you take a series of screenshots, and if some are dark or if someone is smiling in one, but not the other, it can make a composite image similar to what the Galaxy S4 can do without the user having to activate that setting. And, that sounds cool!  It can also handle screenshots in "Motion", HDR, and panoramic photos.

And, no developer review would be complete without the mention of the Developer Sandbox, which occupied 2 floors, with dedicated ones for Android, Wallet, Chrome, standalone ChromeBook Pixel display, Google+, Photos and Google Play. And, not to forget Google Glass had an extra large sandbox which was often crowded with spectators!  Google started shipping an early version of Google Glass known as Explorer mostly to a couple of thousand developers who had requested them at last year's Google I/O conference - forked over a hefty price of $1500!  

I was fortunate to explore Google Glass and the experience was truly amazing! Glass is not like wearing a laptop on your face, though it does have a 12 GB of usable storage (16 GB total), synced with Google Cloud. Glass is more like augmented reality spectacles, but without lenses. Its lightweight frame rests on the ears and nose, suspending a small prism at the upper right corner of the wearer's field of vision. Glass has a tiny touch pad built into one earpiece and a microphone to pick up voice commands. Interestingly, the earpiece uses "bone conduction" to deliver sounds by vibration against the wearer's head. You can speak aloud to get information  or tell Glass to "take a picture" or "take a video" (up to 10s  snippets). You can ask questions like "Google find me a restaurant" and see the results in "Knowledge cards".You can also send texts and make phone calls. If you swipe toward the back, you can see Google Now cards for flight, traffic and other information.  In summary, Google I/O 2013 showcased several interesting innovations across Google products.

If you found this article useful or want to share your developer perspectives on Google I/O 2013, feel free to share your comments below, follow me by clicking on the upper left hand corner and/or follow me on Twitter @tasneemsayeed.

Best Practices for Mobile App Development on Android

Designing and building apps that look great and perform well on as many devices ranging from smart phones to tablets is crucial to ensure an optimal user experience.
At the recent DevFest Silicon Valley event held at Google on March 15th, I had presented a talk on Best Practices for Mobile App Development on Android.  The talk focuses on the Golden Rules & Best Practices of Performance including how to keep your apps responsive, how to effectively implement Background Services, tips for improving the performance and scalability of long-running applications, and briefly on Best Practices for User Experience and concluding with Benefits of Intents and Intent Filters.  For further details, please refer to the slides attached below.

Best practices for mobile app development android march 15 2013 ts from Tasneem Sayeed

If you enjoyed this article, you may want to follow me (@tasneemsayeed) on Twitter. I always announce significant new blog posts and interesting mobile topics via a tweet. You can also subscribe to this blog.  Feel free to post any comments that you may have below.

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Just Released: FREE Sudokroid (Sudoku Game Puzzle) in Android Market

More than 10 billion apps have been downloaded since the launch of the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) App Store—the majority of them via iPhones.  As of March 2011, 37 percent of mobile consumers who owned a smartphone had a device with an Android OS. Apple’s iOS, claimed by 27 percent of consumers, is now outpacing Blackberry, which has 22 percent of the market.


It only seemed appropriate that one of the first mobile apps I decided to release was an Android app, Sudokroid, to the Android Market. Sudokroid is a logic-based number placement puzzle, which initially starts with a partially completed 9x9 grid. The game provides the player with the options to start a "New Game", "Continue" an existing game, an "About Game" option to get further details for playing the game, and finally "Exit Game" to exit from the game.  

When the player selects a "New Game" , it will let the player select the difficulty level from a choice of 3 levels: "easy", "medium" and "hard". A new game grid is displayed, partially filled, while splendid soothing music is playing in the background!  If "Continue" is selected, then the game continues from the previous game state.

The goal of Sudokroid is to fill the grid so that each row, each column and each of the 3x3 boxes contains the digits 1 to 9 exactly once.  Hints are provided to help in the selection, and if a selection results in "no move", then the player can go back to the previous tiles and revisit some of the prior moves.

You can download the game for FREE from the Android Market from http://bit.ly/mO8qfE.  Be sure to rate it and tweet or leave me a comment !  Stay tuned for more apps in the pipeline!

How To Take Android Screenshots on a Mac

If you have ever wondered how to take screenshots for applications running on an Android phone, you can do it for free if you have Java on your machine and have downloaded the Android SDK.

1. Download the Android SDK
2. On your Android phone, select Settings ->Applications -> Development

3. Select Enable USB Debugging by placing a check box next to it

4. Connect your Android device via USB to your Mac
5. Run android-sdk-mac_86/tools/ddms (Dalvik Debug Monitor) (Note: it may be easier to add the tools directory in your path)

6. Select the device in the Dalvik Debug Monitor as illustrated above
7. Type Control + S or go to Dalvik Debug Monitor --> Device --> Screen Capture
8. Voila!  

If you found this article useful, please retweet it.  Feel free to send me any comments.

Was the Google Nexus One Announcement Really About Another Google Android Phone or iPhone Killer?

Was the biggest Google announcement really about another Google Android phone or the iPhone killer as some have suggested? As expected, Google announced its Google Android Nexus One at a press conference Tuesday morning.

Nexus One is a new Google Android phone that offers software internals designed by Google and the device hardware is manufactured by HTC. According to Google's Mario Queiroz, the Nexus One is a "super phone" where the Web meets the cell phone. "It's an example of what mobile phones can do with Android" says Mario. It is indeed slim, sleek, and light-weight (4.58 oz). It offers a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. The primary interface is a 3.7 inch AMOLED display with five customizable home screens. It runs the Android 2.1 OS and the WVGA display is capable of displaying 3G graphics.

According to Google's Senior Product Manager for the Nexus One, Erick Tseng, the feature set includes everything you'd expect from an Android phone and adds a couple of unique goodies.

The Nexus One may or may not be an iPhone killer, but it doesn't really matter as the biggest Google announcement was not really about another Google Android phone. The real news at the Google event was about its online store at http://www.google.com/phone - the news that could shake up the mobile industry as it had happened during the initial iPhone announcement.  The real news was about an online storefront offering that, if successful, could revolutionize the much reviled US carrier model - offering much faster, cheaper and more flexible services for mobile users. So what is really the significance of the Google announcement?

Well, Google confirmed that Nexus One, and all subsequent Google phones sold via the company's online store will be available unlocked for use on every participating carrier. By offering a lineup of phones that is essentially carrier-independent (with the radio compatibility caveat), Google has broken the two previously interlocked parts of the phone/plan-buying—phone selection and carrier selection—and has done so in a way that threatens one of the most important enablers of carrier lock-in.

In short, what Google announced today wasn't just the Nexus One, but the world's first carrier-independent smartphone store; the Google store is now the only smartphone store in the US where, for every phone on offer, you first pick which phone you want, and then you pick a network and a plan on that network. So you can comparison shop among networks based purely on plan price and network quality, because you already have your phone picked out.

8 Nifty Twitter Mobile Clients

For any Twitter newbie, it can be a very daunting task when you first start twittering to figure out which Twitter client of the numerous others is appropriate for a specific mobile platform.  You quickly discover that it is hard to find a way to follow all of your Twitter updates without being interrupted constantly by a flow of updates. While you can update your status via SMS, keeping track of your friends and followers is difficult to do particularly while you are on the go.  Due to the huge success of the iPhone launch, there is no shortage of the number of Twitter clients out there on the iPhone or even other emerging platforms such as Android.  Below is a concised list of the more popular mobile Twitter applications listed by platform.

1. Tiny Twitter (Java-enabled phones, Windows Mobile, Blackberry platform)                          
2. TwitterBerry (Blackberry)
3. CeTwit (Windows Mobile)
4. Twitteresce (Java-enabled phones)
5. Twibble (Java-enabled phones)
6. Twinkle (iPhone)
7. Twidroid (Google Android G1)
8. Tweetie (iPhone)

Tiny Twitter is a twitter client for Java-enabled, Windows Mobile and Blackberry phones.

Features:

• Set automatic update interval
• Click update from [menu] to fetch friends timeline
• Send tweets/direct message
• Hide friends temporarily
• Collapse tweets, hide user's image and truncate text to get more real estate
• Retrieve direct message

Overall: good for mass-market phones, but other Twitter clients have better UI (see below)

Twitterberry is a mobile Twitter client for posting updates for the Blackberry platform.

Features:

• Pictures support via TwitPic
• ping.fm support
• Timeline updates while device is sleeping
• Audible/vibrate alerts
• Retweet
• Favorite
• Delete
• Picture support via TwitPic.com
• Refresh timelines
• Configurable auto-updating of timelines
• Longer list of tweets: 200
• View & reply to tweets and direct messages
• Favorite and delete tweets from any timeline
• View friends list
• Allow overflow of 140 characters when typing your tweet
• Optimize menu screen so most commonly used choices are easy to access
• URLs in tweets can be selected and opened in your Blackberry browser
• User customizable default application entry screen
• BES connection support

Overall: best app for Blackberry

CeTwit is a Windows Mobile Twitter client written in C# leveraging the .net compact framework.

Features:

• Timeline display
• Account storage
• Status updates
• Direct Messages
• Click to reply
• Automated refresh
• Smartphone support
• Avatars in timeline
• Local caching of avatars
• Squeezer support
• Relative timestamps
• Follow/unfollow
• Pictures support via TwitPic
• ping.fm support
• Timeline updates while device is sleeping
• Audible/vibrate alerts
• Retweet
• Favorite 
• Delete

Overall: Nicer UI compared to Tiny Twitter and fully featured, except for URL shortening

Twitteresce is a Twitter client for Java-enabled phones with a slick background for text updates.

Features:

• Displays all status updates
• Retrieve and delete tweets & direct messages
• Autoupdate
• Refresh rate

Overall: basic tweeting functionality for Java enabled phones, but lacks several nifty features

Twibble is a location-aware Twitter client that uses GPS on Blackberry Curve 8330 or Symbian phones like Nokia E71 or N95

Features:

• Post Messages
• Auto refresh
• Notifications
• Uploading of photos via TwitPic
• Themes
• Integrated tweets & direct messages displayed in a single list
• Open web URLs within tweets
• Retweet
• Quick @replies
• Follow users
• Mark tweets as favorite
• SSL support
• Cancel network requests
• Location-based (shows location of friends on a map) via GPS

Overall: good for Java-enabled phones or GPS supported phones

Twinkle is an iPhone client that has location aware features.

Features:

• Discover, connect and send messages to people nearby
• Upload photos and update your status on your Twitter account
• Using the power of geolocation, join the discussion with the people around you

Overall: cool UI and looks slick on the iPhone

Twidroid is a Twitter client for the Google Android phone.

Refer to my earlier post on "Top Android Social Networking Applications".

Tweetie is a full featured Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It offers everything you would want from your timeline to trends - all within an incredibly polished user interface, great performance and ease-of-use.

Features:

• Handles multiple Twitter accounts
• View  your timeline, replies and direct messages
• Manage favorites
• Browse friends and followers
• Post new tweets, Retweet
• Reply directly to tweets and send direct messages
• Follow and unfollow people
• Block/unblock users
• Navigate reply chains
• Inline web browser
• Integrated with TwitPic for posting photos
• Update Twitter location
• Post tweets w/auto URL shortener
• Uses secure connection (https)
• View Twitter trends and custom searches
• Nearby searching
• Links to StockTwits
• Optional landscape keyboard
• Themes

There are several other Twitter clients that were developed earlier for the iPhone such as Twitterific, Twitterfon, Twittelator and Twinkle (above).  However, of all of them, my favorite one is Tweetie for the iPhone. Tweetie includes four main buttons: Tweets, Replies, Messages, Favorites.  Under More, you will find My Profile, Following, Followers, Trends and Search.  You can easily view @replies, see URL links directly in the inline browser, retweet messages, turn links in the browser into short URLs and much more. Perhaps, the only thing missing is that it doesn't let you browse the web and shorten a URL on the fly.  Tweetie is definitely a solid app overall and is probably the most full-featured Twitter client available for the iPhone to date.

What is your favorite Twitter mobile client? Please let me know in your comments.  If you found this article interesting, feel free to retweet (upper left corner) and follow me on Twitter.

Top Android Social Networking Applications

Social networking applications are increasingly driving the growth of the mobile internet audience. According to a November comScore report, the European mobile social networking audience grew 152% from November 2007 to November 2008 to 12.1 million people (UK boasts the highest mobile social networking penetration at 9%. Furthermore, 33% of all mobile social networking users access social media sites exclusively.
According to the New York Times, Facebook is adding a million users per day and nearing a milestone of 200 million users.  Whereas, MySpace still dominates Facebook in the US market with 72 million monthly uniques. After 3 years, Twitter has roughly 8 mm unique US unique users according to Compete.  Twitter is a distributed service, leveraging a lot of  "instances" of  Twitter (i.e. Tweetdeck, Twirl, Tweetie, Twitterific, SMS users,...) and it is reported that more than half of its users don't even hit the main site at any given time.

Based on the aforementioned findings, I decided to focus on the top 3 social networking mobile applications available on the Android Market.  

Application Title: Twidroid   Website: http://twidroid.com

Available: Now on Android Market   Release 2.0 expected around mid-April 2009

Rating: 5  (Best social networking app on Android Market)

Twidroid is a fully featured twitter client for Android mobile phones.  The twitter client I downloaded was a Beta release (version 1.6.4). 

Features supported included:

• Posting tweets, replies, direct messages and refreshing results
• User profile detail information from a posted tweet
• Option to send direct message, follow or unfollow
• Tweet options include add/remove favourite, delete and cancel
• Background notifications for replies and direct messages
• Auto-layout for landscape and portrait mode

When posting a tweet, you have the option to include a picture already taken from your photo gallery or to import the picture by opening the camera through Android.  The settings allow you to select the photo hosting client (Photoid or Twitpic) and the picture quality (low, medium and high).   You can also insert your current location when posting your tweet.  As you are entering characters for posting the tweet, a character countdown in the upper left corner tracks how many characters you have left from the 140 characters limit.  As the tweet is being posted, you get a status update.  

Twidroid also includes background notifications that inform of new tweets.  From the menu, you can click on "Settings" which allow the user to set various options such as "Check for Tweets", "Check for Replies", "Check for Direct Messages", "Vibrate on Alerts", "LED Flash on Alerts", "Play ringtone on Alerts", and how often to check (default is 5 minutes). Shorter intervals may use up more battery.  Other options include "Show shortcut icon" (disabled by default), "Show complete message in notification (disabled by default), "Start at boot time" (enabled).  Whenever a tweet is posted, the URL is automatically shortened, and the URL Shortener option can be customized in "Settings".  Display options for "Use Screen Names", "Font Size", "Metric Units", "Refresh list after sending tweet" and the number of tweets to display (set to 80 by default) are customizable to suit your style.  There are various other settings for enabling SSL, Autocomplete for Contact Names, Automatic GPS, and Cache Settings.  

The only nice-to-have feature would be the ability to easily view your own profile information (i.e. followers) without having to view it from your posted tweet.

Application Title: MySpace Mobile   

Available: Now on Android Market

Rating: 3  (application UI needs more work)

MySpace application includes options to display My Profile information, Friend Requests, Friend Status and Mood, Friend Updates, Comments and Bulletins.  However, the performance was considerably slow for displaying profile information and even simple comments, or adding comments.  During an earlier attempt to post a comment, there was a "Post Comment Failed" message displayed, so when I re-entered the comment, the comment ended up being posted twice.  There were also some display issues but they cleared up once a subsequent comment was posted!

Generally, I did not find the MySpace application on the Android as compelling or cool!  Nonetheless, the application has had >250,000 downloads!

Application Title: fBook   (Updated)

Available: Now on Android Market

Rating:  3+ (no option to display older newsfeeds)

fBook application provides several of the features supported by Facebook.  Features supported include:

     1.  Home (NewsFeed, Events, Requests)
     2.  Profile (Info, Wall, Photos)
     3.  Friends (Status, Online, Photos)
fBook provides the option to either choose the "mobile" or "full" website at the bottom of the screen.  The login page did not provide an option, remember me so that the user is required to login repeatedly which can be annoying on a mobile phone.  The Settings can be invoked from the menu option.  

The Settings include options for "Storage" (clear cache), "Notification Settings" and "Message Checking Frequency" (defaulted to every 5 minutes).  There is also a "Photo Upload" option available from the menu.

The "NewsFeed" displayed only some of the stories, and there did not seem to be any option for uploading the remaining stories or any available configurable settings.

The "Profile" info displayed only basic and personal information. There was no content displayed for Education, Work, Group or Pages.  The "Wall" did not seem to show many of the posts.  The Profile Photos showed no photos.

The "Friends" options shows the friends status, friends that are online and the friends photos that have been uploaded.   The option for Status updates is not intuitive as it is hidden on the panel in the upper left corner.  There is also a Search option hidden on the same panel in the upper right corner! Clicking on the Search option allows you to search people on Facebook (cool)! But, would you expect that is how you can Add Friends by entering a name of a friend, then clicking Add Friend or Message!  You can also post a comment on your wall by clicking on Profile then selecting Wall, and touching in the comment area.  

The download site indicates that fBook is a wrapper that fixes the Facebook iPhone web app (push notifications (supported on Android only) and photo upload).  Nonetheless, it is a useful mobile application for checking your facebook status  on the road.  

Were there any social networking applications that you found compelling on the Android Market?  If so, let me know them in your comments.  If you found this article informative, please feel free to click on retweet (upper left corner) and  follow me on twitter.

Porting J2ME Applications to Android

When the new Google Android platform was introduced, there were initially a small number applications available, so Google spent $10 million to attract developers to their Android Developer Challenge before the T-Mobile G1 phone was released.  The existing Java ME community quickly realized that there was a huge opportunity if there can be tools developed that allowed the existing Java ME applications to be run on the Android platform.  

There are 2 tools that may be somewhat useful for allowing Java ME applications to run on Android:

1. MicroEmulator is a pure Java implementation of Java ME in J2SE.  The advantage is that it is an open source project and is licensed under LPGL so that it is possible to distribute commercial software with its libraries.  See MicroEmu: Running Java ME applications on Android for further details.  
2. Netmite has developed an application, J2ME MIDP Runner to allow running Java ME applications on Android without significant source code changes that is readily available to download from the Android Market

MicroEmulator supports the following features :  

• MIDP 2.0 (TextField UI - not yet implemented)
• Skinnable and configurable interface
• Generic Connection Framework
• JSR 135 (Mobile Multimedia API); JSR 75 (File Connection API)
  
• JSR-179 (Location APIs) targeted to be available as a commercial extension
  
• JSR-184 (3D graphics) on top of Android OpenGL ES targeted to be available in the future as a commercial extension