Google’s Android is a mobile platform that is fast becoming Apple’s biggest competitor. In fact, the Android’s popularity is growing so fast that a whole new industry of application developers is forming. First off, freelancers far and wide are already capitalizing greatly on the needs of small businesses. Mobile web applications are fast becoming one of the most useful tools for all kinds of business owners, creating a whole new list of needs that freelancing programmers and developers can serve at a much more affordable rate than hiring a full time programmer.

Modern technology phone hardware developers also benefit greatly by the release of the Android because a very powerful phone is required in order to operate the highly advanced software. There are already many new handsets featuring Android and more are being developed and improved every day. As Google’s Android itself matures and improves, new and better hardware will be required to support it. In addition to this, mobile phone manufacturers will need to continuously upgrade their products to be compatible with Android’s applications.

The market for Android technology is not restricted to the mobile industry. For example, a new market of tablet devices much like Apple’s new iPad has emerged due to Android’s extremely adaptable operating system. The main intention behind the tablet’s technology is to improve the way people access information in a variety of situations, which requires a whole new industry of developers and programmers.

As you can see, the job market created by Google’s Android is vast and highly promising. The peaking mobile market combined with the deliberate versatility of the Android platform, the opportunities available for all kinds of professionals involved in mobile communications is endless.

Google’s Android is currently best known for its mobile platform used by several smart phones and has features and capabilities comparable to the Apple iPhone. Android’s state of the art technology has put Android phones in direct competition with iPhones and is expected to be steep competition for the iPad despite Apple’s superior marketing.

For starters, Android based tablets are available in different sizes, whereas the iPad is currently only available in one standard size. Another great feature of Android tablets is that the community of developers is much larger because, unlike iPhone developers, Android allows people to create new applications without requiring user approval. With so many more applications to choose from, Android tablets will offer so much more to users than the iPad currently does.

Android’s versatility with Flash based web sites and applications is another reason why these tablets are far superior to iPads, which are either permanently Flash enabled or not. Android users can purchase an accessory that will run Flash when they want to use their tablets to do things like watch TV or play a game on Hulu. Another feature the iPad lacks is UBS ports. Android tablets allow you to connect all kinds of USB devices to further enhance the uses and capabilities of your tablet, smart phone, or netbook.

The fact that the Android platform is usable on tablets, netbooks, and smart phones alike makes it the most versatile mobile platform ever created. The applications being developed and released are improving daily and are expected to become the most interactive and demanded programs of their kind.

For those who feel they can’t afford a tablet right away, you could benefit from following the progress of the Android tablets as they continue to be upgraded and improved upon over the next year or so. It is only a matter of time before an even more new and improved version is released, which will also reduce the costs of previous versions and accessories, allowing just about anybody to have a chance to own a Google Android product.

Well, you know that it has to be, especially since it is being offered for free! It is hard enough to compete with an operating system that costs a considerable amount of money, and in case you haven’t forgotten, Windows is usually the platform that is the most affordable, but when you get a platform like Google Android, that seems to offer what everyone needs on a high-quality level, a company like Windows starts to sweat a little bit.

What is perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that Google is setting itself up for better things in the future by offering Google Android for free. Instead of making money on Android now, Google is probably planning to expand it’s Web presence with Android, so that it can increase it’s ad revenue – or even by doing bigger things that we do not know about yet!

But even with Google Android freely sourcing and Windows working hard to sweat it out, we have not even discussed the big players in the handheld, mobile market. Apple and Blackberry are actually the heavy hitters here, making the mobile market more competitive and fierce than an electronic market has been in a long time.  Will one company eventually dominate the market, or will it remain competitive forever? Only time will tell, but for now, one thing is for certain. If Windows wants to compete with free Google Android software, it had better come up with an OS that kicks butt – it cannot afford not to.

Jetty is a lightweight, open source webserver implemented in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Webtide is the principle maintenance developer for the software, it said.

Jetty is designed to work as a standalone webserver or as a dynamic content server behind a dedicated HTTP server such as Apache. The Android-based i-Jetty version is loaded as a servlet on Android, says Webtide. Once loaded, it enables remote access to phone functions from desktop PCs.

The i-Jetty port to the Android open source software stack for mobile devices is billed primarily as a matter of convenience for cell phone users, who can use it to make calls from their PCs, or to access phone-based content such as address books and calendars using a familiar browser interface. According to Webtide, users will be able to view, create, and save changes to files from remote PCs, including address lists, system settings, call logs, and multimedia files.

Two years ago, Nokia touted similar benefits when it ported Apache to Symbian with its Raccoon project. So far, there has been little evidence of major developer support for Raccoon, yet with mobile phones far outnumbering PCs, the potential for changing the nature and scope of the web is intriguing.

Beyond convenience, Nokia promoted the Raccoon technology as something of a paradigm shifter for the web, especially for mobile webcam-based website projects or for personal web servers. In particular, said Nokia, the amount of personal information stored on mobile phones makes it easy to “semi-automatically generate a personal home page.” Other applications touted by Nokia included finding the location of other mobile web sites in the proximity, mobile weblogs, and IM messaging.

i-Jetty users can also build publicly accessible mobile web servers said Adam Lieber, CEO of Webtide, in an interview. In fact, he said, the potential might be greater with i-Jetty compared to Nokia’s technology. “I-Jetty is more of a full-featured Java application server as opposed to being just a page server,” he said. For example, i-Jetty supports web services technologies such as AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML), which speeds up interactive processes on AJAX-enabled applications like Google Maps.

Beyond mobile phones: routers with webservers

Yet, mobile phones are not sufficiently powerful for most web-serving applications, Lieber noted. “Right now, the devices still don’t have the processing power and connection speed to handle more than a small population of users,” he said, quickly adding, “i-Jetty-enabled Android phones could certainly syndicate to a larger landed service.”

A potentially larger new market could emerge, said Lieber, if Android takes hold in larger-format devices such as network routers. “Android-based networking devices such as routers and access points could host web-based services,” he said.

A month-old blog from Chief Engineer Jan Bartel reveals some of the project’s final struggles in making the port. According to Lieber, however, the porting process was “really fast” compared to typical ports to commercial Java servers. “Android is much more adaptable to projects like this. Instead of, okay, you can add your server to our application, it’s like we’ll adapt our environment to your server.” The biggest challenge, said Lieber, was in “getting used to the Android emulators.”

According to Lieber, the code is stable enough for productive use now. “It’s posted, it’s freely available, and it’s good to go now,” he said. One potential area for improvement will occur, he added, if Google decides to enable “dynamic adding of Java classes in runtime” in the next Android release. “Right now, there are a couple facilities that are not available in Android, but we’re hopeful that they will make the change so more Java components can be added into an application while it’s running,” he said.

Availability

i-Jetty is now available for free download at Google Code. Webtide is demonstrating the technology this week at Eclipse.con 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif.