Google recently announced the Android Developer Challenge 2. It mainly focuses on the applications that can run smoothly on the Cupcake. There are 10 categories in which the developers can submit their entries, like Education/Reference, Lifestyle, Travel, Media, etc to name a few.

The ADC 2 will debut in the month of August, and that’s when the developers can submit their apps for the challenge. The winners will be chosen by the users. These users can download, run and test the submitted apps, using a special ADC 2 software. The first prize winner gets a whopping $150,000.

So, all you Android apps developers out there, get ready for some Android action.

[via androidcentral]

Had you ever imagined applications meant for the Android OS running on your notebook loaded with Ubuntu OS ? If not, then you can and you should imagine it now. Because, developers at Cannonical successfully ported some Android apps onto Ubuntu. This was unveiled at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona on Tuesday.

Here’s a pic of a desktop PC running some Android apps :

Google’s Android is based on Linux platform. But, its built on Google’s custom Java runtime. So, that makes it more convenient for use in mobile phones and tablet PCs and not in desktops.

But, this development would surely pave the way for future development of Android to make it more user-friendly and to be used in deskptop PCs. Even in the past, we have had news about Android notebooks and netbooks in the making (by companies like Skytone, HP and T-Mobile).

So, lets hope that Android soon makes its way into the notebook arena and we get a taste of the Open-Source environment in our notebooks.

[via androidarena]

The most awaited JesusFreke’s Android 1.5 cupcake, was released a couple of days back.

According to Jesus Freke, the important changes/additions made are :

• I’m now including a much better Superuser app, courtesy of zinx
• I’ve rebuilt the kernel and enabled netfilter support, to allow tethering. I recommend aNetShare
• You can see/download both paid and protected apps in the market
• Luke’s multitouch kernel patch and browser patch have been ported to the .27 kernel and 1.5 browser.
• Support for the “apps to sdcard” hack. There’s not a separate “apps to sdcard” build. You can use the same build whether you are doing apps to sdcard or not. Thanks to haykuro for explaining how he’s done this in his images, so I can make my builds compatible. See here for a tutorial on setting this up.
• I’m not including a recovery image in this build. I ran into some snags getting all of the recovery features to work with the 1.5 recovery image, so I’ll forgo that for now. If you don’t have a spiffy recovery image yet, I’ve packaged up the most recent recovery image from JFv1.43 as a separate update.

Here are a few screenshots showing Android 1.5 running :

The above screenshot shows the virtual keyboard.

Here, you can see the fresh new look of Android 1.5 Cupcake.

This displays the Super User application.

Click here for the entire list of screenshots.

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