Google will give $10 million to the developers who build the best applications for Android, the open source platform Google designed for building mobile phones. Google says it hopes to spark innovation with the so-called Android Developer Challenge, announced today concurrently with the release of Android. The software development kit is now available for download on the Android site.

As expected Google released their Android Software Development Kit (SDK) today. It provides all of the tools needed to start creating applications that run on the next generation mobile operating system, and Google is getting their checkbooks out to help ensure that Android won’t be a flop…

«This guide explains how you can install the Google Android SDK 1.0 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. With this stable release of the Android SDK, you can now develop applications for Android smartphones (like T-Mobile's G1) and offer them on the Android Market.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!»

According to Google, the number of devices running version 2.1 of its Android mobile operating system is on the rise - at the expense of 2.0.1 and 1.6 based devices

More than 65,000 smartphones running Google's Android OS are being shipped each day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during an annual shareholders meeting May 13. ...Later this year, the company plans to begin shipping a new hardware architecture from its hardware partners. The architecture will bring together the Chrome browser, a Chrome operating system and an open-source program called Chromium.

Google is stepping up its presence in the mobile space with a late-2007 announcement of Android, its mobile phone operating system that competes directly with existing phone operating systems such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

We warned readers multiple times in recent weeks that Google Android and Canonical's Ubuntu were on a collision course. We mentioned the competition would involve Ubuntu and Android on netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs). Now, even Asus is fanning the competitive flames between Ubuntu and Android.

At this year's Google I/O developer conference, a new Tegra 2 based prototype tablet running Google's open source Android mobile operating system with an 8.9 inch screen was on display

A few days before the launch of Windows 7, Acer has released the first netbook to ship with the Google Android operating system. And a juicy tidbit has come out of an early review: Android comes with Mozilla Firefox for Web browsing, not Google’s own Chrome browser or the Android browser that comes on mobile phones.