A better view of Android, free Windows equivalent

One of the big disappointments of the 3GSM
show in Barcelona
this year is that the world's biggest annual mobile show barely featured
anything from the backers of Android – the mobile phone operating system
movement being driven by Google.

There were a handful of hardware makers
there showing off Android prototypes, but there was nothing to get excited
about. The iterations of the operating system on show were pretty basic and the
guy demonstrating one of the phone got really flustered when someone asked him
to open up the mail program – I don't think it had been built yet.

Any, this week in San Francisco at the Google I/O developer's
conference there's been some more demonstrations of Android and finally we are
getting to see some of what the operating system has to offer.

Like the iPhone, Android allows touch-screen
and, we're told multi-touch interaction, so you can use more than one
finger on the screen at a time. The model shown today also has an accelerometer
in it which is being used for a clever purpose. Showing off Google's Streetview service, which lets you get a
360 degree view from street level of locations in Google Maps, Google's Andy
Rubin showed how the phone's screen rotates the view as you move around. That
sounds pretty cool.

Richard MacManus has more on Android here.

Makesueof.com has compiled a decent list of
Windows components and their equivalent in the open source world.

You'll have heard of many of them –
Eclipse, Thunderbird, Firefox and Apache among them. But there are some
interesting lesser-known OSS applications in there. Virtualbox lets you run a guest operating
system on your PC or sever. As such it mimics what can be done with software
form VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC. I'm interested to hear form anyone who has
used it. There's also TightVNC which is for remote access to
the desktop of another computer. It's much like Microsoft Remote Desktop for
Windows.

As people commenting on the story pointed
out – there are a few gems left off the list. VLC is a great alternative to
Windows Media Player. Audacity is a great
little audio editor. It's free too. Then there's Photoshop equivalent, The Gimp.