Willcom shows off Android prototype – multi-tasking on Android is a go
By Will Park on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 12:44 PM PST In Android, Announcements, Developer, GPhone, Linux
Ever since Google (NSDQ: GOOG) blitzed the blogosphere with their Android and OHA announcements, we’ve been waiting on news of manufacturers tooling up their Android-based wares. It looks like Willcom, our favorite wacky-mobile-phone manufacturer in Japan have an Android-based reference board up and running. The image you see above is the Willcom reference board running Android on a FreeScale CPU.

What’s interesting is that the image shows an incoming call while running Google Maps. Multitasking may not be as spectacular as we’ve come to expect from other OS’s but at least we have some pretty good evidence that Android will be able to do some multitasking.
[Via: Digital World Tokyo]


the question that comes up a lot and why i said it doesn’t multitask, is the fact that you can’t switch between applications at will. i’ll have to wait until devices are out to praise or poo poo Android, but for now it isn’t impressing me.
Exactly. Multi-tasking on Android may not be what multi-tasking is supposed to be, but the fact that Android can run at least two applications simultaneously is a good sign. But, I’ll definitely be getting myself an Android handset – if only to find out how crappy the OS turns out to be.