[Updated with screenshots]
Before anything else, here’s a disclaimer: Everything that you will see here are screenshots of the Android emulator provided in Google’s Android SDK. Google has admitted that the user interface currently implemented in the emulator is just a placeholder for the final design. Android is still a very young platform, and in cases like this, it’s not uncommon for things to get moved around, new features to be added, and existing ones to be removed. On the other hand, the road to the day before actual Android handsets reach the market is not too far ahead, with 2008 almost just around the corner. So what we see in the emulator could not be really that far off from what would eventually be released. With these being said. Let’s go right ahead.

The current emulator provided by Google contains the main Android OS, its very own Virtual machine for running the “java applications” developed on it, basic applications such as Maps, Contacts, Web Browser, API demos that showcases the Android API and some development tools.

The Buttons
The navigation buttons are very much tied to the user interface of the phone. After all, design and workflow decisions are designed based on the available buttons. Although Android-based devices could probably include both those with qwerty keyboards and those without, the navigation buttons will be the same for both. The final design could change though, but below is the current implementation:

• Call Buttons (Start and End)
• 4-directional dpad and center button
• Dedicated Menu button (same as Palm’s menu key)
• Home Button
• Back Button
• X Button (non-functional in the emulator)

The current design lacks soft keys, and these soft keys, as Nokia has shown with the success of the Navi key, is good usability element. This wouldn’t be much of a problem though for devices with touch-based displays.

Home Screen
The home screen is very basic, featuring a dock-like feature at the bottom that houses the icons for launching the applications, and a notification bar at the top which contains the signal strength, battery meter, other connection details, and time.

The notification bar is utilized in Android in a novel way. You can actually make the bar active by pressing the up direction button while at the home screen when a notification is present.

(Notifications can be anything from new SMS messages or other notifications that other applications may eventually implement - email alerts, voicemail status, etc.). You can view the actual full message (if there is one) by activating the corresponding notification thru the center button

The Browser
On of the big things that the iPhone did is that it set a high bar for the internet browsing experience. In this regard, the included web browser in Android is almost as good as the Apple offering. This is not suprising, since the Android browser is based on the same rendering technology that iPhone Safari uses: the open source project WebKit. What this means is that it has excellent support even for normal websites originally designed for the desktop browser.

The browser features many similarities to Mobile Safari including touch and drag for panning the view, zooming in and out of a page. It also has the traditional features: bookmarks, history, cache and home page settings. For menus, Android’s browser uses the more common way of a nested menu, but by using excellent fonts, right transparency and soft design, it solves the clutter problem facing similar implementations.

It doesn’t feature multiple tabs/windows, but it’s probable that other may soon implement that feature. The browser features a visual history that’s very similar to Nokia’s mobile browser (which is also based on Webkit). The URL bar functions both as a search and a url field, depending if you put in a valid http URL or just keywords. Before I forget, there’s no flash support too (as of this writing).

Next time we will continue with Contacts and Maps