A Little Over A Year Later, Android Is Unstoppable

The more you look at Android today, the more you have to think back to the fact that early last year, people wondered whether Google's mobile operating system would even survive.  There were countless columns in March of 2009 trumpeting the fact that only one Android handset was shown at Mobile World Congress that year. Now, Android is spreading out far beyond just the many smartphones it appears on. This week, Cisco announced a new tablet based on the OS, and that's just one new direction for Android.

Cisco's seven-inch, 1.15-pound Cius tablet is camera smart, which could differentiate it from Apple's iPad. It has a front-facing 720p camera for videoconferencing, but there also a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera for standard picture taking. You can read more about it in Cisco's announcements, and see some cool pictures. It's shown above, and I want one.

Cisco notes that the new tablet runs Cisco Collaboration Architecture and Virtual Desktop Integration so that videoconferences can be run in conjunction with other types of tasks:

"Based on the Android operating system, Cisco Cius is an open platform for communication and collaboration whose form factor and applications are designed to more securely connect employees on-the-go with the right people in real-time, and to provide those workers with the ability to access and share the content they need from any place on the network."

Meanwhile, Android continues to spread out across the smartphone landscape. As JKOnTheRun reports, over 160,000 Andorid phones are activated daily. That's nothing to shake a stick at, and makes it all the more bizarre to think that in March of last year, Android, was, in the eyes of some observers, on the brink of failure.