Android Mobile App Development with Phonegap & Eclipse

The importance of mobile apps and the mobile web is clearly indicated by the pervasive nature of mobiles and smartphones in today's world. When developing websites or apps for mobiles, there are two main approaches:

Mobile Web Applications - effectively a website, or web application, optimised for use on mobiles
Native Mobile Apps - apps that are downloaded onto your mobile device and use the native features of the phone

There is in fact a third approach which is a hybrid development style of the above two options. Mobile app platforms / frameworks such as PhoneGap, jQTouch and Sencha Touch allow you to author "native" applications with web technologies (HTML5, Javascript). There are pros and cons to this approach and some further reading is available below on this topic...

Web vs. Native Mobile App? Forrester Says Do Both

Is HTML5 Ready for Prime Time vs. Native? (Mobile App Development)

How Are Native Mobile Apps Better? Help Me List the Ways…

That said, we played around with PhoneGap and the Eclipse IDE briefly and thought we'd share some screenshots with you of the Android Emulator.

Until next time!