   Looking to develop for the Android OS
  I have been considering looking into taking my knowledge of programming to somewhere I have never been before and that is developing for the Android market. I have a great game idea I think would be good for the phone, and I am currently in the process of programming it in C++, I just got done putting together my framework. Back to the point, I was wondering if there is anything I should know, besides Java, I downloaded the Android SDK and Eclipse IDE, but it is kinda hard to test anything out since I currently don't have any Droid phone at least now until September when I renew my contract. Things I am wondering:1. Any tips I should know about that would help me.2. Are there any game engines that work with it?3. (Anything you want to add)Any kind of suggestions or ideas would be helpful, I haven't been able to find much information on this subject, but maybe I have just not using the right words in Google, I thought it being Google I wouldn't have a problem finding crap on it.   
  I just got into this myself (really just setting up Eclipse and the SDK, etc, and compiling some sample apps).There is an emulator that can be run from Eclipse (or the command line I believe, although I haven't tried it outside the GUI yet). It's a bit of a pain if you want to simulate a specific model of phone, there are a lot of settings to look up on the internet if you don't want a generic, imaginary Android phone. However, Motorola has a bunch of plugins for specific phones ready to download and install; I would assume other vendors offer some too.Sorry I don't have too much to offer other than that, hopefully I'll get some free time soon and gain some experience in this.   ;  I don't think it's a massive issue not actually having a physical phone in your hand before you start out developing for android. As krez says there is an emulator available which is pretty good IMO. I started out porting my 3d game from C++/directx to android before i got my phone and was pleasantly surprised that it worked pretty much the same as on the emulator. I assume you'll be using OpenGL ES, I don't know of any game engines available offhand. The only thing to watch is what version of android you code for, as this can limit what you can do. For example my phone uses 1.5 kernel of 'droid which means I can only use OpenGL ES 1.0 and not 1.1. But that's fine by me as i'm pretty sure it'll work on newer versions too. Here's some great 'droid/GL tutorials to get you going.... though i'd check out the helloworld here first...OpenGL tutorial 1Similar but worth the readDroid API reference is hereoh and i just ended up using notepad++ and the commandline to compile and run the emulator and that. Couldn't stand Eclipse but maybe that's just me....   ;  You can also check out obviam.net. I document a game development process currently for android.   ;  Don't forget that there's the NDK, you can code in C++ with it. Beware of ANY extensions, and anything beyond GLES1.0 . The emulator and different real devices have completely different capabilities beyond the core.[Edited by - idinev on August 7, 2010 7:34:16 PM];  The emulator is pretty good, but it has it's own quirks that makes having a device almost a necessity. For instance, using opengl on the emulator, loading up textures that aren't power of 2 dimensions will work just fine, but will only be white boxes on a real device. I've also ran into an issue where something with the z axis caused the textures to appear on the emulator, but not appear on the device, but I can't remember the specifics right now.Also, the emulator doesn't really support an accelerometer. It's also very slow in general when compared to a real device, and games are pretty much unplayable if you are running the debugger.Otherwise, the emulator is a decent tool to begin working in, but you really need a device if you want to publish.Good luck   