There's no doubt about it: Smartphones based on the Android OS are hot. Currently, they're generating 550,000 activations per day. Their market share is at approximately 40 percent, and continuing to rise.
That success wouldn't be happening without a friendly, clean UI. Many times, a user will base their feelings about an application on the UI. In this article, I'll look at the XML layout language for Android, some controls that can be used in Android and the tools that can be used to create a UI -- namely, Mono for Android, which enables you to create native apps in C# and Visual Studio using an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Then I'll talk about how choices can factor in with some of the constraints, such as the battery.