For the Army, Droid does, all right.

The Army wants every soldier to carry a smartphone to stay networked. It doesn’t yet have a program for that, having spent the last year working through the implications of what it might mean to have such a system — like, for instance, what operating system would power it. An initial answer: Google’s Android.

A prototype device running Android called the Joint Battle Command-Platform, developed by tech nonprofit MITRE, is undergoing tests. The development kit behind it, called the Mobile /Handheld Computing Environment, will be released to app creators in July, the Army says.

But until then, the envisioned apps for the Joint Battle Command-Platform will run a gambit of Army tasks. There will be a mapping function like the kinds the defense industry is developing for soldier smartphones and tablets. A Blue Force Tracker program will keep tabs on where friendly forces are. “Critical messaging” will exchange crucial data like medevac requests and on the ground reporting.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered about the Army’s smartphone effort, like how to keep data secure and how to use the devices effectively in combat environments with low connectivity.

Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the iPhone lover who moonlights as the Army’s vice chief of staff, has boasted that the devices being tested can withstand the physical wear-and-tear of soldiering, but it remains to be seen just how rugged the smartphone is.

Even when connected to a radio, the Army says its Joint Battle Command-Platform weighs about two pounds. That’s way lighter than the Nett Warrior suite of sensors, computers, radios and mapping functions — the Army’s program of record for doing much of what a smartphone already does.

But that’s not to say the current phone prototype will be what the Army ends up issuing soldiers. And it’s also not to say that whatever makes it through testing will definitely rely on Android as its operating system. That’s all a ways away.

But the point of building the  Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment is to have a common framework for designing apps that can run on any manner of devices — and that’s an early indication that the Army’s leaning toward Android devices, especially in this age of budget efficiencies, rather than iOS, which is tied to one specific (i)Phone. Score one for open architecture.

Photo: U.S. Army

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