On 13th February, during my regular surfing in net, I came across with an event announcement for a webinar at EventBrite. The name of the online course was “Developing Android Applications with Java”, a topic which I am very interested in nowadays. I registered myself to the course same day, it was free, organized by CreativeTechs and O’Reilly Media and held by Tony Hillerson, a mobile developer at EffectiveUI.

The sessions were on Tuesdays and the quality of webinar, content and communication was perfect. A simple task manager application for Android was written in 5 weeks period, including location aware functionalities, Googles Map API, database usage (SqLite) etc. It was very useful for me and also for other Android development beginners, because the basic concepts and fundamentals were explained briefly.

On Mar 16, we had the last session with topic “Tasks Near me”. Next day I got an email with subject “Thank You and a Surprise – Android Phone Giveaway!”.

“We have a surprise for you: we are giving a free Motorola DROID or Nexus One phone to eligible customers as a special thank you for attending this live class and developing with Android.

To see if you qualify for a free phone and to register to receive your phone, please go to oreillynet.com/android/android-giveaway.csp. The deadline for completing the form is 11:59pm PST, March 21, 2010.”

After this great course, O’Reilly prepared a really big surprise to the participants, who had registered the course before 9th March and attended at least 3 sessions.

Now I am waiting for my gift – sponsored by Google. I will be able to test my applications on real device.

For those who are interested:

The video of the course can be purchased for only $99.