a la mobile achievement: put OS to work with standard hardware
Looking through the blogosphere review of A La Mobile presentation of a Qtek 9090 running Android, it seems to me that there is a correction that has to be made to the original US News and World Report story. A La Mobile is not a software company, it is a hardware company. What they really did is got Android to run properly on a standard machine and interact with all principal hardware elements - GSM radio, sound card, camera and so on. This basically proves that Hardware Abstract Level (HAL) of the platform is operating properly and software written for it can be expected to operate fine.
Based on the only available screenshot (courtesy of openandroids.com), it is difficult to say what kind of applications they got to run - we can only see a iPhone-like launcher. They could have used a number of open source applications or write their own prototypes (a primitive media player, for example, takes less than an hour to write and is available as a tutorial; browser and maps are provided by Google with the platform) . Porting Android to hardware has already been done before.
What is important, though, it that we now have proof that all basic functions of Android work with standard issue hardware (or at least are claimed to be working). To which degree, A La Mobile deserves recognition.