After taking a brief vacation, I'm back working on my game.
I was heavily inspired by the Android game 'Pocket Empires' which I think is brilliantly designed.
Integrating the chat involved working with Perl, Erlang, and Java all at once, but I got it mostly done in less than a week.
Most of the time was wasted fiddling with the Android UI toolkit.
So here's a screenshot of the rough results, of course multiplayer enabled!