Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Google has dropped some interesting information about Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android - Android 4.0
at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco.
Ice Cream Sandwich will bring all the interface loveliness of Android
3.0 Honeycombto Android smartphones. Android phone users will get the
updated app launcher, holographic user interface, interactive and new
homescreen widgets plus the multi-tasking panel.
Features
Google says Ice Cream Sandwich is its "most ambitious release to
date" and will incorporate all the best bits of Honeycomb, the Android
tablet OS, and make them useable on smartphones too.
But Ice Cream Sandwich is about more than just the user interface and it will bring all the new Android 3.1
features to phones. This new update means Android tablets will also be
able to act as a USB hub and you'll be to hook up devices such as mice
and keyboards and game controllers to tablets and smartphones.
Google
is also intending to make life easier for developers by releasing a
new set of APIs that will help them to scale their apps across the
various sizes of Android devices - Google acknowledges that it's
important for developers to be able to design apps that will work
across 3.5-inch smartphones up to 10.1-inch tablets.
During the
Google Google I/O keynote those on stage also showed off 3D
headtracking using the front-mounted camera so you can figure out who
is speaking and focus on them while on a video call. Face detection
will be a key feature in the OS.
Google is intending to make Ice Cream Sandwich fully open source. It
didn't do this with Android 3.0 Honeycomb in an attempt to make things
more consistent.
