Ice Cream Sandwich for Users

The new features for users in Ice Cream Sandwich are detailed on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:

• Evolved UI
• New typeface optimized for high-resolution screens
• System Bar Refinements contains virtual buttons for better user experience
• Action Bar like features
• Resizable widgets
• Improved voice input engine
• Better control over network data
• People app offers richer profile information, including a large profile picture, phone numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, events, and a new button for connecting on integrated social networks.
• Improved Calendar, Camera, Email and Browser apps
• Android Beam for sharing across two NFC-enabled devices
• Face Unlock is a new screen-lock option that lets users unlock their devices with their faces
• Wi-Fi Direct lets users connect directly to nearby peer devices over Wi-Fi
• Connecting to Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) devices so users can connect to wireless medical devices and sensors in hospitals, fitness centers, homes, and elsewhere.

Ice Cream Sandwich for Developers

Developers need to be aware of the following features:

• Unified UI framework for phones, tablets, and more. All the UI elements from Honeycomb, like the action bar and fragments
• New social API
• new APIs for Contacts, Calendar, and Visual Voicemail
• audio remote control API so any music or media app can register to receive media button events from the remote control and then manage play state
• spell-checker API
• Android Beam so you can Share just about everything over NFC by tapping two phones together (like the bump app)
• ShareActionProvider widget lets developers quickly embed standard share functionality and UI in the Action Bar of their applications
• Low-level streaming multimedia (sounds a bit like DRM)
• New camera capabilities like continuous focus and image zoom. There’s also face detection.
• Wi-Fi Direct for ad-hoc networking
• Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) For connecting to medical or fitness devices like the MotoActive.
• GridLayout improves the performance of Android applications by supporting flatter view hierarchies that are faster to layout and render
• Hardware-accelerated 2D drawing
• About a million other things – Stylus support, a new framework for text-to-speech engines, data usage, a VPN API, and policy management for the camera.

Source developer.android.com

So let’s take a closer look what we can expect.

Getting that Honeycomb look

Features of Honeycomb will be available to Android phone users like slick holographic user interface, an updated app launcher and the interactive homescreen widgets. Also we can look forward to using the multi-task bar currently located at the bottom of the HoneyComb tablet OS.

New developer API

It will be possible for building apps for tablet, phones and other connected devices under the same framework. That should help the rollout of Android apps across different hardware platforms to be done all at the same time. And don’t forget that you can develop for GoogleTV (finally).

Recognition

Developers will be able to play with a 3D display system that can track movement and detect the position of a person’s head, nose and eyes, like Kinect.

Music and movies

Integrated will be the cloud music service (first only available in beta to our American friends), This will give you the possibility to share playlists instantly across all Android devices. Also rent a movie direct from the Android market.

NFC sharing

You’ll be able to share web pages, contacts, YouTube videos and more by the power of Near Field Communication. Ok, like Bump, but without having to open up an application or having to be make your phone or tablet physically be in contact with another one.

Finally the release date will be the October. For those who can’t wait, have a look at this video:

For Testing Only

The SDK offers non-final APIs and is for testing purposes only.
Google says its release is intended to allow developers time to familiarize themselves with the new UI patterns, APIs and capabilities. One thing I have notist, it’s extremely slow. If you’re just curious about its insides and don’t need to test anything yourself, it may be better to just stick with the news and forum postings for now

Honeycomb for Users

The new features for users in Honeycomb are detailed on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:

• System Bar: The notifications bar from the Android phone has been transformed into a “System Bar,” which now lives at the bottom of the screen. From here, you can access notifications, system status and the soft navigation buttons (Back, Home and Recent Apps).
• Action Bar: The Menu area from Android phones has become the Action Bar on Honeycomb. Now at the top of the screen, this bar provides access to the contextual options, navigation, widgets and other content, as dictated by the application currently running.
• Customizable Homescreens: Honeycomb comes with five customizable homescreens which users can add widgets, app shortcuts and wallpapers to. Each homescreens offers a launcher for access to all the applications and search box for apps, contacts, media files, Web content and more
• Recent Apps
• New Keyboard: Honeycomb’s soft keyboard offers reshaped keys which have been repositioned for better targeting. New keys, including Tab for example, have been added, too.
• Better Copy-and-Paste: The copy/paste functionality has been given an upgrade too.
• Connectivity Options: Honeycomb offers built-in support for the Media/Photo Transfer Protocol, which lets you sync with a USB-connected camera. You can also attach USB or Bluetooth keyboards. Bluetooth tethering is supported and Wi-Fi connectivity has been improved.
• New Standard Apps: Also new in Honeycomb are major updates to the standard Android applications, the Browser, Camera and Gallery, Contacts apps and Email.

Honeycomb for Developers

Developers need to be aware of the following features:

• UI framework for creating great apps for larger screen devices
• High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript.
• Support for multicore processor architectures: Honeycomb is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance.
• Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users.
• New types of connectivity.
• Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively.

Source Readwriteweb..com
Source Developer.android.com

Gingerbread for Users

The new features for users in Gingerbread are detailed on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:

• UI Refinements
• New Keyboard
• Word Selection Improved
• Copy/Paste Improved
• Improved Power Management: Android now is more active in managing apps that keep the device awake, even going so far as to close apps when appropriate. In the Application Settings, users can now see how the battery is being used by various apps.
• Application Control
• Internet Calling: Internet Calling (SIP) addresses can be added to Contacts and calls can be placed from the Quick Contact or Dialler. A SIP account is needed for this feature to work. This feature will be available depending on manufacturer and carrier support.
• NFC: Near-field communications support is now included in the OS. With NFC, you can “touch” or “swipe” an NFC tag embedded in a poster, sticker, ad, or anywhere else and then be directed to a website associated with the URL included in the tag’s data. NFC support will be determined by the phone’s hardware.
• Downloads Management
• Camera: The camera app now provides access to multiple cameras on the device, if the phone includes more than one (such as a front-facing camera, for example).

Gingerbread for Developers

Developers need to be aware of the following features:

• StrictMode
• Concurrent garbage collector: The Dalivik VM introduces a new, concurrent garbage collector that minimizes application pauses, helping to ensure smoother animation and increased responsiveness in games and similar applications.
• Faster event distribution: The platform now handles touch and keyboard events faster and more efficiently, minimizing CPU utilization during event distribution. The changes improve responsiveness for all applications, but especially benefit games that use touch events in combination with 3D graphics or other CPU-intensive operations.
• Updated video drivers: The platform uses updated third-party video drivers that improve the efficiency of OpenGL ES operations, for faster overall 3D graphics performance.
• Event Handling: Applications that use native code can now receive and process input and sensor events directly in their native code, which dramatically improves efficiency and responsiveness. Native libraries exposed by the platform let applications handle the same types of input events as those available through the framework. Applications can receive events from all supported sensor types and can enable/disable specific sensors and manage event delivery rate and queueing.
• New Sensor Types: Android 2.3 adds API support for several new sensor types, including gyroscope, rotation vector, linear acceleration, gravity, and barometer sensors. Applications can use the new sensors in combination with any other sensors available on the device, to track three-dimensional device motion and orientation change with high precision and accuracy. For example, a game application could use readings from a gyroscope and accelerometer on the device to recognize complex user gestures and motions, such as tilt, spin, thrust, and slice.
• Open API for Native Audio: The platform provides a software implementation of Khronos OpenSL ES, a standard API that gives applications access to audio controls and effects from native code. Applications can use the API to manage audio devices and control audio input, output, and processing directly from native code.
• Native graphics management: The platform provides an interface to its Khronos EGL library, which lets applications manage graphics contexts and create and manage OpenGL ES textures and surfaces from native code.
• Native access to Activity lifecycle, window management: Native applications can declare a new type of Activity class, NativeActivity whose life-cycle callbacks are implemented directly in native code. The NativeActivity and its underlying native code run in the system just as do other Activities — they run in the application’s system process and execute on the application’s main UI thread, and they receive the same life-cycle callbacks as do other Activities. The platform also exposes native APIs for managing windows, including the ability to lock/unlock the pixel buffer to draw directly into it..
• Native access to assets, storage: Applications can now access a native Asset Manager API to retrieve application assets directly from native code without needing to go through JNI. If the assets are compressed, the platform does streaming decompression as the application reads the asset data. There is no longer a limit on the size of compressed .apk assets that can be read. Additionally, applications can access a native Storage Manager API to work directly with OBB files downloaded and managed by the system. (Dev tools for creating and managing OBB files will not be available until early 2011.)
• Robust native development environment: The Android NDK (r5 or higher) provides a complete set of tools, toolchains, and libraries for developing applications that use the rich native environment offered by the Android 2.3 platform.
• Internet telephony: Developers can now add SIP-based internet telephony features to their apps. Android 2.3 includes a full SIP protocol stack and integrated call management services that let applications easily set up outgoing and incoming voice calls, without having to manage sessions, transport-level communication, or audio record or playback directly.
• Near Field Communications (NFC): The platform’s support for Near Field Communications (NFC) lets developers get started creating a whole new class of applications for Android. Developers can create new applications that offer proximity-based information and services to users, organizations, merchants, and advertisers. Using the NFC API, applications can respond to NFC tags “discovered” as the user “touches” an NFC-enabled device to elements embedded in stickers, smart posters, and even other devices. When a tag of interest is collected, applications can respond to the tag, read messages from it, and then store the messages, prompting the user as needed.

Source Readwriteweb..com
Source Developer.android.com