Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS announced and SDK released

News · 6 Dec 2010 · MTW Editorial Team

Google has finally officially introduced Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread today. The new version of the leading smartphone OS packs a lot of new features that you will see highlighted in a video after the break but here’s a list of all the new Gingerbread features:

– UI refinements for simplicity and speed
– Faster, more intuitive text input
– One-touch word selection and copy/paste
– Improved power management
– Control over applications
– New ways of communicating, organizing:
1) Internet calling
2) Near-field communications (NFC support)
– Downloads management

– Improved Performances
– Native input and sensor events
– Gyroscope and other new sensors, for improved 3D motion processing
– Open API for native audio
– Native graphics management
– Native access to Activity lifecycle, window management
– Native access to assets, storage
– Robust native development environment

– Mixable audio effects

– Support for new media formats
– Access to multiple cameras

New Platform Technologies

Media Framework

• New media framework fully replaces OpenCore, maintaining all previouscodec/container support for encoding and decoding.
• Integrated support for the VP8 open video compression format and the WebMopen container format
• Adds AAC encoding and AMR wideband encoding

Linux Kernel

• Upgraded to 2.6.35

Networking

• SIP stack, configurable by device manufacturer
• Support for Near Field Communications (NFC), configurable by device manufacturer
• Updated BlueZ stack

Dalvik runtime

• Dalvik VM:
  • Concurrent garbage collector (target sub-3ms pauses)
  • Adds further JIT (code-generation) optimizations
  • Improved code verification
  • StrictMode debugging, for identifying performance and memory issues
• Core libraries:
  • Expanded I18N support (full worldwide encodings, more locales)
  • Faster Formatter and number formatting. For example, float formatting is 2.5x faster.
  • HTTP responses are gzipped by default. XML and JSON API response sizes may be reduced by 60% or more.
  • New collections and utilities APIs
  • Improved network APIs
  • Improved file read and write controls
  • Updated JDBC
• Updates from upstream projects:
  • OpenSSL 1.0.0a
  • BouncyCastle 1.45
  • ICU 4.4
  • zlib 1.2.5

You can also download the SDK directly from here and here

Microsoft has a really good base with Windows Phone 7 but still a lot of work to do to match the Android’s feature set.