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| Android Phone Tips |
Google officially unveiled AndroidIce Cream Sandwich this week at its annual I/O 2011 event in the US. The latest version follows in the footsteps of previous Android incarnations by being named after desserts, but Ice Cream Sandwich could prove the most pivotal update yet in Google’s battle to compete with Apple for phone and tablet supremacy.
Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to combine the smartphone and tablet versions of Android, therefore integrating the two. We’ve heard several times before that Android’s fragmentation holds back Google from being top dog, but Ice Cream Sandwich could see this change. Android being integrated together will provide a more solid base for the whole platform. At the moment there are Android devices running on all kinds of different Android numbers, 2.2 being the most popular.
Of course, some older Android handsets have not been updated even that far and are on 2.1 or older, whereas new top of the range devices like Samsung’s Galaxy S2 are on Android 2.3.3 – the latest smartphone version of Android. Android 3.0 (AKA Honeycomb), which will be updated to 3.1 within the next month was Google's first tablet-specific variant of Android.
Google announced its next version of the Google Android operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, at Google I/O this week. Google I/O is the company's annual developer conference, held in San Francisco. (The different versions of Android are named alphabetically, i.e., Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and now Ice Cream Sandwich.)
Ice Cream Sandwich will basically bring the functionality of Honeycomb, the version of the OS tailored for tablets, to your phone. This next version of Honeycomb, which will eventually make its way into Ice Cream Sandwich phones, includes features such as 3D facial detection. Though Honeycomb was designed for tablets, Ice Cream Sandwich will be a cross-platform OS. Google hasn't said exactly when Ice Cream Sandwich will launch. Google also hasn't said which devices will be first to offer Ice Cream Sandwich.
Because Ice Cream Sandwich is expected to be the "unifying" version of Android, Google has said it will be able to run on most versions of existing Android hardware. Apple has a huge app store because of this, whereas Google’s Android Market is smaller because of the difficulties that are faced with developing.
Ice Cream Sandwich will look to combine Android 2.3 and 3.0 together to produce one single platform for phones and tablets. Therefore apps will only need to be developed for one type of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich – as yet unnumbered. Because of Android’s open source nature, users and companies alike can customise their phone. This means that one user’s phone will look, feel and act differently to another user’s phone.
Despite unifying platforms, this will remain the case under Ice Cream Sandwich. Thing is, Google locked-down the source code of Android 3.0 and this meant no UI customisations, like Samsung's TouchWiz or HTC's Sense UI. First up, just how long will the unification of the Android platform take? Google didn't give specifics.
Will it take as long for Ice Cream Sandwich to be rolled out? Google says that Android Ice Cream Sandwich will 'adapt' to the device's hardware, which means, in theory, it'll work on everything. With Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is hoping to boost its own ecosystem. Developers will be able to create apps across the whole Android platform in one go, for both tablets and phones. It seems that Google certainly isn’t.
Android has been growing bigger and bigger itself, even without Ice Cream Sandwich. We shouldn’t forget that Android is already a huge operating system across the globe. The point here is that Android can get even bigger. Google is setting its stall out when it claims Android Ice Cream Sandwich is set to be “One OS Everywhere”.
When Google says this it really means it, with suggested future plans including Android eventually running everything in your home. The plan is to unify all Android devices, but if the updating process goes wrong, it could cause more fragmentation than before.
By. Android Phone Tips
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