The New User Features in this release are:
- Quick Search Box for Android
- Updated interface to Camera, Camcorder, and Gallery
- VPN, 802.1x - Yes that is right you can now VPN into your corporate LAN from your android phone
- Battery usage indicator - usage per application
- Accessibility Framework
- Android Market Updates
The New Platform Technologies in this release are:
- Expanded Search Framework - Hello! it's Google, but now it's also on the phone data
- Text-to-speech engine
- Gestures
- Expanded support for screen densities and resolutions
- Telephony support for CDMA
- New API packages
- android.accessibilityservice - An accessibility service runs in the background and receives callbacks by the system when AccessibilityEvents are fired.
- android.gesture - Provides classes to create, recognize, load and save gestures. A gesture can have a single or multiple "strokes".
- android.speech.tts - Synthesizes speech from text for immediate playback or to create a sound file.
- android.view.accessibility - This class represents accessibility events that are sent by the system when something notable happens in the user interface.
- Linux Kernel Upgrade from 2.6.27 to 2.6.29.
- "The Linux 2.6.29 kernel really shines with OpenSSL and its RSA 4096-bit performance. The number of signs per second had doubled!"
- "The blur performance with GraphicsMagick had jumped from 25 [ed. iterations per minute] to 40 with Linux 2.6.29."
- Info taken from http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2629_benchmarks&num=1
Some interesting opportunities can come out of this.
Security App
With the new Text-to-Speech API you could have the camera pick up movement and SMS you a picture of what it now sees. You could then reply SMS with the Text you would like said "I've called the police", "I'm watching you" or "Please say your name"- on receipt of this SMS the phone could Text-to-Speech it and announce it to the room. It could also start the voice recorder and after x amount of time SMS you back the voice file so you can figure out if that person should be there or not.
Accessibility
Come on people there are loads of opportunities here - read my messages to me, read me some selected text, vibrate or make a sound when I point my phone towards home (compass).
Gestures
"Developers can use the new GestureBuilder tool included in the Android 1.6 SDK to generate libraries of gestures to include with their application."
I'm thinking someone should create a generice GestureLibrary that can be imported into people's applications by default. That way there will be a consistent end user experience.
I hope this starts to get the juices going for you!!!
Regards,
Simon Collings
Solutions Manager
Serendipity IT Ltd
