Android Videos
Google’s latest Android prototype is miles improved over the versions we last saw. Back at CES the GUI was clunky and the whole thing looked relatively primative; Google themselves asked us to keep an open mind and instead concentrate on the OS’ potential. Now, they’ve brought out a device that you could, frankly, mistake for production hardware.
As our exclusive demo videos show, the Android team have been putting in some long hours bringing the user interface up to the standard people expect. The iPhone sets the bar high, and leftfield rivals like Samsung’s TouchWiz GUI really pile on the pressure. What they’ve given us is, at first glance, a blend of the successful parts of each of those, together with a dose of Google’s own minimalist aesthetic. Hopefully you’ll agree with us, once you’ve looked through the photos and watched the video, that the design is a winner.
In this first video, we see an overview of the new interface and menu structure, including the clever pattern-based unlock screen. Much of the GUI can be interacted with - for instance pulling down the title bar reveals missed calls and new messages - using the familiar palatte of swipes and taps. You can also see the straightforward way to create shortcuts on the home screen; a matter of holding down your finger and then following through the contextual menus.
Next up, Google’s Street View gets the Android treatment with a built-in compass. That lets you pan around the location-based image, turning the handset into something of an augmented reality device. As you can tell by the applause, this was one of the most popular apps!
Google briefly touched on their work with developers, including the latest round of entries in their Android Developers Challenge. Here you can see a port of Pacman, developed for the handset:
In this last video, a demo of Google Maps, you can see how closely the Android experience matches that of the desktop. All of the usual mapping options are present - satellite views, traffic, etc. - and, with a 3G network, load and update quickly.
After wowing the IO conference crowd with their Android prototype demonstration, the developers sat down for a Q&A session. The question on everyones’ lips was what exactly the demo hardware consisted of, and who made it; while the answer to the latter was under NDA, we were given some details of the former. Based on a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, the smartphone used a Synaptics capacitive touchscreen and the UMTS cellular standard; the demo itself was carried out using a 3.6Mbps HSDPA connection. Android’s memory requirements continue to be reasonable: the prototype had 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash.
Q. Do you have a more specific release date for Android now?
A. [Android should launch in the] second half of this year. What you saw on stage looks pretty good, but we want to make sure it’s perfect and that people have a really good consumer experience with it.
Q. Will you have to buy the device with Android on it, or will you be able to load Android onto an existing device.
A. The software will be released as open-source when the first handsets are available … so people can do with it pretty much whatever they want. We don’t dictate how it’s used.
Q. Touch is heavily featured in the demo today, but Android is extensible to all sorts of different platforms. Were you just showing off the most flashy parts … how did you make those choices?
A. The platform is designed to be very generic, it has to work with touchscreen devices, D-pad devices and trackball devices. Some devices might not even have a screen. We chose to show a demonstration with a device that happened to have a trackball; we have other devices with a trackball. We could’ve shown that exact demo completely driven by the trackball. That’s pretty compelling as not a lot a lot of platforms have that flexibility.
Q. Could you tell us more about the hardware of the touchscreen handset?
A. The specific OEM who made built that hardware we’re under NDA with, but I can give you some details on components. It is a UMTS handset, the demo was on HSDPA 3.6Mbps. It was a Qualcomm MSM7201A [Ed: 528MHz] processor, it had a Synaptics capacitive touchscreen, 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash.
When we announced the product and soon after we posted some videos, some of our partners demonstrated the platform at at MWC at Barcelona in March. This is the most recent stuff; literally the finishing touches were put on the device last night. The clock didn’t exist last night.
Q. What was shown here first?
A. I’m not totally sure if I’m right here, but notifications we hadn’t shown before, the desktop-like launcher of applications where you can put alias and icons on the desktop and get a spatial-representation of workflow. The compass and accelerometer based Street View was a new application. The unlock mechanism - letting the device learn the user’s gesture to unlock it for security and sleep purposes. And Pacman was shown for the first time too!
Q. The unlock gesture would only be available on the touchscreen?
A. You could select each of the circles using the trackball, but it might make more sense using the touchscreen.
Remember, you can see all of our Android demo videos here. Vincent is now off to hopefully spend some hands-on time with the prototype, so keep reading Android Community for more Google IO coverage!