Android 3.0 is Google’s latest release of Android that represents a fork in the road for the OS. Android 3.0 features a completely new UI designed for tablets rather than smartphones. With this release, developers have the final release of the Android 3.0 OS and SDK to develop applications targeting the OS.
Android 3.0 is only a temporary fork as future releases of Android for smartphones will incorporate some of the new features of the OS that translate well to a smartphone form factor.
Android 3.0 brings the following new features, which can be seen in their entirety, here, at the developer section of the Android site:
New user features
- New tablet-specific UI
- System Bar, for global status and notifications
- Action Bar, for application control
- Five customizable home screens
- Recent Apps, for easy visual multitasking
- Redesigned keyboard
- Improved text selection, copy and paste
- New connectivity options
- Updated set of standard apps, with new & improved Browser, Camera, Gallery, Contacts, & Email applications
New developer features
- New UI framework for creating great tablet apps
- High-performance 2D and 3D graphics
- Support for multicore processor architectures
- Rich multimedia and connectivity
- Enhancements for enterprise
- Compatibility with existing apps
The latest release brings a lot more interesting features for developers, to make developing tablet apps simpler. There are improvements to the UI builder relating to the palette of widgets available for applications, improvements to zooming, tracing applications, more accurate rendering of layouts, etc.
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You can download the Android SDK from here. The SDK includes the Android 3.0 OS with a virtual machine to run it. So those of you itching to try it out can do so right on your computers using the SDK.