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.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]A number of tablets coming out this year will feature the Android OS, making this release rather significant for both Android users, and developers.
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.