Everyone must be feeling flooded by the deluge of information about Google’s I/O event held recently and there was also a rumor about the release of a new nexus tablet, We have put all the info in a concise and clear format just for you.
Android One is Google’s new effort to make it easier for OEMs to produce Android handsets, and is especially aimed at those making phones for developing markets. Google takes a lot of the uncertainty out of hardware design and also provides software updates to a very GPe-like stock Android experience.
We still don’t know what the L stands for, nor if this is 4.5 or 5.0, but Google previewed what to expect from this fall’s release of Android L. The new Material Design interface seeks to make apps more accessible, easier to interact with, and greatly improves their ability adapt to screen sizes and form factors. From enhanced notifications, to the lock screen, there are a lot of changes here to look forward to, and with the developer preview arriving tomorrow, expect to be hearing a lot more about them.
Chrome gets a new look at it embraces Material Design, and multitasking changes will make it as easy to switch between web pages as you currently can between apps.
We heard quite a bit about the abilities we’ll be seeing from Android Wear devices, and also got the skinny on the start of hardware sales, as both LG’s and Samsung’s offerings hit the Play Store today.
Google shared news of Android Auto, which leverages new APIs to bring a low-distraction, voice-controlled Android experience to the screens in your car. Google continued with this spread into new device types with word of Android TV, building off its experience with Chromecast to integrate live TV, gaming, and (once again) voice control into a system that can either be embedded into TVs themselves or connected as an external accessory.
Speaking of Chromecast, It finally has support for Android screen mirroring. It also loses the requirement for the device and your phone to be running on the same WiFi network.
Following Apple’s introduction of HealthKit for iOS 8, Google fired back with its own news of Google Fit, previewing how wearables – including both dedicated fitness trackers and more general purpose Android Wear devices – will be able to gather data and make it available for fitness apps to digest.
An update to Google Play Services bring a lot of new APIs, opens a few new doors for devs, and improves how Google’s able to deploy future Android updates. We go over the specifics in our coverage of the release, including the new features coming to Google Play Games.
Then there were all the little things – news items that didn’t grab the big headlines but still present us with some teases about the sort of projects Google’s been working on in its spare time: stuff like the very unexpected Cardboard project for turning your phone into a virtual reality 3D viewer. Not something we really expected to be here but delights us all the same
