The search engine giant Google has officially unveiled their new Android 2.0 platform a couple of weeks back, which brings in lots of new enhancements to the open source operating system. Developers can now go ahead and download the new SDK to start developing and testing their apps against the new platform.
Some of the new features in Android 2.0 include:
- Integration of Facebook friends with Contacts.
- Faster and improved web browser with support for HTML5 standard.
- Universal Search.
- Support for Microsoft Exchange.
- Support for Multitouch.
- Maps now supports Layers.
- YouTube widget.
- Camera
- Built-in flash support
- Digital zoom
- Scene mode
- White balance
- Color effect
- Macro focus
- Improvements to Messaging app.
- Combined email inbox to enable viewing of messages from multiple accounts simultaneously.
- More responsive and improved virtual keyboard.
There are also lots of other improvements. For a detailed list of change log, you can visit Android 2.0 Developers page here.
Google has also put together a small video which shows a preview of all these new features in action:
Android 2.0 will be featured on handsets starting from the highly anticipated Motorola Droid in November 2009, which everyone is quoting as the iPhone killer, which I highly doubt will be the case. HTC is also set to release HD2 soon – the first multitouch Windows phone which will run on Windows Mobile 6.5 (with HTC Sense on top of it).
