Google I/O Report: Lots of Little Green Robot Sightings
I was up in San Francisco earlier this week for the Google I/O event, and as expected, Android played a big part in the proceedings. A number of big announcements involving the platform were made, and it was also interesting to see that at the I/O Developer Sandbox (the closest thing the event has to an expo floor), the section showing off Android tools, services and devices was bigger than any of the others focused on other Google areas of interest.
There were three big pieces of Android news:
- Version 2.2 of the platform, named Froyo, was formally announced. Many of the features of 2.2 had been going around the web for a few weeks, but this was its formal introduction. Engadget has a good rundown of all the new features, including Flash support in the browser, the ability to store apps on external memory. Froyo also supports tethering and mobile hotspot services, and is significantly faster, both in UI and the browser, than earlier versions. It should be available for the Nexus One in the next few weeks, with other devices to follow.
- Users will soon have the ability to push apps to their phone from their PC browser, meaning they can surf the Android Market on their computer, find apps they want to download, then push them to the device. Several of the app stores for Android that we track in the App Store Wiki have ways to let users do this, but none are quite as seamless. Presumably this also means Google will be making some significant enhancements to the PC web version of the Android Market to encourage its use.
- Google also grabbed a lot of attention with the announcement of Google TV, its take on how to marry the web to people's TV sets. It will run in boxes that sit alongside users' existing set-top boxes, but will also get built in to things like Sony Blu-ray players. You may be asking what it's got to do with mobile, but Google TV will be based on Android, meaning mobile developers will be able to extend their apps to users' TVs -- yet another way that mobile development is moving beyond just the mobile phone.