INDEX

1. What is Android?

2. Features

 Simple, beautiful, beyond smart

 Refined, evolved UI

 Home screen folders and favorites tray

 Resizable widgets

 Powerful voice input engine

 Control over network data

 Sharing with screenshots

 Powerful web browsing

 Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth HDP

3. Applications.

4. Version

5. References.
 ANDROID
What is Android?
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system,
middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs
necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java
programming language.

Features
Simple, beautiful, beyond smart
Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — easy
multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and
deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing.
Refined, evolved UI
Focused on bringing the power of Android to the surface, Android 4.0 makes
common actions more visible and lets users navigate with simple, intuitive
gestures. Refined animations and feedback throughout the system make
interactions engaging and interesting. An entirely new typeface optimized for
high-resolution screens improves readability and brings a polished, modern feel to
the user interface.

Virtual buttons in the System Bar let users navigate instantly to Back, Home, and
Recent Apps. The System Bar and virtual buttons are present across all apps, but
can be dimmed by applications for full-screen viewing. Users can access each
application's contextual options in the Action Bar, displayed at the top (and
sometimes also at the bottom) of the screen.

Multitasking is a key strength of Android and it's made even easier and more
visual on Android 4.0. The Recent Apps button lets users jump instantly from one
task to another using the list in the System Bar. The list pops up to show thumbnail
images of apps used recently — tapping a thumbnail switches to the app.

For incoming calls, you can respond instantly by text.

Rich and interactive notifications let users keep in constant touch with incoming
messages, play music tracks, see real-time updates from apps, and much more. On
smaller-screen devices, notifications appear at the top of the screen, while on
larger-screen devices they appear in the System Bar.
The All Apps launcher (left) and resizable widgets (right) give you apps and rich
content from the home screen.
Home screen folders and favorites tray
New home screen folders offer a new way for users to group their apps and
shortcuts logically, just by dragging one onto another. Also, in All Apps launcher,
users can now simply drag an app to get information about it or immediately
uninstall it, or disable a pre-installed app.

On smaller-screen devices, the home screen now includes a customizable favorites

tray visible from all home screens. Users can drag apps, shortcuts, folders, and
other priority items in or out of the favorites tray for instant access from any home
screen.

Resizable widgets
Home screens in Android 4.0 are designed to be content-rich and customizable.
Users can do much more than add shortcuts — they can embed live application
content directly through interactive widgets. Widgets let users check email, flip
through a calendar, play music, check social streams, and more — right from the
home screen, without having to launch apps. Widgets are resizable, so users can
expand them to show more content or shrink them to save space.

New lock screen actions

The lock screens now let users do more without unlocking. From the slide lock
screen, users can jump directly to the camera for a picture or pull down the
notifications window to check for messages. When listening to music, users can
even manage music tracks and see album art.

Quick responses for incoming calls

When an incoming call arrives, users can now quickly respond by text message,
without needing to pick up the call or unlock the device. On the incoming call
screen, users simply slide a control to see a list of text responses and then tap to
send and end the call. Users can add their own responses and manage the list from
the Settings app.

Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks, and browser tabs

Android 4.0 makes managing notifications, recent apps, and browser tabs even
easier. Users can now dismiss individual notifications, apps from the Recent Apps
list, and browser tabs with a simple swipe of a finger.

Improved text input and spell-checking

The soft keyboard in Android 4.0 makes text input even faster and more accurate.
Error correction and word suggestion are improved through a new set of default
dictionaries and more accurate heuristics for handling cases such as double-typed
characters, skipped letters, and omitted spaces. Word suggestion is also improved
and the suggestion strip is simplified to show only three words at a time.

To fix misspelled words more easily, Android 4.0 adds a spell-checker that locates
and underlines errors and suggests replacement words. With one tap, users can
choose from multiple spelling suggestions, delete a word, or add it to the
dictionary. Users can even tap to see replacement suggestions for words that are
spelled correctly. For specialized features or additional languages, users can now
download and install third-party dictionaries, spell-checkers, and other text
services.

Powerful voice input engine

Android 4.0 introduces a powerful new voice input engine that offers a continuous
"open microphone" experience and streaming voice recognition. The new voice
input engine lets users dictate the text they want, for as long as they want, using the
language they want. Users can speak continously for a prolonged time, even
pausing for intervals if needed, and dictate punctuation to create correct sentences.
As the voice input engine enters text, it underlines possible dictation errors in gray.
After dictating, users can tap the underlined words to quickly replace them from a
list of suggestions.

Data usage controls let you monitor total usage by network type and application
and then set limits if needed.

Control over network data

Mobile devices can make extensive use of network data for streaming content,
synchronizing data, downloading apps, and more. To meet the needs of users with
tiered or metered data plans, Android 4.0 adds new controls for managing
network data usage.

In the Settings app, colorful charts show the total data usage on each network type
(mobile or Wi-Fi), as well as amount of data used by each running application.
Based on their data plans, users can optionally set warning levels or hard limits on
data usage or disable mobile data altogether. Users can also manage the
background data used by individual applications as needed.

Designed for accessibility

A variety of new features greatly enhance the accessibility of Android 4.0 for blind
or visually impaired users. Most important is a new explore-by-touch mode that
lets users navigate without having to see the screen. Touching the screen once
triggers audible feedback that identifies the UI component below; a second touch
in the same component activates it with a full touch event. The new mode is
especially important to support users on new devices that use virtual buttons in the
System Bar, rather than dedicated hardware buttons or trackballs. Also, standard
apps are updated to offer an improved accessibility experience. The Browser
supports a script-based screen reader for reading favorite web content and
navigating sites. For improved readability, users can also increase the default font
size used across the system.

The accessibility experience begins at first setup — a simple touch gesture during
setup (clockwise square from upper left) activates all accessibility features and
loads a setup tutorial. Once accessibility features are active, everything visible on
the screen can be spoken aloud by the standard screen reader.

Communication and sharing

Contacts and profiles are integrated across apps and social networks, for a
consistent, personal experience everywhere — from incoming calls to
emails.Designed for the way people live, Android 4.0 integrates rich social
communication and sharing touchpoints across the system, making it easy to talk,
email, text, and share.
People and profiles
Throughout the system, a user’s social groups, profiles, and contacts are linked
together and integrated for easy accessibility. At the center is a new People app
that offers richer profile information, including a large profile picture, phone
numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, events, and a new button for
connecting on integrated social networks.

The user's own contact information is stored in a new "Me" profile, allowing
easier sharing with apps and people. All of the user's integrated contacts are
displayed in an easy to manage list, including controls over which contacts are
shown from any integrated account or social network. Wherever the user navigates
across the system, tapping a profile photo displays Quick Contacts, with large
profile pictures, shortcuts to phone numbers, text messaging, and more.

Unified calendar, visual voicemail

To help organize appointments and events, an updated Calendar app brings
together personal, work, school, and social agendas. With user permission, other
applications can contribute events to the calendar and manage reminders, for an
integrated view across multiple calendar providers. The app is redesigned to let
users manage events more easily. Calendars are color-coded and users can swipe
left or right to change dates and pinch to zoom in or out agendas.

In the phone app, a new visual voicemail features integrates incoming messages,
voice transcriptions, and audio files from one or more providers. Third-party
applications can integrate with the Phone app to add their own voice messages,
transcriptions, and more to the visual voicemail inbox.

Capture the picture you want, edit, and share instantly.

Rich and versatile camera capabilities
The Camera app includes many new features that let users capture special
moments with great photos and videos. After capturing images, they can edit and
share them easily with friemds.

When taking pictures, continuous focus, zero shutter lag exposure, and
decreased shot-to-shot speed help capture clear, precise images. Stabilized image
zoom lets users compose photos and video in the way they want, including while
video is recording. For new flexibility and convenience while shooting video, users
can now take snapshots at full video resolution just by tapping the screen as
video continues to record.

To make it easier to take great pictures of people, built-in face detection locates
faces in the frame and automatically sets focus. For more control, users can tap to
focus anywhere in the preview image.

For capturing larger scenes, the Camera introduces a single-motion panorama

mode. In this mode, the user starts an exposure and then slowly turns the Camera
to encompass as wide a perspective as needed. The Camera assembles the full
range of continuous imagery into a single panoramic photo.

After taking a picture or video, users can quickly share it by email, text message,
bluetooth, social networks, and more, just by tapping the thumbnail in the camera
controls.

Redesigned Gallery app with photo editor

The Gallery app now makes it easier to manage, show, and share photos and
videos. For managing collections, a redesigned album layout shows many more
albums and offers larger thumbnails. There are many ways to sort albums,
including by time, location, people, and tags. To help pictures look their best, the
Gallery now includes a powerful photo editor. Users can crop and rotate pictures,
set levels, remove red eyes, add effects, and much more. After retouching, users
can select one or multiple pictures or videos to share instantly over email, text
messaging, bluetooth, social networks, or other apps.

An improved Picture Gallery widget lets users look at pictures directly on their
home screen. The widget can display pictures from a selected album, shuffle
pictures from all albums, or show a single image. After adding the widget to the
home screen, users can flick through the photo stacks to locate the image they
want, then tap to load it in Gallery.

Live Effects let you change backgrounds and use Silly Faces during video.

Live Effects for transforming video

Live Effects is a collection of graphical transformations that add interest and fun to
videos captured in the Camera app. For example, users can change the
background behind them to any stock or custom image, for just the right setting
when shooting videeo. Also available for video is Silly Faces, a set of morphing
effects that use state-of-the-art face recognition and GPU filters to transform facial
features. For example, you can use effects such as small eyes, big mouth, big nose,
face squeeze, and more. Outside of the Camera app, Live Effects is available
during video chat in the Google Talk app.
Sharing with screenshots
Users can now share what's on their screens more easily by taking screenshots.
Hardware buttons let them snap a screenshot and store it locally. Afterward, they
can view, edit, and share the screen shot in Gallery or a similar app.

Cloud-connected experience

The Browser tabs menu (left) lets you quickly switch browser tabs. The options
menu (right) gives you new ways to manage your browsing experience.

Benchmark comparisons of Android Browser.

Android has always been cloud-connected, letting users browse the web and sync
photos, apps, games, email, and contacts — wherever they are and across all of
their devices. Android 4.0 adds new browsing and email capabilities to let users
take even more with them and keep communication organized.

Powerful web browsing

The Android Browser offers an experience that’s as rich and convenient as a
desktop browser. It lets users instantly sync and manage Google Chrome
bookmarks from all of their accounts, jump to their favorite content faster, and
even save it for reading later in case there's no network available.

To get the most out of web content, users can now request full desktop versions of
web sites, rather than their mobile versions. Users can set their preference for web
sites separately for each browser tab. For longer content, users can save a copy for
offline reading. To find and open saved pages, users can browse a visual list that’s
included with browser bookmarks and history. For better readability and
accessibility, users can increase the browser’s zoom levels and override the system
default text sizes.

Across all types of content, the Android Browser offers dramatically improved
page rendering performance through updated versions of the WebKit core and
the V8 Crankshaft compilation engine for JavaScript. In benchmarks run on a
Nexus S device, the Android 4.0 browser showed an improvement of nearly 220%
over the Android 2.3 browser in the V8 Benchmark Suite and more than 35% in
the SunSpider 9.1 JavaScript Benchmark. When run on a Galaxy Nexus device, the
Android 4.0 browser showed improvement of nearly 550% in the V8 benchmark
and nearly 70% in the SunSpider benchmark.

Improved email
In Android 4.0, email is easier to send, read, and manage. For composing email,
improved auto-completion of recipients helps with finding and adding frequent
contacts more quickly. For easier input of frequent text, users can now create
quick responses and store them in the app, then enter them from a convenient
menu when composing. When replying to a message, users can now toggle the
message to Reply All and Forward without changing screens.

For easier browsing across accounts and labels, the app adds an integrated menu
of accounts and recent labels. To help users locate and organize IMAP and
Exchange email, the Email app now supports nested mail subfolders, each with
synchronization rules. Users can also search across folders on the server, for faster
results.

For enterprises, the Email app supports EAS v14. It supports EAS certificate
authentication, provides ABQ strings for device type and mode, and allows
automatic sync to be disabled while roaming. Administrators can also limit
attachment size or disable attachments.
For keeping track of incoming email more easily, a resizable Email widget lets
users flick through recent email right from the home screen, then jump into the
Email app to compose or reply.

Android Beam lets users share what they are using with a single tap.
Innovation
Android is continously driving innovation forward, pushing the boundaries of
communication and sharing with new capabilities and interactions.

Android Beam for NFC-based sharing

Android Beam is an innovative, convenient feature for sharing across two NFC-
enabled devices, It lets people instantly exchange favorite apps, contacts, music,
videos — almost anything. It’s incredibly simple and convenient to use — there’s
no menu to open, application to launch, or pairing needed. Just touch one Android-
powered phone to another, then tap to send.

For sharing apps, Android Beam pushes a link to the app's details page in Android
Market. On the other device, the Market app launches and loads the details page,
for easy downloading of the app. Individual apps can build on Android Beam to
add other types of interactions, such as passing game scores, initiating a
multiplayer game or chat, and more.

Face recognition lets you unlock your phone with your face.
Face Unlock
Android 4.0 introduces a completely new approach to securing a device, making
each person's device even more personal — Face Unlock is a new screen-lock
option that lets users unlock their devices with their faces. It takes advantage of the
device front-facing camera and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology to
register a face during setup and then to recognize it again when unlocking the
device. Users just hold their devices in front of their faces to unlock, or use a
backup PIN or pattern.

Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth HDP

Support for Wi-Fi Direct lets users connect directly to nearby peer devices over
Wi-Fi, for more reliable, higher-speed communication. No internet connection or
tethering is needed. Through third-party apps, users can connect to compatible
devices to take advantage of new features such as instant sharing of files, photos,
or other media; streaming video or audio from another device; or connecting to
compatible printers or other devices.

Android 4.0 also introduces built-in support for connecting to Bluetooth Health
Device Profile (HDP) devices. With support from third-party apps, users can
connect to wireless medical devices and sensors in hospitals, fitness centers,
homes, and elsewhere. In addition, for connecting to higher quality Bluetooth
audio devices, Android 4.0 adds support for Bluetooth Hands Free Profile (HFP)
1.6.

Applications
Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS
program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are
written using the Java programming language.
 Android Version

Cupcake:  Android 3.0

 Android 3.1
 Android 1.5  Android 3.2

Donut: Ice Cream Sandwich:

 Android 1.6  Android 4.0

Eclair: Jelly Bean:

 Android 2.0  Android 4.1

 Android 2.1  Android 4.2
 Android 4.3
Froyo: (short for "frozen yogurt")
KitKat:
 Android 2.2
 Android 4.4
Gingerbread:
Lolipop:
 Android 2.3
 Android 5.0
Honeycomb:
 Future scope
Android provides access to a wide range of useful libraries and tools that can be
used to build rich applications. For example, Android enables developers to obtain
the location of the device, and allows devices to communicate with one another
enabling rich peer–to–peer social applications. In addition, Android includes a full
set of tools that have been built from the ground up alongside the platform
providing developers with high productivity and deep insight into their
applications.
 Conclusion
Android does not differentiate between the phone’s core applications and third-
party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone’s
capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services.
With devices built on the Android Platform, users are able to fully tailor the phone
to their interests. They can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer,
or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite
photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.