Android 3.1 Platform Highlights | Hacker News Reader

Android 3.1 Platform Highlights

developer.android.com

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Just got the 3.1 update for my Xoom. Few observations :

* Flash acceleration seems to be both enabled and making a positive difference in smoothness.

* UI is noticeably smoother and we got a brighter text selection caret.

* New scrollable multitasking is welcome as I was frequently hitting the older limitation of handful apps listed there

* No crashes or force closes yet

* SD card STILL does not work which is ridiculous.

Its some really positive improvements. It will be interesting to see if the UI evolves more rapidly to a better place than the iPad UI.

Support for USB devices is an interesting thing from a number of perspectives. I don't think it puts ChromeOS in jeopardy but I do think it means some great differentiation from the iPad. Looking at the Cellbots [1] stuff that has been done with Android I can imagine some cool things with a tablet and the even better capabilities.

It will be interesting to see what they do to replace Skype now that Microsoft has a plan to own it. Without the equivalent of 'facetime' (and yes I fully expect Microsoft to limit your rights to run a Skype client on any 'mobile device' that isn't running Windows Phone) they will need a replacement. Fortunately they have the video engine in GTalk.

[1] www.cellbots.com

The "input from mice, keyboard, and joysticks" sounds like Android might just supplant ChromeOS.

GoogleTV+Android3.1+joysticks = console play... considering GoogleTV hasn't really been popular, this might be what it needs to make a splash in the living room.

This and the picture of a laptop in a slide during the Ice Cream announcement made me wonder if this means Android is coming to the laptop form factor, and/or other 'PC' form factors. Certainly would be interesting.

There have been android laptops, like the Toshiba AC100 and many tablets are coming into the laptop form, like the ASUS Transformer series.

And still no source Luke. Not even for 3.0 ...

They said in the Fire Chat with the Android team that they will push the icecream source to git. This will include all the previous commits including the Honeycomb ones. They are not sure yet if they will tag what exact commit exactly corresponds to 3.0 and 3.1 but the commit will be there (this is how git works).

Anyway, it doesn't really matter as long as the icecream release is tagged (and it will be), why would we care about a year old commit when the latest can be used instead?

I'm hoping the browser control shortcuts improve tab switching. That's my only complaint about the current browser, but it's a big one.

2 factor auth support?

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