Notably, Froyo also brought support for Flash to Android's web browser — an option that was significant both because of the widespread use of Flash at the time and because of Apple's adamant stance against supporting it on its own mobile devices.
Apple would eventually win, of course, and Flash would become far less common. But back when it was still everywhere, being able to access the full web without any black holes was a genuine advantage only Android could offer. Android's first true visual identity started coming into focus with 's Gingerbread release. Bright green had long been the color of Android's robot mascot, and with Gingerbread, it became an integral part of the operating system's appearance.
Black and green seeped all over the UI as Android started its slow march toward distinctive design. Android 3. Under the guidance of newly arrived design chief Matias Duarte , Honeycomb introduced a dramatically reimagined UI for Android.
It had a space-like "holographic" design that traded the platform's trademark green for blue and placed an emphasis on making the most of a tablet's screen space. While the concept of a tablet-specific interface didn't last long, many of Honeycomb's ideas laid the groundwork for the Android we know today.
The software was the first to use on-screen buttons for Android's main navigational commands; it marked the beginning of the end for the permanent overflow-menu button; and it introduced the concept of a card-like UI with its take on the Recent Apps list. With Honeycomb acting as the bridge from old to new, Ice Cream Sandwich — also released in — served as the platform's official entry into the era of modern design. The release refined the visual concepts introduced with Honeycomb and reunited tablets and phones with a single, unified UI vision.
ICS dropped much of Honeycomb's "holographic" appearance but kept its use of blue as a system-wide highlight.
And it carried over core system elements like on-screen buttons and a card-like appearance for app-switching. Android 4. And it started the slow process of bringing a standardized design framework — known as "Holo" — all throughout the OS and into Android's app ecosystem.
Spread across three impactful Android versions, and 's Jelly Bean releases took ICS's fresh foundation and made meaningful strides in fine-tuning and building upon it. The releases added plenty of poise and polish into the operating system and went a long way in making Android more inviting for the average user. Visuals aside, Jelly Bean brought about our first taste of Google Now — the spectacular predictive-intelligence utility that's sadly since devolved into a glorified news feed. It gave us expandable and interactive notifications, an expanded voice search system, and a more advanced system for displaying search results in general, with a focus on card-based results that attempted to answer questions directly.
Multiuser support also came into play, albeit on tablets only at this point, and an early version of Android's Quick Settings panel made its first appearance. Searches can be done by text and Voice, and this is not restricted to just the Web; you can also search your bookmark history, Contacts, Music, Dictionary and the Web with this method and from the same search box.
App screenshots are now available in the Android Market. The Gallery was fully integrated with the Camera apps for better and faster viewing of photos taken from the camera.
Eclair, Android 2. Android users were also treated to the virtual keyboard for a faster typing experience, and if typing takes too long, then the speech-to-text technology is the best alternative. Users who have multiple emails could browse their multiple accounts at the same time, and the Account sync enables synchronization of email and contacts easily.
Calling or texting friends has become a lot easier by using a long press over the wanted Contact Name, then selecting to Call or Text them.
The Camera app on Android 2. That double-tap that allows you to zoom into text on a browser? It was introduced in this version as well, along with support for HTML5 and an improved navigational experience with Google Maps. Come May , Android 2. Android users can also now run Flash on their Android device and are treated to picture preview stacks in the 3D photo shots gallery without selecting to see the full photo first.
Also worth mentioning is the remote wipe features that allow you to wipe out your data in the event of a lost or stolen phone for better data protection. Android 2. Users are able to quickly switch between front and back camera in the modified camera app.
Copy-paste can now be done word by word press-hold to select rather than by blocks of text. This version also has better battery management tools allowing users to see which app is zapping battery juice the most. Its last update v2.
Taking a break from smartphones is the Android 3. Everything is on the UI now, with no need for physical buttons. The Back and Home keys get perpetual spots at the bottom of the screen.
Widgets become more prominent as developers get more room to play with due to the larger screen size. In the main view, one can see two bars: at the top, the Action bar, which gives access to individual apps and widgets, at the bottom, the System bar showing notifications and soft navigation buttons. The first upgrade to the Android platform came in February , a little over three months after the launch of the G1.
Version 1. At the time, that was a big deal, and it was something that no other major smartphone platform was doing. The trend has continued and is expected to go on. In many ways, Cupcake was about refinement, polishing some rough edges on the user interface that had originally launched. Hover over the image below to get a sense of just how subtle these changes were. If you used a device running 1. Most G1 users probably flew past those UI tweaks without noticing them because the extensive list of new features Google had thrown in was far more exciting, noticeable, and immediately relevant in day-to-day use:.
An on-screen keyboard. In conjunction with the soft keyboard support, Google took a bold step: it integrated the hooks necessary for third-party developers to create their own replacement keyboards, which is a capability that differentiated Android from competing platforms for years.
Extensible widgets. While Android 1. The only widgets you had available were the few included in the box. That changed in 1. Clipboard improvements. The platform technically supported it from day one, but it was largely limited to text fields and links. Video capture and playback. And a lot more. In a way, this feature — synchronization of rich contact information across multiple apps and screens — would foretell the direction that Android was moving, particularly in 2.
It made another pass of minor visual refinements throughout the platform, but much of the big news was under the hood. CDMA support was first offered in Donut, opening the door to American carriers like Verizon and potentially hundreds of millions of subscribers across Asia. Donut marked the first time that Android was capable of running on a variety of screen resolutions and aspect ratios, which opened the door for phones that featured displays of something other than x in a portrait orientation.
All these scaling capabilities trace their roots directly to 1. What other features debuted in Android 1. Eclair, as it was known, was initially offered exclusively on Verizon on none other than the Motorola Droid — the phone that kicked off one of the most successful mobile franchises of its time.
What made Eclair so important? It represented the most fundamental refresh that Android had seen since its debut, both visually and architecturally. Multiple account support. For the first time, multiple Google accounts could be added to the same device — separate work and personal accounts, for instance — with access to email and contacts from each.
Support for Exchange accounts was added, too. Eclair also gave third parties the tools they needed to plug their own services into this account framework, which would then permit them to be automatically synchronized on an ongoing basis. One key advantage is that shared information between your account types can be automatically synchronized into a single contact on the phone, a one-stop shop for all the information about the individuals in your address book.
Google Maps Navigation. Released in conjunction with Android 2. Quick Contact. The bar was designed from the outset to be extensible, too, so different types of information got synchronized to your contact. Twitter handles, for instance, could be added to the bar. Soft keyboard improvements. Revamped browser. Considering that Android 2. There were countless other changes that touched nearly every screen in Eclair, too.
Google continued its trend of warming over the UI in the latest version, but the changes generally felt more cohesive in 2. Android 2. There were, however, a couple notable additions in 2. Live wallpapers.
But now, users could talk into their phones as a replacement for traditional keyboard input. To facilitate that, Android 2. Apple added a similar feature to the keyboard in iOS 5. A new lock screen. The functionality remained largely the same this time, but Google changed the clock typeface from a standard sans serif to a distinctly more Android-esque, high-tech font and modified the unlock and mute functions to require a straight swipe rather than a curved one.
Android the way Google intended, as it were. It was well ahead of its time, and it has since gone down as one of the most well-regarded Android phones ever produced. Google actually started down this path in Android 2. Google and Moto worked very closely together in the development of the phone, and the Droid received Eclair well before anyone else did. That changed with the Nexus One. What did Google have to showcase in Froyo?
From the first power-on, the redesigned home screen was instantly recognizable: the old three-panel view was gone which dated back to Android 1. Additionally, dots on either side of the shortcuts gave the user an indication of what panel they were currently viewing. Google had actually outsourced its development to an outside firm. More generally, it was around the launch of 2. About a half year after the launch of Froyo on the Nexus One, Google came back for another round of the Nexus program to support the release of Android 2.
The ubiquitous trackball beneath the display was no more. With the Nexus S, it appeared that Google was finally ready to bid adieu to hardware navigation of the user interface.
This seemingly trivial change actually had a pretty big effect on the appearance of the platform. It instantly looked cleaner and more modern. More granular control over copy and paste. Prior to Gingerbread, stock Android only offered the ability to copy the contents of entire text boxes, which was frequently usually, even not what you wanted to do.
Gingerbread fixed this, adding word-by-word highlighting with finger-draggable anchors on either end to facilitate adjusting the highlight. Like the home screen improvements in Froyo, this was another area where Google was catching up to the innovations that some of its OEMs had already been including in their skins for some time.
HTC had already grafted similar functionality into prior releases. An improved keyboard. Google once again tweaked its stock keyboard for 2. Better battery and app management tools. Android had been dinged by some for being too effective in supporting multitasking. By letting software run free in the background, battery life was always at risk of taking a big hit, particularly if a user had loaded poorly designed apps. Gingerbread helped make that a little easier to fix with a new bundled utility for graphically viewing battery drain over time and seeing exactly what apps and system functions are eating the most power.
Of course, the onus was still on the user to uninstall offending apps or adjust their usage. Support for front-facing cameras. Other new features of Gingerbread were targeted more at developers than end users: NFC support, for one, was available on the Nexus S by way of a special antenna embedded in the battery cover.
Many companies are still betting the farm on the future of NFC and mobile payments, and Gingerbread was on the bleeding edge of that push. Google also used the launch of Gingerbread as an opportunity to gain some footing in the mobile gaming market, an area where it had lagged iOS significantly. The new version gave developers lower-level access to audio, device controls, graphics, and storage, which allowed them to write considerably faster native code. This was absolutely key for creating the rich, graphics-intensive 3D games that the platform lacked.
Honeycomb was, to say the least, an oddity. Instead, Google returned to Motorola — the company that it had worked with to deliver Android 2. That device would become the Xoom. A move from green to blue accents. Green was, is, and likely forever will be associated with Android. On the actual platform, though, green was shown the door with the release of Honeycomb. In its place, a light, desaturated blue was used for the battery and signal indicators, the clock widget, and a variety of highlights and trim pieces throughout the interface.
Redesigned home screen and widget placement. Rather than choosing home screen widgets from a list, sight unseen, Honeycomb ratcheted up the user friendliness a couple notches by showing visible previews for each type of widget available on the system.
Though Android had always used a grid for widget and icon placement on the home screen, Honeycomb did a better job of embracing it and exposing it to the user. The death of physical buttons.
On a Honeycomb tablet, there was no need for dedicated, physical buttons for Back, Home, Menu, and Search as there had been on phones running 2. For hardware manufacturers, less bezel space needed to be devoted to supporting hardware buttons. Improved multitasking. More importantly, there were screen captures for each. A new paradigm for app layout. It was something of a dedicated status bar for each individual application.
Android 3. Android 4. Ice Cream Sandwich was, without question, the biggest change for Android on phones at the time. Ice Cream Sandwich replaced it with another bespoke font — Roboto — that was said to be designed to take better advantage of the higher-resolution displays. Google would later open source Roboto in , four years after the release in 4. The aging notification screen is still one of the best implementations available in a mobile platform, but ICS improved it by making individual notifications removable simply by swiping them off the screen.
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