The Android 3.0 platform is designed specially to meet the unique needs of applications on devices with larger screen sizes.
Activity Fragments are broken down subcomponents of the application. Fragments:
- Can be combined in a variety of ways to create a richer and more interactive experience.
- Can be added, removed, replaced, and animated inside an Activity dynamically.
- Modular and offers an efficient for applications to run properly on both larger and smaller screen devices.
- Reusable across multiple Activities.
Redesign UI widgets for
- Larger screens such as tables.
- New holographic UI theme.
- New widget types such as 3D stack, search box, a date/time picker, number picker, calendar, popup menu, etc.
- Can be used as remote views in application widgets displayed on the home screen.
- Application written for earlier version can inherit the new widget designs and themes.
Expanded Home Screen widgets now has more types of content and new modes of interaction. Developers can use standard UI widget types in the home screen widget. New interaction such as using touch gestures to scroll and flip content displayed in a widget.
Persistent Action Bar at the top of the application screen which gives quick access to contextual options, widgets, status, navigation, etc.
Richer notifications in a new builder class that include large and small icons, a title, a priority flag, and any properties existing in previous versions, and more content by expanding on the UI Widgets via remove Views.
Multiselect, clipboard and drag-and-drop for managing collections of items in lists or grids.
- Multiselect mode lets users choose mutile items for an action.
- New system-wide Clipboard to let uses easily copy any type of data into and out of their applications.
- Drag-and-Drop interaction through a DragEvent framework allos easier file management and organization.
New Animation framework is more flexible and allows easy animation of the properties of UI elements such as Views, Widgets, Fragments, Drawables, and any arbitrary objects.
Hardware-accelerated 2D graphics with OpenGL renderer that gives a performance boost for most operations in Canvas, Paint, Xfermode, ColorFilter, Shader, and Camera. Developers can control how hardware-acceleration is applied at every level; enabling it globally, specific Activities or Views inside the application.
Renderscript 3D graphics engine
- Provides an API for building 3D scenes.
- A platform-independent shader language for maximum performance.
- Accelerate graphics operations and data processing.
Support for multicore processor architectures
Is the first Android version that has a variety of changes in the Dalvik VM, Bionic library, etc. Single-threaded applications might also see a performance boost if the Dalvik garbage collector runs on the second core automatically.
- HTTP Live streaming allows an M3U playlist URL to the media framework to begin an HTTP Live streaming session including adaptive bit rate.
- Pluggable DRM framework that lets applications manage protected content according to a variety of DRM mechanisms that may be available on the device.
- Digital media file transfer includes built-in support for Media/Picture Transfer Protocol (MTP/PTP) over USB, let users create or manage media files that they may want to transfer or share across devices.
- Bluetooth A2DP and HSP profiles lets applications query Bluetooth profiles for connected devices, audio state, and more, then notify the user.
- System broadcasts of pre-defined vendor-specific AT commands, such as Platronics Xevent.
- New support for full keyboards connected by USB or Bluetooth.
Enhancements for enterprise
Developer of device administration applications can support new types of policies, including policies for encrypted storage, password expiration, password history, and password complex characters required.
Compatibility with existing apps
There is a new UI designed for tablets and other larger screen devices, but it also is fully compatible with applications developed for earlier versions of the platform, or for smaller screen sizes. Developers wanting to take fuller advantage of larger screen sizes can also create dedicated layouts and assets for larger screens and add them to their existing applications.
