Android phone insurance covers from the GoTronics android phone insurance company

The GoTronics android phone insurance company has brought a new definition to the android phone insurance industry. It has gone miles by introducing very special inclusions in the android phone insurance cover which you can purchase from us. There is an extended android phone insurance warranty which you can be able to enjoy and have everything catered for. You are able to be given two years of insurance which grants you the chance of having all damages catered for fully. All damaged charge ports, can be repaired and you would be able to enjoy the services which your android phone offers you. No extra charges are required from you for as long as you have valid android phone insurance.

There is a 90 day full refund guarantee which you can only be able to get from the GoTronics android phone insurance company and nowhere else. If you can change your mind about having your android phone insurance cover, you would be able to get your android phone insurance claim paid to you fully. This is a very great offer for those who do not need their android phone insurance offers extended to the full period. If you had never had any repairs done on your android phone, you would be very well compensated in full.

The GoTronics android phone insurance company is the only company which has data recovery included in its cover. Your data is very important and you can never risk loosing them. If you purchase android phone insurance from GoCare android phone insurance company, you would be very settled knowing that everything that you may loose if your android phone drops in water would be recovered.

The GoTronics android phone insurance company is also in a position to insure android phones which were not bought from our company. It is of no importance to us if you just bought your android phone from another company store. What GoTronics android phone insurance company is always concerned about is the fact that your android phone has never undergone any form of repairs in the past. It is also important if is in good working condition for it to be able to qualify for android phone insurance from us. If your android phone was bought on a second hand basis, you would still have a chance to have it evaluated to see if you can still qualify for android phone insurance cover from us. Terms are always the same and you would never get locked out of our android phone insurance cover just because you bought your android phone from either eBay or from a friend.

The efficiency of GoTronics android phone insurance company

Efficiency of an android phone insurance company is very important. This is because there can be very serious implications to both your business and your personal life. If for example the android phone insurance company you are working with takes to long to process its android phone insurance cover, you can be faced with damages even before the android phone insurance is complete. The result would be so annoying because what you were trying to avoid has caught up with you when things are being dragged. The GoTronics android phone insurance company ensures you of speed in everything it does from servicing your android insurance cover, doing your android repairs when it is damaged to quick processing of your android phone insurance claims.

There is enough infrastructures which have been put in place to ensure that all android phone insurance services go as fast as they should. There is no single step which has not been considered. All the machines and tools which may be necessary for doing repairs, testing or evaluation of your android phone are all set in place so that time is not wasted. Your time is very respected by GoTronics android phone insurance company and that is why we are always struggling to get you the android phone insurance services within the shortest time possible. Still on time, GoTronics android phone insurance company has a courier service which does all the errands to keep efficiency reachable. The GoTronics android phone insurance courier is used to pick up your android phone for repairs or evaluation. After your android phone has been worked on, the android phone insurance courier again ensures that you get your phone at the appropriate time.

The effects of down time are well understood at the GoCare android phone insurance company. This is why we do not ever compromise on doing things as they should be done and at the right time. When you are working with GoCare android phone insurance company you will never experience the effects of down time. Being without your android phone could make you to loose touch with very important people and you could even loose business. With the understanding that GoCare android phone insurance company has, we have come up with a solution to the occurrences of down time. You can now find loaner android phones from GoTronics android phone insurance company. If at any time you need one, the only thing you would be require to do is to send a request for it either by phone or email and the GoTronics android phone insurance courier would be at your office in no time to deliver a loaner android phone for your use.

Unmatched reputation of the GoTronics android phone insurance company

The reputation which the GoTronics android phone insurance company has built over time is very great. So many people have worked with the android phone insurance company and are always glad to testify about our great android phone insurance covers. It is obvious that for an android phone insurance company to be in the industry for so long, its services must be good. This is not only determined by its being able to give you a genuine android phone insurance cover, how a customer is handled really gets the reputation of the android phone insurance company up or down.

Our customers are served with great honesty and dignity such that you would be able to get no issue to complain about. The fact that your android phone contains so much information which may not just be personal but also private makes our staff to be very cautious with it whenever it is in our hands. For example if your android phone falls in water and you need to get your data recovered, the GoTronics android phone insurance staff would be able to get it out for you without prying or breaching your privacy. We know that our android insurance customers value their dignity and that is why every GoCare android phone insurance personnel has been trained to respect that.

The turn around time within which the GoTronics android phone insurance company works does not exceed 24 hours. Your android phone gets a quick servicing from the GoTronics android phone insurance technicians. Depending on the intensity of damage which your android phone may have suffered, turn around time may be as little as two hours. Minor repairs and replacements can even be doe as you wait or our courier service can pick up your android phone to bring it for repairs and deliver it back to you within the agreed time. All these just make GoTronics android phone insurance company to be very efficient and a very reputable android phone insurance company that you would love to work with. We give you android phone insurance cover with your interests and satisfaction at heart.

Replacements of damaged android phone parts are usually done using original apple spare parts only. You may not find this in an otherwise android phone insurance company but with the GoTronics android phone insurance company, it is a guarantee because we know the worth of your android phone and really value your satisfaction. Be it replacement of your android phones glass or the charge port, you will always be sure that the GoTronics android phone insurance technicians will carry out any necessary replacement with the required type of spare parts.

Highly Rated Android Phones-TradeTang

Which Top Android Phone is Right For You?
Everybody knows about the iPhone and the Blackberry Most likely you know about the Pearl. Additionally, you may have heard about the Android phones that are on the market. Without even realizing it, the fact is the Google's Android phones are all over the cell phone market! This is because several different cell phone manufactures have adopted the Android operating system into their phones. This means your choices for amazing phones are better than you probably thought they were. The top rated Android phones are as good as all the other smart phones available on the market. When you consider buying a new phone, here are some of the best choices among the Android phones.

One of the best Android cell phones is the Motorola Quench. The Quench, a later model of Motorola has been enhanced with the Android operating system. This is one of eight Motorola phone models, which utilizes the Android system. With very high definition – 320 x 480 – the small screen of only a little more than three inches, won't be an issue. Additionally, it uses the Motoblur technology, which was designed to enhance the user's social networking experience. It runs on the Android 1.5 operating system and comes equipped with Wi-Fi capabilities, GPS, a five-megapixel camera and tons of apps the user will love.
T-Mobile offers a popular Android phone called the Pulse Mini. This phone is designed for the money conscious consumer who wants all the bells and whistles of an Android phone but does not want to pay an astronomical price. The touch screen on this unlocked android phones are not even three inches. It comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera that has an LED Flash that helps the photographer snap even better photos. Android 2.1 software operates the phone. This phone has a jack for a headphone, which makes it different than the standard Pulse phone.
There are so many cell phones out there that it is common to overlook the Acer Liquid e cell phone. Acer is not well known for its phones-it is better known for its computers and monitors. This phone gets its power from the Android 2.1 operating system.
One character is its Snapdragon processor The screen is precisely three and half inches big and runs on touch screen technology. It has many features – Wi-Fi capability, GPS, a 5-megapixel camera, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack to allow you to listen to music as well as plug in an earpiece and microphone to aid you with hands free cell phone calls. Google came up with the Android system and it is making it possible for cell phone manufactures to compete the iPhone from Apple. Noticeably, the Android is a big time competitor with Apple and has now allowed other cell phone companies an opportunity to provide comparable smart phones to people who want to upgrade from their current phone to something more wise and cultivated. In actuality, cell phones are no longer used solely for making calls. Today they take photos, play tunes and give you a connection to the Internet. If you are yearning to upgrade your cell phone but are skeptical about the iPhone, the Unlocked Android phone is a great choice

Android phone insurance company

The GoCare android phone insurance company has a very skilled team which handles your work. The Skills have been developed over a considerable duration of time such that when any of the GoTronics android insurance technicians touches your android phone, it is ensured of perfect results at the end. Before anyone can get employed at the GoCare android phone insurance company, his credentials and training background testimonials are keenly scrutinized because we can not risk to experiment with our android phone insurance customers expensive android phones. GoTronics android phone insurance company administration does not stop there in the effort of verification of its android insurance technicians abilities. All recruits at GoCare android phone insurance company go through a rigorous session of induction training before getting absorbed into the team of qualified android phone insurance personnel

With GoCare android phone insurance company, quality is an absolute guarantee. Nothing is left to chance because we really value the satisfaction which our android phone insurance customers get from us. We are not just after doing business without caring about how our customers feel as concerns our android phone insurance service provision. The opinions of any android phone insurance customer are highly welcome as they help is to improve on our android phone insurance service provision means and get us maintained at the top. The best thing we can ever offer our android phone insurance customers is a listening ear. GoCare android phone insurance company takes your android phone insurance concerns and opinions, work on them and find out the best and perfect way to develop them so as to reach a perfect android phone insurance satisfaction for you.

Unlike most android phone insurance companies which just give you a limiting one year android phone insurance cover, there is a two year android phone insurance cover which you would only be able to enjoy if you work with GoTronics android phone insurance company. A lot that may be of concern to you is all included within the two years without having you to go back to your pockets for any reason whatsoever. This is of so much convenience because for the entire period when your android phone will be having GoCare android phone insurance cover, all damages on your android phone would be done for you. Should you phone be stolen before the expiry date of your android phone insurance cover from the GoTronics android phone insurance company, you would be able to get your android phone insurance compensation. The compensation is processed so fast so that you do not have to stay long before either receiving your money or getting a brand new android phone worth the claim you are making.

Android Phone Survival Scrutiny

Android based telephones are the most popular smartphones on the market today. Android is definitely outselling the iPhone and is accessible on each main cell carrier. New customers usually struggle to really get the most out of their Android handset. Frequent criticisms of Android would doubtless evaporate if more customers knew ways to maximise the good factor about their Android handset. Listed below are some purposes, ideas and methods that I've discovered to actually enhance the usefulness of my Android phone.

Managing Your Battery Life
A criticism that I hear often is that Android phones have very poor battery life. That was actually true with the earliest fashions, and it might still be true with the newer handsets. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools for managing your battery life that may assist you squeeze the most from your Android phone's battery.

A few of the options of Android aren't needed on a constant basis. These include Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS. These options can quickly drain the phone battery if they are working continuously. Fortunately, Android version 1.6 added some tools to make it simpler to modify this stuff off in an effort to increase battery life. There is a widget you can add to your phone's desktop that lets you switch these options ON and OFF with a single touch. Many purposes have the flexibility to toggle these ON and OFF as properly so if an utility wants one in all these options, it can activate it.

Another frustrating side of managing your battery life on Android is that the default battery meter solely displays a coloration: inexperienced, yellow and red to point how much battery energy remains. This could make it more durable to gauge if an utility is draining your battery more quickly than normal. Battery Meter Lite is a free software that features a battery remaining notification. When this notification is enabled a battery icon with the percentage of battery remaining will seem in your notification area. This makes it a lot simpler to manage your battery life because you know precisely how much battery energy remains.

Managing Duties
Typically you need to know what duties are working and have an approach to cease a running task. This is very true when you have got an older Android telephone with a slow processor. System Panel Lite is a superb application for this. When you've got got ever used an Unix based mostly working system or Linux, System Panel Lite will remind you of the highest application. It gives an inventory of actively working processes and inactive however cached processes. It additionally offers you some helpful charts of the current CPU usage and reminiscence usage. Clicking on a working utility, you may see the individual application's CPU and memory utilization and you have got the option of killing the process. By default, system processes are hidden from view but there is an possibility in settings to see the Android system processes as well.

Getting Extra from Messaging
Once I first acquired my Android cellphone, I hated the default messaging application. I shortly found Handcent SMS, a free utility that replaces the default messaging application. Handcent features a threaded interface to can assist you visually see the forwards and backwards dialog you are having through SMS. It additionally allows sending footage via MMS and saving MMS attachments. You presumably can set Handcent because the default messaging utility on Android. Handcent will even present notifications for brand new SMS messages. The notification might be personalized a bit, including what colour your cellphone LED should flash when you might have new messages. While you change to Handcent, you will have to enter the default messaging utility and switch off its notifications. Otherwise, you're going to get two notifications each time you obtain a message.

Ditch Your iPod
Let's face it - carrying a phone and a music player is a pain. Luckily, you can simply change your iPod along with your Android phone. The default music player that ships with Android is agreeably nothing to put in writing home about. The interface may be very simple and albeit, fairly boring. However, you may simply exchange it with the Cubed Media Participant from the Android market.

Cubed is a free media participant with a considerably unique consumer interface. Album paintings appears in a third-dimensional cube. By rotating the cube up or down, you presumably can flick thru your album paintings in a fashion similar to iPod's cover flow. Rotating the dice to the left or proper lets you alphabetically flip by means of your collection. This will be a nice utility for turning your Android phone into a completely featured media player.

Android is an working system for smartphones, tablets, and internet books. But the precise meaning of the Android is a robot that's developed to look and act like humans. Presently Android Operating system is essentially the most used cellular working system with over 33% of its share in the good cellphone market in 2010. These statistics explains us all the story of how vital function the Android phones are enjoying in human day-to-day life. With over 12 million lines code, android operating system is the integration of Java, XML, C, C++ languages. Being such an necessary and loopy product, Android's have crossed the Symbian, Blackberry OS in 2010 statistics, because of this the concentration was now shifted to Android phone and tons of official as nicely as private developers had been deeply involved in creating the most effective Android apps for Android phone. Listed here are the must have best Android apps to your Android phone.

Top 5 Finest Android Apps

Beneath is the checklist of prime 5 greatest Android apps of all of the time. There isn't any method that we are ready to embrace all the apps in our greatest android apps post. That is mainly centered on utility and value they offer.

Phone Halo Shield is our first alternative in best Android apps part that retains the track of cellular, protects it, and helps us to get well the lost data.
It consists of Bluetooth gadget as it really works on it when Cell is lost. It makes use of the GPS system to recuperate the stuff.
The three main fundamental works of this application is Protect, Find and Recover.
This can be a paid software, you can buy this software from official web site
Titanium Backup

The Titanium Backup is ultimate backup software, that can backup and restore all purposes, information, market hyperlinks, what not it just provides another life on your Android phone.
Titanium Backup is obtainable in each Paid in addition to Free version. Paid version will provide you faster experience and most reliable restore options.
It prices round 5.99$ which is actually a cheaper option on your Cellular backup. You may view the official web page for extra information.
The most effective Android apps that you want to download.
Nimbuzz for Android phone

Nimbuzz is a free IM client, that permits the Chat with our Online friends from Google Speak, Yahoo, Home windows Dwell Messenger, Skype, Facebook, AIM, Myspace and tons of more.
Its helps us to view pals who's online, standing messages, avatars, notifications and many more when your background is running.
Its a free software, that always provides you the feel that you're having mini pc in your hand. That is actually an advisable instrument for web freaks. You may obtain it here.
WordPress For Android cellphone

WordPress for Android phone is an Open Source Utility that which helps you to to experience the facility of WordPress in your android mobile.
This allows you to write new posts, edit content, and handle comments with built-in notifications. What not, you probably can have maximum experience of your WordPress blogging platform on your Android mobile.
Its a free utility and you can download it from official website.
It's a will have to have apps that is out there in our top 5 finest Android apps
Ultimate FavsPro Utility

Final FavsPro is a greatest Android apps beneath utility part enables you to to organize many issues in a graphical method on your Android phone. With this software organizing becomes really easy and you'll have an important experience.
This is the free Android apps, you possibly can obtain it from the official site.

How to Convert Video to Android Phone Format

Android phone is famous for running multiple applications at the same time, but it supports relatively few video formats (only supports H.263, H.264 AVC, MPEG-4 SP video format). So what if to play AVI, Xvid, DivX, MKV, WMV, RM, FLV, SWF, ASF, MPG, MOV, MPEG, HD, MTS, M2TS, and TS on your Android phone like Samsung i7500, Samsung Galaxy, HTC Hero, HTC Legend, HTC Desire HD, HTC Wildfire, Motorola Droid, Motorola Flipout, Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, LG Ally and etc?
If fact, it is very easy to do it so long as you own the professional Android Converter-Bigasoft Total Video Converter.
Bigasoft Total Video Converter, as a professional Android Converter, can easily convert video to Android supported format. No matter what video format you have like AVI, Xvid, DivX, MKV, WMV, RM, FLV, SWF, ASF, MPG, MOV, MTS, M2TS, and TS, the professional Android Video Converter is able to convert them to Android phone video format. Moreover, the ideal Android Converter also can serve as Android Audio Converter to convert any audio format to Android phone supported audio format or to extract audio from video and then save as Android phone supported audio format.
The following is a step by step guide on how to convert video to Android phone format. This guide is also applied to converting audio to Android supported format.
Step 1 Run Android Converter
Free download the professional Android Converter - Bigasoft Total Video Converter (Windows Version ,Mac Version ) install and run it.

Step 2 Import video to Android Converter
Click the "Add File" button to import your video which you want to play on Android phone. Or simply drag and drop video to the Android Converter.

Step 3 Set Android phone format
Click the drop-down button on the right side of the "Profile" button to select Android phone format like Gphone MPEG4 Video (*.mp4) .
Step 4 Customize (Optional)
The ideal Android Converter also provides some advanced functions for you to edit your video before converting the video to Android phone format.

"Trim" function is for you to select the clips you want to convert.
"Crop" function is for you to cut off the black edges of the original movie video and watch in full screen on your Android phone.
"Preference" function is for you to set output effects, image type, CPU usage and action after conversion done.
"Settings" function is for you to set parameters of your output files such as frame rate, resolution, channels, sample rate, video /audio codec, video/audio bitrates, etc.
You can also join several chapters into one by checking "Merge into one file" box.
You can drag and drop the folder where your video files are in to the Android Converter by checking "Copy Folder Structure" box.
You can output the converted video to source folder by checking "Output to Source Folder ".
Step 5 Convert video to Android phone format
Click the "Start" button to finish convert video to Android format.
Step 6 Transfer the converted video to Android phone
Connect Android phone to your PC or Mac, then transfer the converted video to Android phone.
Tips

• What is Android?
  • Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc., a firm purchased by Google in 2005. Android is an open source mobile phone platform based on the Linux operating system. As a flagship participant in the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), Android operating system can be installed by all the members from the Open Handset Alliance including Google, HTC, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung, LG, T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems and more.
• Android phones
  • Android phones refer to phones that use Android as a mobile operating system including HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, Acer Inc, Garmin, HKC, Dell, Huawei, Lenovo, Pantech and more. Usually, Android phones support H.263, H.264 (in 3GP or MP4 container), and MPEG-4 SP video format. If you want to play AVI, Xvid, DivX, MKV, WMV, RM, FLV, SWF, ASF, MPG, MOV, MPEG, MPG, HD, MTS, M2TS, TS in Android phone, you need to convert them to Android phone format like MP4, 3GP.
• Why choose Android phone
  • Android phone includes various phone models, and different phone model has its specific features. But they also have common features which make Android phone more competitive.
  • Android phone can run multiple apps at the same time whether they are system apps or apps from the Android Marketplace. At this respect, Android phone is even more competitive than iPhone OS which does offer limited multitasking, but only allows native applications such as Mail, iPod and Phone to run in the background.

Google Maps on your mobile browser

With 40% of Google Maps usage on mobile devices, we want you to have a consistent Google Maps experience wherever you use it. So, today we’re announcing our updated Google Maps experience for mobile browsers on Android and iOS.

Now, when you visit maps.google.com on your phone or tablet’s browser and opt-in to share your location, you can use many of the same Google Maps features you’re used to from the desktop. This will allow you to:

• See your current location
  
• Search for what’s nearby with suggest and auto complete
  
• Have clickable icons of popular businesses and transit stations
  
• Get driving, transit, biking, and walking directions
  
• Turn on satellite, transit, traffic, biking, and other layers
  
• View Place pages with photos, ratings, hours, and more
  
• When signed into your Google account, access your starred locations and My Maps

This past weekend, I was at a team off-site at a ropes course and needed to find a good deli spot to grab lunch. I opened Google Maps on my mobile browser and searched to locate a popular deli nearby. A few finger taps later, I had viewed photos and reviews on the deli’s Place page and found the quickest way to get there using driving directions- all from my mobile browser.

Google Maps for mobile browsers is platform independent - you will always get a consistent experience and the latest features without needing to install any updates, no matter what phone you use.

To get started exploring Google Maps in your mobile browser, go to http://maps.google.com or any domain where Google Maps is available. Learn more in our help center.

The Future of Android Phones

The age of the Android phone is fast dawning... and most of the applications are freely available, finally some decent ammo to wipe the smug smile on the face of his iFriends. Android phones have feature-rich applications that are not included in other mobile phones, and are ready to take on the market. The best part of Android is that you have a number of options with you, and not only some of them. An interesting feature of the Android phones that offer multiple levels of volume for the various functions of the phone.

The system, developed by Google Android, is a manufacturer of mobile phones to help compete with Apple's iPhone. The Android is seen as strong competition from Apple and so many cell phone companies are able to offer smart phones like the people in the market to your current phone. Upgrade

something more intelligent and competent. What do you need from your phone. It's a good question to consider when it comes to mobile phone users is for an update. Originally, the sole purpose of owning a mobile phone was. Since the cell phone tour, people began to want to take Photos, text messages, listen to music and Internet access. You can do all this and much more if you choose a smartphone. Now you can play Games on their mobile phone, weather and a series of activities, and make calls. Before selecting one of the Android phones it should be considered what basically you are looking out in a phone.

If you are considering buying a new phone, here are some of the best options to Android phones. Best Android phones are as good as the other Smartphones on the market. The reason is that several mobile phone manufacturers have adopted the Android operating system on their phones. It is possible not noticed, but the fact is that Google's Android phones are all over the cell phone market. As one of the best phones available with Android, the HTC Hero has made a lot of hype. This entry is made for the price conscious buyer who wants all mobile the perks an Android phone do not pay dollars more. Another option for mobile phones running the Android software is BETouch Acer E400. The company Acer install its own user interface connected to the system and also installed GPS Android, 600 MHz processor and Wi-Fi. A Android phones on the market first is the LG MaxGW620 InTouch. This phone is powererd from Android 2.

It is a business, while Android kicks WIN mobile in the teeth, &, a division of the open mobile advertising if a viable business because it can not expect Google stores Gettig in a search application in all places and from any phone. One of them is the Google marketplace where thousands of applications for mobile running the operating system Android than T-Mobile G1 and the myTouch T-Mobile with Google. Android users are waiting months after the first announcement to receive Pandora Mobile App for Android. In fact, many people complain that there is absolutely no competition for Android phones in the mobile Market. An important aspect of owning a mobile phone is Android Marketplace mobile applications, with thousands of requests to choose. If you are a parent, and are concerned and monitor the activities of your children, to protect cell phones and other sexting Mobi dangers stealth, then parental control software is for you. The launch of Android, the Google mobile operating system in virtually all areas of the market as "beginner is published up to and including the super-power Smartphones. Since Android has increased, has the Google mobile operating system used in virtually all market segments appear, including high beginners and the end Phones. Look at it, the Android phones can now be purchased almost everywhere. As Android, the mobile operating system designed by Google appeared in almost every conceivable niche, from "Rookie" to and including the super-smart phones. The Rough Guide Slick bag Phone reveals the secrets of this operating system back and forth, including models from Motorola, HTC, Samsung and many others. It is only by tradition, Android phone makes Skype instant messaging, voice and video calls worldwide via Skype. I love all the functions of Android, but UMA only tops, especially when I get home, I get off the frequency with which T-Mobile does not penetrate the walls of the building may have.

In addition to technical issues, Google has many areas that prior to any serious threat to address, as a substitute for a weight providing music Android iTunes smartphone battle. However, since the reach of Google Android as a free open-source operating system that reduces the value of acquisitions Palm Goal. I've never used an Android phone, and I have heard bad things about it, like Google uses the data for advertising, but I think it's a step towards a universal platform for open-source smartphone. The idea that Google will experience the same phenomenon in the store request U.S. dollars ridiculous. The iPhone uses a lot of Google applications and search in Google there is no difference in their pursuit of your surfing habits. The only way to compete with Apple continues to reinvent the phone... to come rather than an incorrect version of the iPhone is slightly up in the same family (the Android and it is in essence), Google, that should come with a feature that everyone that enough to leave their iPhone for. Apple basically skimming the high-margin customers with valuable, Blackberry is still very popular in the society (and blackberry sell more servers, the real interest) and Android, will take over the rest of the smartphone market at $49 - remember that Google gets nothing for all sold Android now and Apple earns $200 - $300 for each iPhone sold without iTunes... that's the difference.

Their phones are feature-rich applications that are not included in other mobile phones with Android, but also applications, the Android to take mobile phones market.

Google I/O: countdown to the keynote kickoff

In less than 24 hours, we’ll be kicking off Google I/O 2011, our annual developer conference here in San Francisco. This year’s keynote presentations will highlight the biggest opportunities for developers and feature two of our most popular and important developer platforms: Android and Chrome. Google engineers from Andy Rubin and Sundar Pichai’s teams will unveil new features, preview upcoming updates, and provide new insights into the growing momentum behind these platforms.



Plus, for the first time in Google I/O history, you’ll be able to join us throughout the two days at I/O Live. We’ll live stream the two keynote presentations, two full days of Android and Chrome technical sessions, and the After Hours party. Recorded videos from all sessions across eight product tracks will be available within 24 hours after the conference. Whether you’ll be joining us in San Francisco or from the farthest corner of the world, bookmark www.google.com/io and check back on May 10 at 9:00 a.m. PDT for a fun treat as we count down to 00:00:00:00.

Check-ins and rating places get easier with Google Maps 5.5 for Android

(Cross posted from Google LatLong Blog)

We’ve made it easier to check in and out of places, rate various locations, and get transit information with Google Maps 5.5 for Android. This release adds ‘check in’ and ‘rate and review’ buttons to Place pages, the option to edit your home/work address for Latitude, and redesigned transit station pages.

Read below for more details about the new features, which we hope will improve your user experience, a topic we take very seriously as there are now more than 200 million users of Google Maps for mobile across platforms and devices worldwide.

New check-in and rating buttons added to Place pages

Now when you open a Place page from your mobile device, you can check in to places with Google Latitude or submit a rating or review by clicking on two new buttons at the top of the listing.

This past week I had the chance to explore the Computer History Museum during my visit to San Francisco from across the pond in London. Once nearby, I could quickly open the museum’s Place page and check in.

When I was ready to leave and head to lunch, in a few seconds I could go back to the Place page and rate the museum – which certainly earned the 5 star rating it received from me.

Update home and work address for your Latitude Location History

Last month we released the Location History dashboard for Latitude which estimates how much time you spend at home, work, and everywhere else. If your home or work address changes, or you’d rather set a different address to represent ‘home’ and ‘work,’ you can now edit these addresses within Latitude.

Change home/work location from Location History dashboard

View the redesigned transit station pages

It’s been about two years since we added transit directions in Google Maps for Android. Since then, we’ve increased the coverage from 250 cities to more than 440 and counting - the most recent being Washington, D.C. To make it easier to plan your transit route, we updated the transit station pages in this release to better organize the information you need.

Each page now includes a list of upcoming scheduled departures for different lines, all the transit lines serving the station, and links to nearby transit stations.


Download Google Maps 5.5 for Android here to try out the new check-in and rating buttons, update your Latitude Location History home/work address, check out a transit station in a nearby city, or just make sure you have the latest version of Google Maps for Android. This update requires an Android OS 1.6+ device anywhere Google Maps is currently available. Learn more in our help center.

Google Search app for iOS, now even faster and easier to use

Two months ago, we launched a redesign of the Google Search app for iOS. We were happy that many of you liked the new look and interactivity of the app. However, we also heard your feedback about the app’s speed. Today we’re introducing changes that make the app more responsive as well as other visual changes that make search results even easier to read.

Faster app performance

This version of Google Search app is up to 20% more responsive as you type search queries and interact with it. As part of the speed improvements, a feature called “Just Talk” will now be off by default. Just Talk allowed you to search via voice just by bringing the phone to your ear and speaking rather than tapping the microphone icon. Turning off this feature may improve app performance, though you can easily re-enable it under the Settings > Voice Search menu.

Turn Just Talk on or off

Improved look & feel for search results

When searching on a phone, the small screen sometimes makes it difficult to read small fonts or to tap precisely on a link. To help you read and tap with ease, we’ve made the font of our search results bigger and the entire search result is now a tap target rather than just the link.

See the difference between previous (left) and new interface (right) with results now easier to read and select

Thank you for your feedback. Please continue to let us know how we can improve your experience by going to Settings > Help and Feedback > Feedback.

Google Search app is available for devices running iOS 3.0 and above. Download it from the App Store or by scanning the QR code below:


 

Listen to more languages in Google Translate for Android

 Today we launched an update to Google Translate for Android that allows you to listen to translations in several more languages.

We’ve dramatically improved the quality of our spoken translations in over 15 languages, including Russian, Chinese and Portuguese, and added the ability to listen to three new languages: Japanese, Arabic and Korean. Text-to-speech is one of the most popular features of this mobile interface. Whether you’re learning how to say a foreign phrase, or trying to share information with someone in their language, simply tap the Speaker icon after doing a translation and you’ll hear the difference.





With today’s launch, Google Translate for Android supports translation between 58 languages and can speak translations in 24 languages. The application works on phones and tablets running Android 2.1 and above. To download Google Translate for Android, scan the QR code below, or visit us on the Android Market.

Stay connected to the market, wherever you are

Mobile phones are great for keeping in touch with the latest information, but when there’s a lot of data to look at, a small screen can be a drawback. For financial queries, where you might want to see stock quotes, the latest news, a market overview or portfolio details, we’ve just launched a new approach in Google search.

To try it out, go to google.com on your iPhone or Android-powered device (2.1 or later) and search for your favourite stock ticker symbol.

The first thing you’ll see is an interactive graph shown on a card - you can switch views to different date ranges by tapping on the buttons below the graph.

If you swipe the card from right to left, you’ll get the latest financial news for the company.

Swipe again for a market overview, and if you’re logged in to your Google account and have created a Google Finance portfolio, a further swipe will show a summary of your stock portfolio. Give it a try on your mobile device now to see how it works.

This feature is available in English with support for more languages coming soon. We hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

make your phone your wallet

Today in our New York City office, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, we gave a demo of Google Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet. You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). We’re field testing Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon.

Google Wallet is a key part of our ongoing effort to improve shopping for both businesses and consumers. It’s aimed at making it easier for you to pay for and save on the goods you want, while giving merchants more ways to offer coupons and loyalty programs to customers, as well as bridging the gap between online and offline commerce.

Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You'll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.

At first, Google Wallet will support both Citi MasterCard and a Google Prepaid Card, which you’ll be able to fund with almost any payment card. From the outset, you’ll be able to tap your phone to pay wherever MasterCard PayPass is accepted. Google Wallet will also sync your Google Offers, which you’ll be able to redeem via NFC at participating SingleTap™ merchants, or by showing the barcode as you check out. Many merchants are working to integrate their offers and loyalty programs with Google Wallet.

With Google Wallet, we’re building an open commerce ecosystem, and we’re planning to develop APIs that will enable integration with numerous partners. In the beginning, Google Wallet will be compatible with Nexus S 4G by Google, available on Sprint. Over time, we plan on expanding support to more phones.

To learn more please visit our Google Wallet website at www.google.com/wallet.

This is just the start of what has already been a great adventure towards the future of mobile shopping. We’re incredibly excited and hope you are, too.

Google Earth optimized for Android-powered tablets

When we launched Google Earth in 2005, most of us were still using flip phones. At the time, the thought of being able to cart around 197 million square miles of Earth in your pocket was still a distant dream. Last year, that dream came to fruition for Android users when we released Google Earth for Android. With the recent release of tablets based on Android 3.0, we wanted to take full advantage of the large screens and powerful processors that this exciting new breed of tablets had to offer.

Today’s update to Google Earth for Android makes Earth look better than ever on your tablet. We’ve added support for fully textured 3D buildings, so your tour through the streets of Manhattan will look more realistic than ever. There’s also a new action bar up top, enabling easier access to search, the option to “fly to your location” and layers such as Places, Panoramio photos, Wikipedia and 3D buildings.

Moving from a mobile phone to a tablet was like going from a regular movie theatre to IMAX. We took advantage of the larger screen size, including features like content pop-ups appearing within Earth view, so you can see more information without switching back and forth between pages.

One of my favorite buildings to fly around in Google Earth has always been the Colosseum in Rome, Italy:

With the larger tablet screen, I can fly around the 3D Colosseum while also browsing user photos from Panoramio. The photos pop up within the imagery so I can interact with them without losing sight of the Colosseum and its surroundings. Also, by clicking on the layer button on the action bar, I can choose which layers I want to browse.

This version is available for devices with Android 2.1 and above. The new tablet design is available for devices with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and above. Please visit the Google Earth help center for more information.

To download or update Google Earth, head to m.google.com/earth in your device’s browser or visit Android Market. Enjoy a whole new world of Google Earth for tablets!

 

Introducing the new Google Docs app for Android

 Increasingly, people are using mobile phones to access information -- from email to web browsing to editing documents. Part of getting work done on the go is being able to easily access, edit and share content, which is why we’re happy to announce the new Google Docs app for Android.

With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors. The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app.

The Docs app also allows you to upload content from your phone and open documents directly from Gmail. You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap.


And my favorite feature: Using the app and your phone’s camera, you can turn photos with text into editable Google documents with the power of optical character recognition (OCR). Just create a new ‘Document from Photo' or select the camera icon from the widget, and your converted document will appear in your documents list shortly after you snap the picture. You can also convert photos already stored on your phone by sharing them with the Google Docs app. OCR does a pretty good job capturing unformatted text in English but won't recognize handwriting or some fonts - stay tuned, it will get better over time!


The Google Docs app is currently available in English and works on Android 2.1+ phones. Try it out by scanning the QR code below or by visiting Android Market.


Let us know what you think of the new Google Docs Android app in our forum.

See your location history dashboard and more with Google Maps 5.3 for Android

Today, we’re happy to announce Google Maps 5.3 for Android, which lets you see your Google Location History dashboard, check in at “home,” and add your own aspects for places when rating them.

Location History dashboard
If you’ve enabled Location History for Google Latitude, you’ve been able to visualize interesting trends in your location history with a personal dashboard at google.com/latitude on your computer. Now, you can also see your dashboard on your phone by tapping View location history from your Latitude profile. You’ll be able to see right on your phone how far you’ve travelled as well as an estimate of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work, or out.

If you haven’t yet, you can enable Location History from your computer or from Latitude’s Settings menu on your phone. Location History is 100% opt-in and is private to you and nobody else. You can always delete any of your location history from the Manage History tab or correct the estimated work and home locations from the dashboard on your computer.

View your location history dashboard from your Latitude profile on your phone and see estimates of where you’ve spent your time.

Check in at home
Now that you can see how much time you spend at “home”, you might want to let friends know when you’re there. Checking in at places using Latitude is another way to keep a history of places you’ve been and also lets you share when you’re there. I love letting friends and family know when I’m at a cafe or park, but sometimes I want them to know that I’m relaxing at home or made it back safely from a road trip. So now, I can start checking in at “home” in Latitude:

1. Check in from Latitude and tap “Home - Tap to set your location” at the bottom of the nearby places list if you don’t have one yet.
2. Use the estimated current address or enter in your home address yourself.
3. Once you’ve checked in at home once, “Home” will appear at the top of the list when you’re checking in near there.

Like Latitude and other check-ins, checking in at home is entirely opt-in. Your set “home” location is not searchable and only you can check in there. Just like any other check-in, you can choose with whom to share your home check-ins (along with your name and address info).

Add your own aspects for places
When you’re rating places on the go in Maps using Google Places with Hotpot, you could always quickly leave feedback on a specific aspect or characteristic of a place, such as the food or ambiance. Before, we’d automatically include aspects about places that were commonly mentioned in reviews. Now, you can add your own aspects for each place. So if you think a place has a beautiful view or great music, you can add it yourself and quickly share it with the world.

When rating places, you can add your own aspects like “music” for places and leave quick feedback.

To get started, update Google Maps from Android Market on devices with Android OS 1.6+ anywhere Google Maps and Latitude are already available.

New ways to discover great apps on Android Market

We’ve seen tremendous growth in Android Market lately. With over 200,000 apps supporting over 300 Android devices, we’ve had 4.5 billion applications installed to date. But with so many apps available, how do you find the ones you really want? Whether you’re looking for the most popular apps, hot new apps, or just the very best apps available, we want to help make sure that you find what you’re looking for.



Today, we’re excited to announce 5 new features for Android Market focused on helping you find apps you’ll love.

• New top app charts - We’ve revamped our top app charts to be fresher and country-specific, so you get the most current, relevant results. We’ve also added top new free, top new paid, and top grossing lists, all right on the Android Market home page.   

• Editors’ Choice - These are some of the very best apps available for Android, as chosen by the Android Market staff. They span everything from games to productivity and beyond.   

• Top Developers - We’re also recognizing those developers creating the highest quality, most popular, and most notable apps available on Android Market. They’ll get a special icon on our Android Market website, appearing wherever the developer name is shown, starting today for an initial set of over 150 developers.

• Better related apps - On the left side of an app page, you’ll now see two groups of related apps: apps frequently browsed by people who viewed this app, and apps that people tend to install alongside this app. For example, people who view ScoreMobile, my favorite sports score app, often also view other sports score apps, while those who install ScoreMobile tend to also install apps for specific sports leagues or teams. We’ll also show you related apps once you decide to install an app.

• Trending apps - Finally, we’ve added a new section to the Android Market homepage showing trending apps – those apps that are quickly growing in daily installs. Look here to stay ahead of the curve and find new apps as they get hot.

We hope you find these features helpful as you explore the many greats apps available on Android Market. These new features are available now on http://market.android.com, and will be coming soon to Android Market on phones and tablets.





 

HTC has confirmed the opening of bootloader

We have already reported that HTC intends to change its policy regarding access to the Android smartphone users to boot the operating system. Now, in an official Twitter, it was reported that the company, as a result of reviewing its position, decided to open the full access to the bootloader. Executive Director Peter Chou (Peter Chou) acknowledged that the criticism by users of sound and said...

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Android 2.3.3 Platform, New NFC Capabilities

Several weeks ago we released Android 2.3, which introduced several new forms of communication for developers and users. One of those, Near Field Communications (NFC), let developers get started creating a new class of contactless, proximity-based applications for users.
NFC is an emerging technology that promises exciting new ways to use mobile devices, including ticketing, advertising, ratings, and even data exchange with other devices. We know there’s a strong interest to include these capabilities into many applications, so we’re happy to announce an update to Android 2.3 that adds new NFC capabilities for developers. Some of the features include:

• A comprehensive NFC reader/writer API that lets apps read and write to almost any standard NFC tag in use today.
• Advanced Intent dispatching that gives apps more control over how/when they are launched when an NFC tag comes into range.
• Some limited support for peer-to-peer connection with other NFC devices.

We hope you’ll find these new capabilities useful and we’re looking forward to seeing the innovative apps that you will create using them.
Android 2.3.3 is a small feature release that includes a new API level, 10.
Going forward, we expect most devices shipping with an Android 2.3 platform to run Android 2.3.3 (or later). For an overview of the API changes, see the Android 2.3.3 Version Notes. The Android 2.3.3 SDK platform for development and testing is available through the Android SDK Manager.

Final Android 3.0 Platform and Updated SDK Tools

We are pleased to announce that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers. The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11.
For an overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.
Together with the new platform, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r10) and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (10.0.0). Key features include:

• UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
• New Palette with categories and rendering previews. (details)
• More accurate rendering of layouts to more faithfully reflect how the layout will look on devices, including rendering status and title bars to more accurately reflect screen space actually available to applications.
• Selection-sensitive action bars to manipulate View properties.
• Zoom improvements (fit to view, persistent scale, keyboard access) (details).
• Improved support for <merge> layouts, as well as layouts with gesture overlays.
• Traceview integration for easier profiling from ADT. (details)
• Tools for using the Renderscript graphics engine: the SDK tools now compiles .rs files into Java Programming Language files and native bytecode.

To get started developing or testing applications on Android 3.0, visit the Android Developers site for information about the Android 3.0 platform, the SDK Tools, and the ADT Plugin.

Introducing Renderscript

Renderscript is a key new Honeycomb feature which we haven’t yet discussed in much detail. I will address this in two parts. This post will be a quick overview of Renderscript. A more detailed technical post with a simple example will be provided later.
Renderscript is a new API targeted at high-performance 3D rendering and compute operations. The goal of Renderscript is to bring a lower level, higher performance API to Android developers. The target audience is the set of developers looking to maximize the performance of their applications and are comfortable working closer to the metal to achieve this. It provides the developer three primary tools: A simple 3D rendering API on top of hardware acceleration, a developer friendly compute API similar to CUDA, and a familiar language in C99.
Renderscript has been used in the creation of the new visually-rich YouTube and Books apps. It is the API used in the live wallpapers shipping with the first Honeycomb tablets.
The performance gain comes from executing native code on the device. However, unlike the existing NDK, this solution is cross-platform. The development language for Renderscript is C99 with extensions, which is compiled to a device-agnostic intermediate format during the development process and placed into the application package. When the app is run, the scripts are compiled to machine code and optimized on the device. This eliminates the problem of needing to target a specific machine architecture during the development process.
Renderscript is not intended to replace the existing high-level rendering APIs or languages on the platform. The target use is for performance-critical code segments where the needs exceed the abilities of the existing APIs.
It may seem interesting that nothing above talked about running code on CPUs vs. GPUs. The reason is that this decision is made on the device at runtime. Simple scripts will be able to run on the GPU as compute workloads when capable hardware is available. More complex scripts will run on the CPU(s). The CPU also serves as a fallback to ensure that scripts are always able to run even if a suitable GPU or other accelerator is not present. This is intended to be transparent to the developer. In general, simpler scripts will be able to run in more places in the future. For now we simply leverage the CPU resources and distribute the work across as many CPUs as are present in the device.

The video above, captured through an Android tablet’s HDMI out, is an example of Renderscript compute at work. (There’s a high-def version on YouTube.) In the video we show a simple brute force physics simulation of around 900 particles. The compute script runs each frame and automatically takes advantage of both cores. Once the physics simulation is done, a second graphics script does the rendering. In the video we push one of the larger balls to show the interaction. Then we tilt the tablet and let gravity do a little work. This shows the power of the dual A9s in the new Honeycomb tablet.
Renderscript Graphics provides a new runtime for continuously rendering scenes. This runtime sits on top of HW acceleration and uses the developers’ scripts to provide custom functionality to the controlling Dalvik code. This controlling code will send commands to it at a coarse level such as “turn the page” or “move the list”. The commands the two sides speak are determined by the scripts the developer provides. In this way it’s fully customizable. Early examples of Renderscript graphics were the live wallpapers and 3d application launcher that shipped with Eclair.
With Honeycomb, we have migrated from GL ES 1.1 to 2.0 as the renderer for Renderscript. With this, we have added programmable shader support, 3D model loading, and much more efficient allocation management. The new compiler, based on LLVM, is several times more efficient than acc was during the Eclair-through-Gingerbread time frame. The most important change is that the Renderscript API and tools are now public.

The screenshot above was taken from one of our internal test apps. The application implements a simple scene-graph which demonstrates recursive script to script calling. The Androids are loaded from an A3D file created in Maya and translated from a Collada file. A3D is an on device file format for storing Renderscript objects.
Later we will follow up with more technical information and sample code.

Best Practices for Honeycomb and Tablets

The first tablets running Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) will be hitting the streets on Thursday Feb. 24th, and we’ve just posted the full SDK release. We encourage you to test your applications on the new platform, using a tablet-size AVD.
Developers who’ve followed the Android Framework’s guidelines and best practices will find their apps work well on Android 3.0. This purpose of this post is to provide reminders of and links to those best practices.

Moving Toward Honeycomb

There’s a comprehensive discussion of how to work with the new release in Optimizing Apps for Android 3.0. The discussion includes the use of the emulator; most developers, who don’t have an Android tablet yet, should use it to test and update their apps for Honeycomb.
While your existing apps should work well, developers also have the option to improve their apps’ look and feel on Android 3.0 by using Honeycomb features; for example, see The Android 3.0 Fragments API. We’ll have more on that in this space, but in the meantime we recommend reading Strategies for Honeycomb and Backwards Compatibility for advice on adding Honeycomb polish to existing apps.

Specifying Features

There have been reports of apps not showing up in Android Market on tablets. Usually, this is because your application manifest has something like this:
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.telephony" />
Many of the tablet devices aren’t phones, and thus Android Market assumes the app is not compatible. See the documentation of <uses-feature>. However, such an app’s use of the telephony APIs might well be optional, in which case it should be available on tablets. There’s a discussion of how to accomplish this in Future-Proofing Your App and The Five Steps to Future Hardware Happiness.

Rotation

The new environment is different from what we’re used to in two respects. First, you can hold the devices with any of the four sides up and Honeycomb manages the rotation properly. In previous versions, often only two of the four orientations were supported, and there are apps out there that relied on this in ways that will break them on Honeycomb. If you want to stay out of rotation trouble, One Screen Turn Deserves Another covers the issues.
The second big difference doesn’t have anything to do with software; it’s that a lot of people are going to hold these things horizontal (in “landscape mode”) nearly all the time. We’ve seen a few apps that have a buggy assumption that they’re starting out in portrait mode, and others that lock certain screens into portrait or landscape but really shouldn’t.

A Note for Game Developers

A tablet can probably provide a better game experience for your users than any handset can. Bigger is better. It’s going to cost you a little more work than developers of business apps, because quite likely you’ll want to rework your graphical assets for the big screen.
There’s another issue that’s important to game developers: Texture Formats. Read about this in Game Development for Android: A Quick Primer, in the section labeled “Step Three: Carefully Design the Best Game Ever”.
We've also added a convenient way to filter applications in Android Market based on the texture formats they support; see the documentation of <supports-gl-texture> for more details.

Happy Coding

Once you’ve held one of the new tablets in your hands, you’ll want to have your app not just running on it (which it probably already does), but expanding minds on the expanded screen. Have fun!

Heading for GDC

Android will descend in force upon the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week; we’re offering a full day packed with sessions covering everything you need to know to build games on Android.

From 10 AM to 5 PM on Tuesday the 1st, North Hall Room 121 will be ground zero for Android Developer Day, with five engineering-focused sessions on everything from compatibility to native audio and graphics. Here's a quick overview; there’s more on the Game Developer Conference site:

• Building Aggressively Compatible Android Games — Chris Pruett
• C++ On Android Just Got Better: The New NDK — Daniel Galpin and Ian Ni-Lewis
• OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android: Building Google Body — Nico Weber
• Android Native Audio — Glenn Kasten and Jean-Michel Trivi
• Evading Pirates and Stopping Vampires Using License Server, In App Billing, and AppEngine — Daniel Galpin and Trevor Johns

Our crack team of engineers and advocates spend their nights devising new ways to bring high-end game content to Android, and a full day of sessions just wasn't enough to appease them. So in addition, you can find incisive Android insight in other tracks:

• REPLICA ISLAND: Building a Successful Android Game — Chris Pruett (1:45 PM Monday, Smartphone Summit)
• Publishing Games Through Android Market — Eric Chu (1:30 PM Wednesday, Main Track)

Finally, you can visit us in the Google booth on the GDC Expo floor; stop by, fondle the latest devices, and check out the awesome games that are already running on them. We're foaming at the mouth with excitement about the Game Developers Conference next week, and you should be too.
Hope to see you there!

Animation in Honeycomb

One of the new features ushered in with the Honeycomb release is a new animation system, a set of APIs in a whole new package (android.animation) that makes animating objects and properties much easier than it was before.
"But wait!" you blurt out, nearly projecting a mouthful of coffee onto your keyboard while reading this article, "Isn't there already an animation system in Android?"

Animation Prior to Honeycomb

Indeed, Android already has animation capabilities: there are several classes and lots of great functionality in the android.view.animation package. For example, you can move, scale, rotate, and fade Views and combine multiple animations together in an AnimationSet object to coordinate them. You can specify animations in a LayoutAnimationController to get automatically staggered animation start times as a container lays out its child views. And you can use one of the many Interpolator implementations like AccelerateInterpolator and Bounce to get natural, nonlinear timing behavior.
But there are a couple of major pieces of functionality lacking in the previous system.
For one thing, you can animate Views... and that's it. To a great extent, that's okay. The GUI objects in Android are, after all, Views. So as long as you want to move a Button, or a TextView, or a LinearLayout, or any other GUI object, the animations have you covered. But what if you have some custom drawing in your view that you'd like to animate, like the position of a Drawable, or the translucency of its background color? Then you're on your own, because the previous animation system only understands how to manipulate View objects.
The previous animations also have a limited scope: you can move, rotate, scale, and fade a View... and that's it. What about animating the background color of a View? Again, you're on your own, because the previous animations had a hard-coded set of things they were able to do, and you could not make them do anything else.
Finally, the previous animations changed the visual appearance of the target objects... but they didn't actually change the objects themselves. You may have run into this problem. Let's say you want to move a Button from one side of the screen to the other. You can use a TranslateAnimation to do so, and the button will happily glide along to the other side of the screen. And when the animation is done, it will gladly snap back into its original location. So you find the setFillAfter(true) method on Animation and try it again. This time the button stays in place at the location to which it was animated. And you can verify that by clicking on it - Hey! How come the button isn't clicking? The problem is that the animation changes where the button is drawn, but not where the button physically exists within the container. If you want to click on the button, you'll have to click the location that it used to live in. Or, as a more effective solution (and one just a tad more useful to your users), you'll have to write your code to actually change the location of the button in the layout when the animation finishes.
It is for these reasons, among others, that we decided to offer a new animation system in Honeycomb, one built on the idea of "property animation."

Property Animation in Honeycomb

The new animation system in Honeycomb is not specific to Views, is not limited to specific properties on objects, and is not just a visual animation system. Instead, it is a system that is all about animating values over time, and assigning those values to target objects and properties - any target objects and properties. So you can move a View or fade it in. And you can move a Drawable inside a View. And you can animate the background color of a Drawable. In fact, you can animate the values of any data structure; you just tell the animation system how long to run for, how to evaluate between values of a custom type, and what values to animate between, and the system handles the details of calculating the animated values and setting them on the target object.
Since the system is actually changing properties on target objects, the objects themselves are changed, not simply their appearance. So that button you move is actually moved, not just drawn in a different place. You can even click it in its animated location. Go ahead and click it; I dare you.
I'll walk briefly through some of the main classes at work in the new system, showing some sample code when appropriate. But for a more detailed view of how things work, check out the API Demos in the SDK for the new animations. There are many small applications written for the new Animations category (at the top of the list of demos in the application, right before the word App. I like working on animation because it usually comes first in the alphabet).
In fact, here's a quick video showing some of the animation code at work. The video starts off on the home screen of the device, where you can see some of the animation system at work in the transitions between screens. Then the video shows a sampling of some of the API Demos applications, to show the various kinds of things that the new animation system can do. This video was taken straight from the screen of a Honeycomb device, so this is what you should see on your system, once you install API Demos from the SDK.

Animator

Animator is the superclass of the new animation classes, and has some of the common attributes and functionality of the subclasses. The subclasses are ValueAnimator, which is the core timing engine of the system and which we'll see in the next section, and AnimatorSet, which is used to choreograph multiple animators together into a single animation. You do not use Animator directly, but some of the methods and properties of the subclasses are exposed at this superclass level, like the duration, startDelay and listener functionality.
The listeners tend to be important, because sometimes you want to key some action off of the end of an animation, such as removing a view after an animation fading it out is done. To listen for animator lifecycle events, implement the AnimatorListener interface and add your listener to the Animator in question. For example, to perform an action when the animator ends, you could do this:

    anim.addListener(new Animator.AnimatorListener() {
public void onAnimationStart(Animator animation) {}
public void onAnimationEnd(Animator animation) {
// do something when the animation is done
}
public void onAnimationCancel(Animator animation) {}
public void onAnimationRepeat(Animator animation) {}
});

As a convenience, there is an adapter class, AnimatorListenerAdapter, that stubs out these methods so that you only need to override the one(s) that you care about:

anim.addListener(new AnimatorListenerAdapter() {
public void onAnimationEnd(Animator animation) {
// do something when the animation is done
}
});

ValueAnimator

ValueAnimator is the main workhorse of the entire system. It runs the internal timing loop that causes all of a process's animations to calculate and set values and has all of the core functionality that allows it to do this, including the timing details of each animation, information about whether an animation repeats, listeners that receive update events, and the capability of evaluating different types of values (see TypeEvaluator for more on this). There are two pieces to animating properties: calculating the animated values and setting those values on the object and property in question. ValueAnimator takes care of the first part; calculating the values. The ObjectAnimator class, which we'll see next, is responsible for setting those values on target objects.
Most of the time, you will want to use ObjectAnimator, because it makes the whole process of animating values on target objects much easier. But sometimes you may want to use ValueAnimator directly. For example, the object you want to animate may not expose setter functions necessary for the property animation system to work. Or perhaps you want to run a single animation and set several properties from that one animated value. Or maybe you just want a simple timing mechanism. Whatever the case, using ValueAnimator is easy; you just set it up with the animation properties and values that you want and start it. For example, to animate values between 0 and 1 over a half-second, you could do this:

    ValueAnimator anim = ValueAnimator.ofFloat(0f, 1f);
anim.setDuration(500);
anim.start();

But animations are a bit like the tree in the forest philosophy question ("If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"). If you don't actually do anything with the values, does the animation run? Unlike the tree question, this one has an answer: of course it runs. But if you're not doing anything with the values, it might as well not be running. If you started it, chances are you want to do something with the values that it calculates along the way. So you add a listener to it, to listen for updates at each frame. And when you get the callback, you call getAnimatedValue(), which returns an Object, to find out what the current value is.

    anim.addUpdateListener(new ValueAnimator.AnimatorUpdateListener() {
public void onAnimationUpdate(ValueAnimator animation) {
Float value = (Float) animation.getAnimatedValue();
// do something with value...
}
});

Of course, you don't necessarily always want to animate float values. Maybe you need to animate something that's an integer instead:

    ValueAnimator anim = ValueAnimator.ofInt(0, 100);

or in XML:

    <animator xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:valueFrom="0"
android:valueTo="100"
android:valueType="intType"/>

In fact, maybe you need to animate something entirely different, like a Point, or a Rect, or some custom data structure of your own. The only types that the animation system understands by default are float and int, but that doesn't mean that you're stuck with those two types. You can to use the Object version of the factory method, along with a TypeEvaluator (explained later), to tell the system how to calculate animated values for this unknown type:

    Point p0 = new Point(0, 0);
Point p1 = new Point(100, 200);
ValueAnimator anim = ValueAnimator.ofObject(pointEvaluator, p0, p1);

There are other animation attributes that you can set on a ValueAnimator besides duration, including:

• setStartDelay(long): This property controls how long the animation waits after a call to start() before it starts playing.
• setRepeatCount(int) and setRepeatMode(int): These functions control how many times the animation repeats and whether it repeats in a loop or reverses direction each time.
• setInterpolator(TimeInterpolator): This object controls the timing behavior of the animation. By default, animations accelerate into and decelerate out of the motion, but you can change that behavior by setting a different interpolator. This function acts just like the one of the same name in the previous Animation class; it's just that the type of the parameter (TimeInterpolator) is different from that of the previous version (Interpolator). But the TimeInterpolator interface is just a super-interface of the existing Interpolator interface in the android.view.animation package, so you can use any of the existing Interpolator implementations, like Bounce, as arguments to this function on ValueAnimator.

ObjectAnimator

ObjectAnimator is probably the main class that you will use in the new animation system. You use it to construct animations with the timing and values that ValueAnimator takes, and also give it a target object and property name to animate. It then quietly animates the value and sets those animated values on the specified object/property. For example, to fade out some object myObject, we could animate the alpha property like this:

    ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(myObject, "alpha", 0f).start();

Note, in this example, a special feature that you can use to make your animations more succinct; you can tell it the value to animate to, and it will use the current value of the property as the starting value. In this case, the animation will start from whatever value alpha has now and will end up at 0.
You could create the same thing in an XML resource as follows:

    <objectAnimator xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:valueTo="0"
android:propertyName="alpha"/>

Note, in the XML version, that you cannot set the target object; this must be done in code after the resource is loaded:

    ObjectAnimator anim = AnimatorInflator.loadAnimator(context, resID);
anim.setTarget(myObject);
anim.start();

There is a hidden assumption here about properties and getter/setter functions that you have to understand before using ObjectAnimator: you must have a public "set" function on your object that corresponds to the property name and takes the appropriate type. Also, if you use only one value, as in the example above, your are asking the animation system to derive the starting value from the object, so you must also have a public "get" function which returns the appropriate type. For example, the class of myObject in the code above must have these two public functions in order for the animation to succeed:

    public void setAlpha(float value);
public float getAlpha();

So by passing in a target object of some type and the name of some property foo supposedly on that object, you are implicitly declaring a contract that that object has at least a setFoo() function and possibly also a getFoo() function, both of which handle the type used in the animation declaration. If all of this is true, then the animation will be able to find those setter/getter functions on the object and set values during the animation. If the functions do not exist, then the animation will fail at runtime, since it will be unable to locate the functions it needs. (Note to users of ProGuard, or other code-stripping utilities: If your setter/getter functions are not used anywhere else in the code, make sure you tell the utility to leave the functions there, because otherwise they may get stripped out. The binding during animation creation is very loose and these utilities have no way of knowing that these functions will be required at runtime.)

View properties

The observant reader, or at least the ones that have not yet browsed on to some other article, may have pinpointed a flaw in the system thus far. If the new animation framework revolves around animating properties, and if animations will be used to animate, to a large extent, View objects, then how can they be used against the View class, which exposes none of its properties through set/get functions?
Excellent question: you get to advance to the bonus round and keep reading.
The way it works is that we added new properties to the View class in Honeycomb. The old animation system transformed and faded View objects by just changing the way that they were drawn. This was actually functionality handled in the container of each View, because the View itself had no transform properties to manipulate. But now it does: we've added several properties to View to make it possible to animate Views directly, allowing you to not only transform the way a View looks, but to transform its actual location and orientation. Here are the new properties in View that you can set, get and animate directly:

• translationX and translationY: These properties control where the View is located as a delta from its left and top coordinates which are set by its layout container. You can run a move animation on a button by animating these, like this: ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(view, "translationX", 0f, 100f);.
• rotation, rotationX, and rotationY: These properties control the rotation in 2D (rotation) and 3D around the pivot point.
• scaleX and scaleY: These properties control the 2D scaling of a View around its pivot point.
• pivotX and pivotY: These properties control the location of the pivot point, around which the rotation and scaling transforms occur. By default, the pivot point is centered at the center of the object.
• x and y: These are simple utility properties to describe the final location of the View in its container, as a sum of the left/top and translationX/translationY values.
• alpha: This is my personal favorite property. No longer is it necessary to fade out an object by changing a value on its transform (a process which just didn't seem right). Instead, there is an actual alpha value on the View itself. This value is 1 (opaque) by default, with a value of 0 representing full transparency (i.e., it won't be visible). To fade a View out, you can do this: ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(view, "alpha", 0f);

Note that all of the "properties" described above are actually available in the form of set/get functions (e.g., setRotation() and getRotation() for the rotation property). This makes them both possible to access from the animation system and (probably more importantly) likely to do the right thing when changed. That is, you don't want to scale an object and have it just sit there because the system didn't know that it needed to redraw the object in its new orientation; each of the setter functions takes care to run the appropriate invalidation step to make the rendering work correctly.

AnimatorSet

This class, like the previous AnimationSet, exists to make it easier to choreograph multiple animations. Suppose you want several animations running in tandem, like you want to fade out several views, then slide in other ones while fading them in. You could do all of this with separate animations and either manually starting the animations at the right times or with startDelays set on the various delayed animations. Or you could use AnimatorSet to do all of that for you. AnimatorSet allows you to animations that play together, playTogether(Animator...), animations that play one after the other, playSequentially(Animator...), or you can organically build up a set of animations that play together, sequentially, or with specified delays by calling the functions in the AnimatorSet.Builder class, with(), before(), and after(). For example, to fade out v1 and then slide in v2 while fading it, you could do something like this:

    ObjectAnimator fadeOut = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(v1, "alpha", 0f);
ObjectAnimator mover = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(v2, "translationX", -500f, 0f);
ObjectAnimator fadeIn = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(v2, "alpha", 0f, 1f);
AnimatorSet animSet = new AnimatorSet().play(mover).with(fadeIn).after(fadeOut);;
animSet.start();

Like ValueAnimator and ObjectAnimator, you can create AnimatorSet objects in XML resources as well.

TypeEvaluator

I wanted to talk about just one more thing, and then I'll leave you alone to explore the code and play with the API demos. The last class I wanted to mention is TypeEvaluator. You may not use this class directly for most of your animations, but you should that it's there in case you need it. As I said earlier, the system knows how to animate float and int values, but otherwise it needs some help knowing how to interpolate between the values you give it. For example, if you want to animate between the Point values in one of the examples above, how is the system supposed to know how to interpolate the values between the start and end points? Here's the answer: you tell it how to interpolate, using TypeEvaluator.
TypeEvaluator is a simple interface that you implement that the system calls on each frame to help it calculate an animated value. It takes a floating point value which represents the current elapsed fraction of the animation and the start and end values that you supplied when you created the animation and it returns the interpolated value between those two values at that fraction. For example, here's the built-in FloatEvaluator class used to calculate animated floating point values:

    public class FloatEvaluator implements TypeEvaluator {
public Object evaluate(float fraction, Object startValue, Object endValue) {
float startFloat = ((Number) startValue).floatValue();
return startFloat + fraction * (((Number) endValue).floatValue() - startFloat);
}
}

But how does it work with a more complex type? For an example of that, here is an implementation of an evaluator for the Point class, from our earlier example:

    public class PointEvaluator implements TypeEvaluator {
public Object evaluate(float fraction, Object startValue, Object endValue) {
Point startPoint = (Point) startValue;
Point endPoint = (Point) endValue;
return new Point(startPoint.x + fraction * (endPoint.x - startPoint.x),
startPoint.y + fraction * (endPoint.y - startPoint.y));
}
}

Basically, this evaluator (and probably any evaluator you would write) is just doing a simple linear interpolation between two values. In this case, each 'value' consists of two sub-values, so it is linearly interpolating between each of those.
You tell the animation system to use your evaluator by either calling the setEvaluator() method on ValueAnimator or by supplying it as an argument in the Object version of the factory method. To continue our earlier example animating Point values, you could use our new PointEvaluator class above to complete that code:

    Point p0 = new Point(0, 0);
Point p1 = new Point(100, 200);
ValueAnimator anim = ValueAnimator.ofObject(new PointEvaluator(), p0, p1);

One of the ways that you might use this interface is through the ArgbEvaluator implementation, which is included in the Android SDK. If you animate a color property, you will probably either use this evaluator automatically (which is the case if you create an animator in an XML resource and supply colors as values) or you can set it manually on the animator as described in the previous section.

But Wait, There's More!

There's so much more to the new animation system that I haven't gotten to. There's the repetition functionality, the listeners for animation lifecycle events, the ability to supply multiple values to the factory methods to get animations between more than just two endpoints, the ability to use the Keyframe class to specify a more complex time/value sequence, the use of PropertyValuesHolder to specify multiple properties to animate in parallel, the LayoutTransition class for automating simple layout animations, and so many other things. But I really have to stop writing soon and get back to working on the code. I'll try to post more articles in the future on some of these items, but also keep an eye on my blog at graphics-geek  for upcoming articles, tutorials, and videos on this and related topics. Until then, check out the API demos, read the overview of Property Animation posted with the 3.0 SDK, dive into the code, and just play with it.