Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com the Android 2.3 Gingerbread SDK has just been released and with it we get the new emulator so that we can track Gingerbread on a computer so in this video we're gonna walk through Gingerbread tell you about all the new stuff that has come along let's get to it so gingerbread is a lot about gaming increases in gaming performance gyroscope support a lot of other things that will help developers make better games for Android there's also a lot of stuff for communications like Internet calling built right into the operating system so you can actually go into the phone dialer and use a over IP service to make a call instead of doing it over the cellular provider there's also new support for camera so that developers can better take advantage of the front-facing camera for video chat and then there's a lot of minor user interface changes as we're going to see mostly through this video the top bar is now black the icons have more detail to them some of them are colorized with a little bit more green overall not that big of a jump from Android 2.2 to 2.3 which is why they didn't go with the title Android 3.0 they're saving that for a big leap so let's talk about Android 2.3 here so the notification bar on the top is now black stock Android 2.2 was white if we pull down the notification shade it's also a little bit different it looks the same but it uses black and gray instead of white and gray as we found in Android 2.2 so we can roll that back up you know things like the phone icon are different as you can see here in the center down here these three buttons along the bottom are colorized green are especially the phone and the web icon let's jump into the web real quick and not much has changed there except there's a better way to copy things now of course we're running this as an emulator so it's not going to be as fast as you'll see on say you know the Google Nexus S that's coming out in December so so bear with us as the screens load and things are a little bit choppy let's say we want to copy some text okay so we can tap and hold I mean this isn't new we get now larger selection handles here we can click and drag and if the cursor will follow me we can select some text now if we tap on the selected text watch what happens boom it's copied in one step so it's a it's a little bit easier now to copy text in Android 2.3 there's also a new on-screen keyboard so if we tap up here in the address bar we should get the new on-screen keyboard pop up and there it is the new on-screen keyboard the keys are sprite spaced out more and that has multi-touch capability so you can be a little bit faster when you're typing also new is that the character buttons or some of the character buttons now have three dots on them and when you see those three dots you know that there are other letters that are associated with them so down here the slash if we tap and hold we will get additional options so we can go into settings from here the same with the period if we tap and hold on the period we'll get additional punctuation pretty much all of them question mark exclamation point and so on and so forth so an improved keyboard which is great because a lot of devices now for Android don't have slide-out keyboards let's jump into the settings and take a look at some other minor user interface changes so here in settings again we get a lot of the black theme and setup the whitish theme that we saw on Android 2.2 and below so let's jump into some of these things like language and keyboard and you're going to see a new sort of checkbox so now as you can see the checkboxes are more clean they have a green check in the middle a nice white border and a gray background so a nice little subtle touch there let's jump into some of these menus real quick to see if there's anything that's different wireless and networks pretty much the same jump out of here let's go into display see if any things have been changed we've auto rotate screen we've seen that we can turn down animations maybe make the device a little bit faster brightness although this is an emulator of course let's go back jump into application see if there's anything new there install applications from unknown sources quick launch set keyboard shortcuts to launch applications which is pretty cool so we can actually assign various letters to launch different applications which is quite nice especially if there's a hardware keyboard not sure if this is going to be something that they roll out for devices that have the on-screen keyboard but if so it's a very cool feature let's jump back into there go to battery use and certainly we're not going to see any information about the battery because there is no battery installed this is an emulator after all now there's a new menu that is the of course multitask menu let's go back to the home screen there's a new menu from the home screen so we tap menu we have a new option which is manage apps so previously you had to go into settings and then applications and then manage apps but from here from the home screen you can jump immediately into manage apps and it will bring you into a little task manager that shows you sort of what is running at the what's what is running at the moment the contact screen is a little bit different when you go to add a new contact the interface has been spruced up a little bit and bear with us as it loads here so we're gonna go to menu and new contact and you're gonna see how things have been spruced up a little bit so things are bigger more finger friendly nicer icons to do certain things here in Android 2.3 and the application drawer has been slightly updated if you remember in Android 2.2 there was a 3d carousel and that seems to have been changed a little bit although it's tough to tell because we've only got a small grid of icons here but it looks like the icons sort of fade away from you instead of sort of cascade away from you and here are the programs that are built in to Android 2.3 in lis and at least the emulator there's not much to work with here we don't even get the Android Market let's go into the gallery and see if we can see any changes there seems to be bouncing back out ok no media found fair enough let's jump back out and go to music see if we can see any changes there similar kind of interface that we found in Android 2.2 and below and one more thing we want to go into messaging and just see what looks like so of course this is for text messaging and I've already sent a message looks identical to the way it was in Android 2.2 so not many changes there well though we get these three dots appear again which will allow you to manipulate or do additional things with a contact so presumably if I had this person stored in my address book tapping on those three dots would allow you to call the person message them or do an Internet call just a better visual representation that there are additional options available should you want to action on this person so that was a quick walk through of Android 2.3 when we get it on a device we're going to do a more comprehensive walk through it's really hard to get a full representation of what the new version of Android is going to be like through an emulator we're also going to put instructions on pocketnow.com if you want to try out Android 2.3 on your own with this emulator if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and check out pocketnow.com for smartphone news and reviews thanks for watching that's it for now