Gadgetory

what's up everybody John Breton you're from TechnoBuffalo here I want to give you a tour and show you what's new in Google's tasty dessert themed Android 2.3 called Gingerbread to help me out here I've got an Android 2.2 device so I can illustrate the differences here on the Nexus One and 2.30 will be demonstrated on the Nexus S let's go ahead and get started a lot of the additions to 2.3 are under the hood and things that the end user doesn't necessarily see as graphical enhancements but there are some graphical changes and some tweaks that we can see and I want to go and show you what each of those are so first let's start down at the bottom these now colored icons represent the call and browser buttons we saw them on Android 2.2 but they didn't have that green color that they have now that green theme also sort of comes into play with the status bar at the top you can see the icons now I have a green color to them whereas before they did not another small change the battery indicator here is horizontal in 2.3 it is vertical all right so that's about it maybe the green theme was due to the Android little logo but that's the main difference that you're going to see on the home screen a very small minor tweak which I really like is what happens when you lock the device let me go ahead and show you what that looks like so I go ahead and lock the phone you get sort of a cool math TV turning off effect so it powers down like that very neat you don't have anything similar on 2.2 now it's obviously not a giant thing it's just graphical but it's kind of fun to say see it right there and the unlock screens on both look identical alright so let's go ahead and continue our tour here one of the things that I was hoping we were going to say an Android 2.3 was more utility in this pull down tray if you look at galaxy s devices or other devices running TouchWiz you have profile switchers and some other utilities you can do with that we don't have any sort of extra functionality just some new colors so there's been another sort of small tweak here take a look at dialer the wrong button there to jump into phone you can see the dialer looks a little bit different spin skin just a bit again nothing major but there is a sort of something new you now have memory and application management right from the home screen the main menu on the home screen so I go ahead and hit the menu button I now have something for manage apps that was not there in Android 2.2 and you can manage your applications nice and easily perhaps Google realize there's a big market for third-party application management and they want to their phone to sort of natively support that Lee's relatively easy and make it nice and simple to get to so you can view your downloads we'll talk about in just a minute all your USB storage files and what's running so you might notice this says USB storage this is more of a galaxy essay it doesn't actually have expandable memory but it treats them as 16 gigs it has almost as external storage it partitions it just a little bit so that's in addition to Android 2.3 let's go ahead and homescreen out of here if you look at a list in any sort of the menu items on 2.3 notice something different as well so let's go ahead and jump into settings and I'll show you what that looks like we'll do that on each device so on Android 2.2 when you scroll to the bottom you just get to the bottom you don't get any sort of bouncy physics and your kind of thing you just get to the bottom simple menu I've got a bit more animations now on two point three got that little yellow or orangish color bar that pops up color lets you know that you're at the bottom of the menu it's a small graphical improvement certainly nothing giant but it is something that two point three does or that two point two does not another nice addition to two point three is actually a download manager it's an application found right in your applications menu I'll go ahead and show you what that is I've made a shortcut to it on the home page you can now access all of your downloads from your emails from for apps whatever it is might be whatever you downloaded you can now access and reopen a nice and easily an Android 2.3 certainly a lot of these things that I'm going to mention that two point three does it could be accomplished with third parties important older versions of Android but they are now built in so one of the most noticeable differences in 2.3 is actually the keyboard let's go ahead and talk about that we'll jump into messaging applications on each let's go ahead and find messages here all right so here the keyboard you notice that they do look noticeably different on two point two this is the stock android keyboard certainly there are many third-party keyboards you can put on here like swipe which may make some of this obsolete but if you're a fan of the native Android keyboards you're going to want to pay attention so on to point to the keys were very close together you can move around and pick whatever key you wanted but became a bit cramped and you were trying to type on two point three the keys are a little bit spaced out the fonts are a little bit different and the typing experience seems to be much easier another really big improvement in two point three that we didn't have in two point two is the ability to manipulate the text and show where you want to go and actually move the cursor where you'd like so here we've got a two point to add a message typed in there that says Winnie the Pooh sounds gross if I want to move my cursor around I got to sort of select it pick the letter that I want go on to the copy text I'd have to hold it down I could go ahead and copy all or copy a certain area it's not to select text you know you can just copy and you get all those menus here on two-point-three they've made it a bit easier so if I just sort of tap text I get this new I don't know let's what the call in a little icon I let me move around and control where the cursor goes makes it very easy now makes element it easy if you want to copy and at pasted text as well there's a lot of things you can do to make things just a bit easier so if I tap this and I want to let's say select a word you'll now know that I've got two so I can move this to control whatever words I want makes it a lot easier for copying and in for pasting long text and that's definitely much welcome improvement alright so one of the other things that actually that this particular Nexus S has that the necklace one doesn't have again this is particular to the Nexus S is something called NFC which is a near field communications it's a way to transmit data back and forth although right now it's just one direction for security you also now have access to multiple cameras the Nexus S in particular which is currently only 2.3 device has a front-facing VGA camera as well they go ahead and show you what that looks like so before it was a little bit difficult to switch cameras now there's an menu option built right in let you go to the front and back and obviously wasn't found on the Nexus One because in there a front-facing camera alright so let's go ahead and go back home and let's continue the tour now there's a lot of stuff under the hood as well that you're not going to see here that the end user isn't going to see right away they've improved a third-party support for video drivers which you're going to be especially parents for 3d graphics so gaming is going to look unnoticeably better as developers get access to these new AP is that also is a new AMR wideband which is really going to new codec for that which translates to supposedly a better video for a started rather better audio fidelity while making phone calls so the sound quality is going to be a bit better and there's a lot of new API support the developer can take advantage of so really in conclusion 2.3 is not a giant upgrade over 2.2 if you're running a 2.2 device not necessarily have to be clamoring for 2.3 you're not going to get giant new features or completely redone uy they're very subtle changes certainly welcome but it's nothing revolutionary very evolutionary changes here found at Android 2.3 so would you like to seeing anything added Android 2.3 that you didn't get are you waiting for the next version of Android which is going to be called honeycomb whether it's 3.0 or 2.4 ever Google decides to call it hey guys I am Jon Retton German techno buffalo with the highlights of what's new in Android 2.3 bye-bye you