SAN FRANCISCO — Day one of the annual Google I/O developers conference at the Moscone Center was all things Android.
The day began with a recap of Android’s growth in the last 2½ years. Google says that there are now 100 million activated Android devices, and 400,000 new devices are activated every day. Two hundred thousand apps are in the Android market, and users have installed 4.5 billion apps.
While the numbers aren’t as gargantuan as Apple claims, they’re respectable and indicate enormous growth for the only serious competitor to Apple’s popular iOS operating system.
The company announced an update to Honeycomb, the version of Android optimized for tablets, but also said a soon-to-be-released OS called Ice Cream Sandwich will support both phones and tablets. The just-released Honeycomb 3.1 adds resizable widgets and a new task switcher.
Google also announced an update to the Google TV platform, which will soon run applications from the Android marketplace.
In the past couple of years, Google has given out Android phones to developers attending Google I/O.
This year, it handed out the as-yet-unreleased Samsung Tab 10.1. The tablet, slated for a summer market date, is thinner and lighter than Apple’s iPad 2 and feels great in the hand. It’s not an iPad killer, but it’s absolutely a contender. However, there’s no 3G cell modem option; it connects to the Internet through Wi-Fi.
Perhaps the biggest news Tuesday was Google’s music and video rental service. The music service will allow users to upload up to 20,000 of their own digital music files to Google servers so that they can stream them or download them to another computer, phone or tablet. With all your music in the cloud, you can synchronize a device without a cable or connecting to a computer. Even though Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said that he expects many people to replace their PCs with tablets, the only way to get your music collection to an iPhone or an iPad is with a cable connected to a computer.
Google’s movie rental service, part of the Android market, allows you to rent movies to instantly stream to a computer or an Android device. Like other movie rental services, you have 30 days to start watching a rental and once you start, you have 24 hours to finish it.
Since it’s on the cloud, you could start a movie on a PC then finish it on an Android device. One relatively unique feature is called “pinning,” which allows you to download the movie to a device so you can watch it an area without an Internet connection — such as 30,000 feet up in an airplane. Apple doesn’t currently support streaming, so the only way to view a movie on an iOS device is to download it.
Google also announced Android@Home, which will allow Android devices to control home appliances, light switches and other things. Another project called Android Open Accessory allows hardware developers to create an interface between Android devices and accessories. One example shown at Google I/O showed a user with an Android tablet to control a labyrinth game. A physical board with motors tilted and moved based on how the tablet shifted. It’s not the most practical demonstration in the world, but it shows the potential for hardware accessories.
Larry Magid’s technology column appears Wednesdays in The Daily News. Email him at larry@larrymagid.com.
