Android 3.2 Honeycomb Officially Announced by Google, the new version is designed specifically for tablet computers. Android version 3.2 will deliver “several new capabilities for users and developers,” including changes to the Application Programming Interface (API) that will boost it to level 13.
There’s also an interesting new “compatibility zoom” option, intended to make viewing smartphone apps on tablet hardware more pleasant. Rather than simply stretching the app to fill the screen, Android 3.2 can use pixel-scaling.
Here are some of the highlights of Android 3.2:
- Optimizations for a wider range of screen sizes: allows developers to better target a range of screen sizes–not just 10.1-inch.
- New fill-screen mode: a new zoom-to-fill screen compatibility mode, which “renders the application in a smaller screen area and then scales the pixels to fill the current screen.”
- Media files can be loaded directly from the SD card: users can now “load media files directly from the SD card to apps that use them,” and there is a “system facility [that] makes the files accessible to apps from the system media store.”
- Extended screen support API: provides developers with more “precise control over [the user interface] across the range of Android-powered devices.” It’s also meant to “allow [the] targeting [of] screens by their dimensions.”