Android 1.5: New and Improved

Google really surprised me when they released their own mobile operating system. Why do I say that?  Because Google was always supposed to put out a web-based OS, one that you would access through nothing more than a web browser.  This was what we all were anticipating 5 years ago.  That still has not become a reality, but they are really making waves in the mobile world.  Here is the latest list of improvements to Android 1.5:

Overall User Interface Improvements for:

• In-call experience
• Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
• SMS & MMS
• Browser
• Gmail
• Calendar
• Email
• Camera & Gallery
• Application management

Performance improvements

• Faster Camera start-up and image capture
• Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
• Smoother page scrolling in Browser
• Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

New features

• On-screen soft keyboard
  • Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
  • Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
  • User dictionary for custom words
• Home screen
  • Widgets
    • Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
  • Live folders
• Camera & Gallery
  • Video recording
  • Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
• Bluetooth
  • Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
  • Auto-pairing
  • Improved handsfree experience
• Browser
  • Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
  • Copy ‘n paste in browser
  • Search within a page
  • User-selectable text-encoding
  • UI changes include:
    • Unified Go and Search box
    • Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
• Contacts
  • Shows user picture for Favorites
  • Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
  • One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
• System
  • New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
  • SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
  • SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
• Google applications
  • View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
  • Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
  • Upload videos to Youtube
  • Upload photos on Picasa