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Model Developer Release date Android version at release Ref. Amazon Fire Phone: Amazon: 2014/07 Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean Arirang (original) Arirang (smartphone)
- Android (operating system) - Wikipedia
Android has been the best-selling OS worldwide on...
- Smartphone - Wikipedia
By Q1 2018, over 383 million smartphones were sold with 85.9...
- Android (operating system) - Wikipedia
- Overview
- In the beginning there was Cupcake
- Android 1.6: Donut
- Android 2.0: Eclair
- Android 2.2: Froyo
- Android 2.3: Gingerbread
- Android 3.0: Honeycomb
- Android 4.0: Ice Cream Sandwich
- Android 4.1: Jelly Bean
- Android 4.4: KitKat
News
By Basil Kronfli
published 31 December 2018
Celebrating the sweet taste of Google’s mobile platform
2008, when pinch-to-zoom was a right reserved for iPhones and BlackBerrys were still the business, a new kind of smartphone hit the scene: the Android smartphone.
Starting at version 1.5 for public consumption, Android was launched on the HTC Dream (known as the T-Mobile G1 in the US), a QWERTY keyboard-packing slider phone. Based on a modified version of Linux, Android offered something very different to the iPhone: freedom.
An open source Cupcake
Unlike iOS’s heavily policed, locked-down operating system, Android arrived with the promise of open source everything. Google made access to the Android Market (now called the Google Play Store) freely available, and users could even customize their home screens with widgets, offering in-app functionality from said home screen, no app opening needed.
Is it an albatross? Is it a jumbo jet? No! It’s the Dell Streak!
Version 1.6 of Android, Doughnut was announced in 2009, and it’s the update we have to blame for today’s giant phones that don’t quite fit in normal-sized pockets.
While Android tablets hadn’t quite taken off by this point, Donut was a step ahead, laying the foundations for the ‘phablet’, and introducing support for more screen sizes than Cupcake.
Big screens ahoy!
The aforementioned 5-inch Dell Streak, for example, despite being small by today’s standards, was a veritable beast when it was launched, and it owed its big screen to advances Donut introduced.
Other innovative features introduced in Android 1.6 included a text-to-speech engine, universal search and a more complete battery usage screen, so you knew which apps were draining your smartphone dry.
Who knew there was ever a time when you couldn’t have multiple Google accounts on your Android smartphone? We did!
Eclair, named for the choux pastry French patisserie staple, remedied account limitations and more.
Multi-touch me
But multiple accounts wasn’t the highlight feature of Android 2.0 – oh no. Eclair finally introduced multi-touch to smartphones that weren’t made by Apple (although that created something of a hoo-ha in itself.)
Take a picture, open it up, pinch to zoom… Android and iOS were in a two-horse race now, and Android was catching up.
Eclair also introduced Google Maps navigation, as well as additional camera modes, live wallpapers and Bluetooth 2.1 support.
Froyo, aka frozen yoghurt, is confectionary number four, and Android version 2.2. Loaded up on classic phones like the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the HTC Incredible S, it marked the point at which Android hardware started to feel more premium, finally doing justice to the OS inside – from Super AMOLED screens bettering the LCDs of iPhones through to excellent industrial design from the likes of HTC.
Get some Froyo on that hotspot
Version 2.2 also introduced a feature that could make Android phones more attractive than iPhones for the everyday user – Froyo’s most practical highlight was most definitely mobile Wi-Fi hotspotting.
While Windows phones had Bluetooth and USB hotspot tools before, the idea of using high-speed Wi-Fi tethering to share your phone’s (then blazingly fast) 3G data with a laptop or even another smartphone was vindication for Android fans the world over.
Android Gingerbread didn’t get a new look or feel compared to Froyo, but it did get a host of new features, including support for new sensors, including NFC. Other highlights included internet calling and a new download manager – but none of those were our highlights.
Copy, paste, catch up with Apple
Oh no – our highlight was the seemingly rudimentary and long-overdue copy and paste feature that was giving iPhones the text-editing edge over Androids for over a year: single word selection.
Before Gingerbread, Android copying was clumsy, given the fact that only entire text boxes could be selected. 2010 saw Google closing the gap, with a long press over a word selecting just that word, and displaying a pop-up menu that included copy and paste options, just like we have on Android phones today.
Remember the Motorola Xoom? No, not the Microsoft Zune – we’re talking about the Motorola tablet that introduced Google’s tablet version of Android, codenamed Honeycomb.
The most striking difference between it and any version of Android we'd seen before was the interface. Introducing ‘Holographic’ UI elements, Google went a bit Tron here – all illuminated lines, gradient halo highlights around objects – and while it didn’t look timeless, it did look cool.
On-screen navigation, the shape of things to come...
Android phones today seldom sport hardware navigation buttons; that’s to say, the back, home and recent apps buttons are in a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen on the biggest phones out now – the Google Pixel 3, Samsung Galaxy S9 and Huawei Mate 20 for example.
So long physical buttons, hello unified Android typeface!
Ice Cream Sandwich was probably one of the richest updates Android has seen. Available on the Galaxy Nexus and HTC One X, it brought an excellent in-gallery photo editor to the table, as well as a data limiter within the settings.
The whole look and feel was refined, in line with Honeycomb’s design direction, and it delivered a much richer experience than Android 2.3..
Swipe to dismiss
In hindsight, probably the most pervasive feature introduced in this version was the swipe to dismiss gesture.
While it had been used by other smartphone manufacturers before, getting Android users comfortable with this little swipe gesture ensured its rise to ubiquity.
Jelly Bean was a tale of three parts: 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3.
4.1 was all about refinements. It took Ice Cream Sandwich and made it smoother, introduced improved support for multiple languages, and automatically resized widgets to fit your home screen.
Android 4.2 was a further refinement, this time polishing the look and feel, making for an excellent-looking tablet UI, showcased well on the Nexus 10, complete with Miracast wireless display projection support.
The final episode – Return of the Jelly Bean, if you will – was a corker for developers, giving them tools to improve UI smoothness, use the latest version of Bluetooth and restrict profiles on devices with multiple user accounts – handy for parents and businesses alike.
Expandable notifications
Our Jelly Bean highlight? Dragging down with two fingers for expanded notifications. This feature gave users a peak into the details of their most recent updates. So, if your notification read '3 new tweets', a two-finger drag down would expand the notification and showcase who those tweets were from, with a snippet of the message itself.
Emojis on the Google Keyboard, lower RAM requirements paving the way for budget Android phones, and NFC security being bumped up to help make mobile payments a reality – all this and more was loaded inside the Android 4.4 KitKat update.
'Okay Google, will this ever catch on?'
But it was Google Now becoming a voice assistant that blazed the trail for today’s world of talkative phone assistants and smart speakers.
The always-on microphone and 'OK Google' command were introduced alongside KitKat in October 2013, harnessing the power of Google Search.
People also ask
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Android has been the best-selling OS worldwide on smartphones since 2011 and on tablets since 2013. As of May 2021, it had over three billion monthly active users, the largest installed base of any operating system in the world, and as of January 2021, the Google Play Store featured over 3 million apps.
Apr 26, 2024 · An Android phone is a powerful, high-tech smartphone that runs on the Android operating system (OS) developed by Google and is used by a variety of mobile phone manufacturers. Surprisingly,...
Android. Android is an operating system used in mobile devices. It is mostly used for smartphones, like Google 's own Google Pixel, as well as by other phone manufacturers like HTC and Samsung. It has also been used for tablets such as the Motorola, Xoom and Amazon Kindle. A modified Linux kernel is used as Android's kernel.
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