Tech Tête

Currently Android tablets and smartphones run two different OS’s; Honeycomb for Tablet and Gingerbread for smartphones. That’s all going to change when Google plans to release Ice Cream Sandwich in Q4 to meld the two OS’s together, delicious. This OS will be released to run on anything from a 10-inch tablet to their smallest of smart phones. Google has most of the new features under lock and key for now until they can smooth everything out the way they’d like it to be but here are a few tid-bits of information we learned:

• NFC-enabled (near field communication) devices allow for content sharing – Imagine tapping a NFC-enabled CD on your tablets/phones Tungsten speaker. From there, the entire album is loaded into your Music by Google library, and with another tap, the album starts to play. Ya, that’s happening.
• Peer-to-peer NFC – I know Bump! is already created but it’s sort of annoying and a bit buggy. When P2P is built right into your phone what more could you want? Tap your phone against another NFC-enabled device and content is transfered without pressing a button. Awesome.
• Music By Google to be standard within the OS. No more need for syncing every song. Zing!! to Apple there. (I hate syncing)
• This is somewhat useless but cool at the same time. LightingScience will be creating Android compatible lights. What is this you ask? At the keynote they played a demo of Quake and when shots were fired the lights were flickering to simulate “real life experience”. I think it’s cool but the whole market for this type of product is extremely niche and small and I don’t think I’d want to try it. I’d imagine my neighbors would be rushing over wondering what’s going on when my house is flickering like a techno concert.
• A cool spin off from this though is that your tablet or phone can control your lights if you are in the proximity. Convenient if you are lazy, upstairs and the downstairs lights are on. Tap the button, donezo. Your lights are now off. Can’t get much easier than that.
• This will eventually lead to the ability to control washer, dryer, microwave, oven, etc  once the technology is more widespread.
• Android at Home is the new vision, making your Android device the “center” of your life. Discover, connect and communication with devices in the home
• Android open accessory program (think “made for iPod”, it’s the same deal but just for Android). The OS will be able to interact with more 3rd party devices (plus the OS is already open source).
• Implemented Google movie rental service
• Use your Xbox 360 controller to play games?! Now that is neat.
• Who’s onboard for all this testing? LG, SE, Motorola, AT&T, Vodafone, Sprint, Samsung, HTC and Verizon Wireless. That’s a pretty decent lineup. I smell a winner.