What is Android

What is android?

• Android is an open source and Linux-based Operating System for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Android was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, led by Google, and other companies.

• Android offers a unified approach to application development for mobile devices which means developers need only develop for Android, and their applications should be able to run on different devices powered by Android.

Features of android: 

Beautiful UI : Android OS basic screen provides a beautiful and intuitive user interface. 

Connectivity : GSM/EDGE, IDEN, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LTE, NFC and WiMAX

Storage : SQLite, a lightweight relational database, is used for data storage purposes.

Media support : H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 SP, AMR, AMR-WB, AAC, HE-AAC, AAC 5.1, MP3, MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP.

Multi-touch : Android has native support for multi-touch which was initially made available in handsets such as the HTC Hero.

Messaging : SMS and MMS 

Web browser : Based on the open-source WebKit layout engine, coupled with Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine supporting HTML5 and CSS3.

Multi-tasking : User can jump from one task to another and same time various application can run simultaneously

Resizable widgets : Widgets are re-sizable, so users can expand them to show more content or shrink them to save space

Multi-Language : Supports single direction and bi-directional text.

GCM : Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a service that lets developers send short message data to their users on Android devices, without needing a proprietary sync solution.

Wi-Fi Direct : A technology that lets apps discover and pair directly, over a high-bandwidth peerto-peer connection

Android Beam : A popular NFC-based technology that lets users instantly share, just by touching two NFC-enabled phones together.