Google IO 2011

Seems like everyone did not get why Google choose not to demo Social at Google IO this year. Obviously, part of it is that they do not want any other parts distracting it.

But, the other part i believe is some focusing on what is coming for Android for rest of 2011. While we already know that GoogleTV Android Sdk addon is coming there are of course other items that have only been hinted at with brief one sentence paragraphs.

For example, the music store hinted at GoogleIO 2010 is somewhat late as it was slated for holidays 2010. However, the Android Market changes to pave the way for that in terms of better access, in-app payments,etc have been incorpoated into Android Market.

With Apple testing over-the-air iOS updates slated for full implementation possibly in iPhone 5 that means apple will have the means to attack the low-end as before that style of updating you had to have access to a desktop mac to do updates. This means Google and OHA has to offer something beyond the navigation and text to voice. That obviously could be finishing the UI/OS fragmentation work of moving everyone to the Honeycomb UI apis including OEMs as that would result in OEMs getting updates to mobile carriers in terms of weeks rather than months. Thus, that is something to look for in does Google show off an Android 2011 road-map or show a new version of android for phones with the new honeycomb UI apis being used.

But, no matter if those get fully addressed or not it should be an interesting Google IO.

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Android 4.0 at GoogleIO

There was of course that ice cream sundae doodle which may or not be an April fools joke. But, we know that Google and OHA engineers are hard at work on the next version of Android. We of course know that part of Android 4.0 is a port of the Honeycomb UI to the smartphone device trunk, but what else is in Android 4.0 that we might see at the GoogleIO?

One, renderscripting for smartphones as the real renderscript that you could write code to was introduced in Honeycomb. Two, the 3d scenegraph in Honeycomb obviously will be ported to Android 4.0. To say that a small emphasis on game development will be the focus at GoogleIO 2011 would be a vast understatement as Google knows with its hiring of Game development Advocates for the Android Platform that games is one of the ways independent developers can monetize application development on the android platform.

You can expect to see worker and P2P support in the webkit branch demo’d at GoogleIO 2011 along with a heavy does of new html5 additions. Hopefully, the webkit web widget that OPhone uses is part of that equation.

Continued NFC evolution will be shown in that a new feature of having NFC negotiate a bluetooth connection and than hand off to that established bluetooth connection, I am knick naming it the bump-for-blue. Remember, you can use encryption to keep a NFC connection secure so would be a perfect way to ask for permission to establish a bluetooth connection.

And of course before GoogleIO we have another Android Tools update. What is in this update of ADT? There is already a code commit in android tools to have the android sdk installer within the ADT plugin so you would download the ADT plugin if you were an android beginning developer and install the sdk form the ADT plugin.

I do not know if Google/OHA will call it android 4.0 at GoogleIO2011. They may call it ice-cream sandwich and demo parts of it as Android 3.1. But this thus far as my guess what will be demoed at GoogleIO2011.

Side Note: I started my MobileBytes Google Sites aggregation pages to aggregate demos, videos, tutorials, etc and so there is a left top link for that and eventually in this month it will some neat stuff. Google Sites is easier that doing the some of the html part by hand although I will still update the github pages from time-to-time.