New Features
1. Refined UI
- Launcher animation optimized for faster, smoother transition to/from app list
- Adjustments in color, positioning and text
- Audible feedback for improved accessibility
- Customizable touch-hold interval
- Navigation to/from five home screens made easy. Touching the home button in system bar will return you to most frequently used home screen.
- Improved view of internal storage used by apps
2. Support for more varieties of input devices such as keyboards, mouse, trackballs, game controllers and accessories such as digital cameras musical instrument, kiosks and card readers.
- Any type of external keyboards, mouse and trackballs can be connected
- Most of the PC joysticks, game controllers and game pads can be connected except for some proprietary controllers
- More than one device can be attached simultaneously via USB and/or Blutooth HID
- No configuration or drivers required
- Support for USB accessories as host to launch related applications, if application not available the accessories can give the URL to download the application.
- Users can interact with application to control the accessories.
3. Recent Apps list is expandable to include larger number of apps. The list will have all the apps in use and recently used apps.
4. Customizable Home screen
- Re-sizable home screen widgets. widgets can be expanded in both vertically and horizontally.
- Updated home screen widget for Email app gives quick access to emails
5. New high performance Wi-Fi lock added for uninterrupted connectivity even when the device screen is off. This will be useful for streaming long duration music, video and voice services.
- HTTP proxy for each individual Wi-Fi access point can be configured. This will be used by the browser when communicating with the networks. Other Apps also may use this.
- Configuration is made easy by touch-hold of the access point in the setting
- Back up and restore the user defined IP and proxy setting
- Support for Preferred Network Offload (PNO), which works in the background and conserves battery power in case where Wi-Fi connectivity needed for longer time.
Improvements to Standard Applications
6. Improved Browser app – new features added and UI improved
- Quick Controls UI is extended and redesigned. Users can use it to view thumbnails of open tabs, to close the active tabs, access overflow menu for instant access to settings and many other.
- Supports CSS 3D, animations, and CSS fixed positioning to all sites.
- Supports embedded playback of HTML5 video content
- Save the webpage locally for offline viewing with all styling and imaging
- Improved auto login UI let users quickly sign in to Google sites and manage access when multiple users sharing the same device
- Support for plugins that use hardware accelerated rendering
- Page Zoom performance improved
7. Gallery apps improved to support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP).
- Users can connect external cameras over USB and import pictures to Gallery with one touch
- The imported pictures are copied to local storages and it will show the balance space available.
8. Calender grids are made larger for better readability and accurate targeting
- Controls in data picker are redesigned
- Calender list controls can be hidden to create larger viewing area for grids
9. Contacts app allows full text search making it quicker to locate contacts and the results are shown from all the fields stored in the contact.
10. Email app improved
- When replying or forwarding HTML message the improved Email app sends both plain text and HTML bodies as multi-part mime message.
- Folder prefixes for IMAP accounts are made easier to define and manage
- Prefetches emails from server only when the device is connected to a Wi-Fi access point. This is done to conserve battery power and minimize data usage
- Improved home screen widget gives quick access to emails and users can cycle through email labels with the touch of the Email icon at the top of the widget
11. Improved Enterprise support
- Administrators can use the configurable HTTP proxy for each Wi-Fi access point
- Allows encrypted storage card device policy with emulated storage cards and encrypted primary storage
