Android application highlets

• Faster, more intuitive text input

1. The Android soft keyboard is redesigned and optimized for faster text input and editing
2. The keys themselves are reshaped and repositioned for improved targeting
3. making them easier to see and press accurately, even at high speeds
4. The keyboard also displays the current character and dictionary suggestions in a larger, more vivid style that is easier to read.
5. The keyboard adds the capability to correct entered words from suggestions in the dictionary
6. As the user selects a word already entered, the keyboard displays suggestions that the user can choose from, to replace the selection. 
7. The user can also switch to voice input mode to replace the selection.
8. Smart suggestions let the user accept a suggestion and then return to correct it later, if needed, from the original set of suggestions.
9. New multitouch key-chording lets the user quickly enter numbers and symbols by pressing Shift+<letter> and ?123+<symbol>, without needing to manually switch input modes. From certain keys
10. users can also access a popup menu of accented characters, numbers, and symbols by holding the key and sliding to select a character.

• NEW DEVELOPER FEATURES

1. Applications that use native code can now receive and process input and sensor events directly in their native code, which dramatically improves efficiency and responsiveness.
2. Native libraries exposed by the platform let applications handle the same types of input events as those available through the framework. Applications can receive events from all supported sensor types and can enable/disable specific sensors and manage event delivery rate and queueing.
3. Android 2.3 adds API support for several new sensor types, including gyroscope, rotation vector, linear acceleration, gravity, and barometer sensors. 
4. pplications can use the new sensors in combination with any other sensors available on the device, to track three-dimensional device motion and orientation change with high precision and accuracy
5.  For example, a game application could use readings from a gyroscope and accelerometer on the device to recognize complex user gestures and motions, such as tilt, spin, thrust, and slice.
6. The platform provides a software implementation of Khronos OpenSL ES, a standard API that gives applications access to powerful audio controls and effects from native code. Applications can use the API to manage audio devices and control audio input, output, and processing directly from native code.
7. Native applications can declare a new type of Activity class, NativeActivity whose lifecycle callbacks are implemented directly in native code. The NativeActivity and its underlying native code run in the system just as do other Activities — they run in the application's system process and execute on the application's main UI thread, and they receive the same lifecycle callbacks as do other Activities.
8. The platform also exposes native APIs for managing windows, including the ability to lock/unlock the pixel buffer to draw directly into it. Through the API, applications can obtain a native window object associated with a framework Surface object and interact with it directly in native code.
9. Applications can now access a native Asset Manager API to retrieve application assets directly from native code without needing to go through JNI. If the assets are compressed, the platform does streaming decompression as the application reads the asset data. There is no longer a limit on the size of compressed .apk assets that can be read.
10. Additionally, applications can access a native Storage Manager API to work directly with OBB files downloaded and managed by the system. Note that although platform support for OBB is available in Android 2.3, development tools for creating and managing OBB files will not be available until early 2011.

• NEW PLATFORM TECHNOLOGIES

  Media Framework

  • New media framework fully replaces OpenCore, maintaining all previous codec/container support for encoding and decoding.
  • Integrated support for the VP8 open video compression format and the WebM open container format
  • Adds AAC encoding and AMR wideband encoding

  • Networking

    • SIP stack, configurable by device manufacturer
    • Support for Near Field Communications (NFC), configurable by device manufacturer
    • Updated BlueZ stack

    • Dalvik runtime

      • Dalvik VM:
        • Concurrent garbage collector (target sub-3ms pauses)
        • Adds further JIT (code-generation) optimizations
        • Improved code verification
        • StrictMode debugging, for identifying performance and memory issues
      • Core libraries:
        • Expanded I18N support (full worldwide encodings, more locales)
        • Faster Formatter and number formatting. For example, float formatting is 2.5x faster.
        • HTTP responses are gzipped by default. XML and JSON API response sizes may be reduced by 60% or more.
        • New collections and utilities APIs
        • Improved network APIs
        • Improved file read and write controls
        • Updated JDBC
      • Updates from upstream projects:
        • OpenSSL 1.0.0a
        • BouncyCastle 1.45
        • ICU 4.4
        • zlib 1.2.5