Datasheet

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CHAPTER 1 HELLO, ANDROID
ANDROID SDK FEATURES
The true appeal of Android as a development environment lies in the APIs it provides.
As an application-neutral platform, Android gives you the opportunity to create applications that are
as much a part of the phone as anything provided out of the box. The following list highlights some of
the most noteworthy Android features:
➤ No licensing, distribution, or development fees or release approval processes
➤ Wi-Fi hardware access
➤ GSM, EDGE, and 3G networks for telephony or data transfer, enabling you to make or
receive calls or SMS messages, or to send and retrieve data across mobile networks
➤ Comprehensive APIs for location-based services such as GPS
➤ Full multimedia hardware control, including playback and recording with the camera and
microphone
➤ APIs for using sensor hardware, including accelerometers and the compass
➤ Libraries for using Bluetooth for peer-to-peer data transfer
➤ IPC message passing
➤ Shared data stores
➤ Background applications and processes
➤ Home-screen Widgets, Live Folders, and Live Wallpaper
➤ The ability to integrate application search results into the system search
➤ An integrated open-source HTML5 WebKit-based browser
➤ Full support for applications that integrate map controls as part of their user interface
➤ Mobile-optimized hardware-accelerated graphics, including a path-based 2D graphics library
and support for 3D graphics using OpenGL ES 2.0
➤ Media libraries for playing and recording a variety of audio/video or still image formats
➤ Localization through a dynamic resource framework
➤ An application framework that encourages reuse of application components and the replace-
ment of native applications
Access to Hardware, Including Camera, GPS, and Accelerometer
Android includes API libraries to simplify development involving the device hardware. These ensure
that you don’t need to create specific implementations of your software for different devices, so you
can create Android applications that work as expected on any device that supports the Android
software stack.
The Android SDK includes APIs for location-based hardware (such as GPS), the camera, audio, net-
work connections, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, accelerometers, the touchscreen, and power management. You can
explore the possibilities of some of Android’s hardware APIs in more detail in Chapters 11 through 14.