Google certainly had a lot of announcements this morning at Google IO, I’ll recap some of my favorites here.
Android 4.1 – Jelly Bean
Google announced Jelly Bean with various enhancements to performance and some new personalized features. Project Butter uses VSync, triple buffering, and a 60 FPS refresh rate to provide smoother experience. From a development perspective, there is also a new system trace utility to see exactly what the system is doing.
The Google Now feature uses your daily patterns to provide items like traffic and calendar appointments to tell you when it’s time to leave for an appointment, or suggest alternate routes in times of heavy traffic. These learning features are verging on creepy, but I’m a big fan of pushing the envelope and making life events easier.
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Nexus 7 Tablet
The Nexus 7 tablet fills the 7 inch tablet space, and comes preloaded with Jelly Bean. Price is $199, and it will be available in mid-July. This device is targeted for media consumers (movies, music, ebooks), and does not include an SD Card slot.
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Google+ Enhancements
Google announced updated tablet and phone Google+ apps today, and both will be released this afternoon for Android, and “very soon” for iPad. They are really targeting the mobile space here, since the majority of Google+ access has been through mobile devices. Google+ Events was the other highlight, and features the ability to go to “party mode” and share photos to a common event. If Google can increase the adoption rate of Google+, this will be an exciting feature. (I, for one, would welcome a widely-used replacement for Facebook.)
Looks like the new events feature is active!
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Google Glass
This was definitely the most cutting-edge announcement of the day, and was introduced by a team of skydivers and bicyclists. Glass is most like a set of glasses with photo/video recording capabilities and reality augmentation features. For more information about Glass, I’d encourage you to check out the links below. Pre-orders are currently available only for IO attendees, and there are no plans to release a consumer version at this time.
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Further Reading
I only covered my favorite parts of the keynote here, but there is a wealth of information on both The Verge and AnandTech that covers all announcements.