Android

So Gingerbread, aka Android 2.3 is out. What does this mean for users? Well, if you’re expecting something akin to the difference between Windows XP and Windows 7, you’ll be disappointed, it’s a step forward, but the next big leap will be Honeycomb.

The main differences are in the UI, White/Grey is out, and black is in, with green highlights. There’s VoIP calling built in, better keyboard, better power management, it just adds up to a good all round improvement on 2.2 Froyo.

There are some major differences however, on the developer side of things, with a lot of changes geared towards real-time games and audio, there’s a new low latency audio SDK which would make things like Guitar Rig a possibility with real time effects, there’s something called Strict Mode, which allows developers to stop threads that go on for too long. It adds a lot more capability to native code (something I’ve yet to delve into) which gives a full OpenGL and OpenSL ES capability, which is awesome, again, for games.

Unfortunately the only device with 2.3 available is the Nexus S, and that’s £549 from the Carphone Warehouse. Looks like I won’t be getting one any time soon then, I’ll just have to wait until my HTC Desire is updated to 2.3, which if HTC’s previous updates are anything to go by, will be sometime around April 2011, after Android Honeycomb 3.0 has launched.

You can read more here on the Google 2.3 Platform Highlights.