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Android 3.2 official, coming to a tablet near you

Android 3.2 is official, which means that it will likely appear as an update on a number of tablets in the near future. Motorola is already rolling out the update for its Xoom.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
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Motorola is already rolling out the Android 3.2 update for its Xoom tablet.
Motorola is already rolling out the Android 3.2 update for its Xoom tablet. Motorola

The latest version of Google's Android operating system for tablets is official, which means the update will likely be arriving on a range of tablets in the near future.

Motorola has already begun to roll out the update on its Xoom tablet, the company confirmed with CNET on Wednesday. Other tablet candidates for a 3.2 rollout include Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, Acer's Iconia Tab 500, and Toshiba's Thrive.

Huawei last month announced what it claims is the "world's first" 7-inch Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet to pack a dual-core processor.

Android 3.2 is "an incremental release that adds several new capabilities for users and developers. The new platform includes API (application programming interface) changes and the API level is 13," according to a July 15 announcement posted on Google's Android Developers Blog.

Android 3.2 highlights:

  • Optimizations for a wider range of screen sizes: allows developers to better target a range of screen sizes--not just 10.1-inch.
  • New fill-screen mode: a new zoom-to-fill screen compatibility mode, which "renders the application in a smaller screen area and then scales the pixels to fill the current screen."
  • Media files can be loaded directly from the SD card: users can now "load media files directly from the SD card to apps that use them," and there is a "system facility [that] makes the files accessible to apps from the system media store."
  • Extended screen support API: provides developers with more "precise control over [the user interface] across the range of Android-powered devices." It's also meant to "allow [the] targeting [of] screens by their dimensions."

The Android 3.2 software development kit is available for download here.

Via Netbooknews.com.