Huge crowd, heard the attendance was 5.5k give or take. There was a veritable geek stampede getting into the room this morning. Not sure if there is any big news that hasn’t already been leaked. The Google music service launch, growth in Android market share, and possibly some more info on Honeycomb. It’s all going down in about 12 minutes.
Vic Gundrota upon stage. His review of past IO conferences ends with a shot at Apple. (You stay classy, Vic.)
Hugo Barra kicks off the Android keynote. Review of the Android numbers. Still focused on activations which is the wrong stat. 210 available devices (mostly phones) is still impressive and 200k app in the Android app store. A healthy market, no doubt.
Two new services being announced today. One must be the music locker.
3.1 Honeycomb being released today. Good stuff in the update: resizable widgets, better USB support, and more. 3.1 will also be available on Google TV.
Next release, Ice cream sandwich, in the 4th quarter. The top priority will be device choice but it looks like the OS will become more homogeneous. Like iOs. Unlike iOS some of it will be open source.
Cool head tracking demo using the device camera to adjust an Open GL scene.
Android market now adding movie rentals. Terms are similar to other online rental outlets like iTunes. You can stream and “pin” a movie to a device which downloads it for playing movies on planes. No tethering to a computer to pin the content. So music must be next.
Music beta. All in the cloud. Uses a client app to move files up to Google’s servers. So far it looks like Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Looks like they have a “Genius Mix” feature like iTunes. All demos are showing off both phone and tablets. Of course no tethering required. The service launches today in beta. It’s free while it’s in beta.
Barra announces an industry group that will govern how updates will happen to Android mobile devices. Should help speed the rate of Android updates.
Android Open Accessory is a new open standard and API for device interconnect. Demoing using an Android device with an exercise bike. Interesting idea. It’s a hardware and software solution based on Arduino. (wow) this looks like a great program for building Hardware that interfaces with Android devices.
Android at Home is an extension of this idea but they are short on details on the hardware and software that drives the simple X10-like lighting demos. Still pretty new. Not available.
Looks like Google and Samsung are giving us all Galaxy Tab 10.1! Thanks! Nice way to wrap up the keynote!