Android Version 2.3 "Gingerbread"

2.3 "Gingerbread"

About a half year after the launch of Froyo on the Nexus One, Google came back for another round of the Nexus program to support the release of Android 2.3. This time, it had selected Samsung to produce the Nexus S, a derivative of the company's wildly successful Galaxy S line. Though it actually wasn't much more advanced than the Nexus One it replaced, the two phones couldn't have looked much more different thanks largely to a new curved-glass display and a glossy, all-black shell. Gone also was the ubiquitous trackball beneath the display — with the Nexus S, it appeared that Google was finally ready to bid adieu to hardware navigation of the user interface. For Andy Rubin, the transition might have been a tough call to make: the trackball had always been a marquee feature in Danger's line of devices, and he'd brought it over for the G1.

Android 2.3 included a good mix of new functionality, too:

More granular control over copy and paste. Android's support for clipboard operations had been lagging iOS since Apple released version 3.0 in mid-2009, which offered a fantastic level of character-by-character highlight control using a magnifying glass to make the cursor easier to operate with a finger. Prior to Gingerbread, stock Android only offered the ability to copy the contents of entire text boxes, which was frequently (usually, even) not what you wanted to do. Gingerbread fixed this, adding word-by-word highlighting with finger-draggable anchors on either end to facilitate adjusting the highlight. As with the home screen improvements in Froyo, this was another area where Google was catching up to the innovations that some of its OEMs had already been including in their skins for some time — HTC had already grafted similar functionality into prior releases.

An improved keyboard. Google once again tweaked its stock keyboard for 2.3, and this time it was noticeable to the naked eye — the design and coloration of the keys changed significantly for the first time since the keyboard's introduction in Cupcake. Multitouch support also improved with "chording," allowing users to press multi-key combinations to quickly access the secondary symbol keyboard.

Better battery and app management tools. Android had been dinged by some for being too effective in supporting multitasking — by letting software run free in the background, battery life was always at risk of taking a big hit, particularly if a user had loaded poorly-designed apps. Gingerbread helped make that a little easier to fix with a new bundled utility for graphically viewing battery drain over time and seeing exactly what apps and system functions are eating the most power (of course, the onus was still on the user to uninstall offending apps or adjust their usage).

Support for front-facing cameras. Though it wouldn't be until mid-2010 that Google Talk would gain mobile video chat support, Gingerbread laid the groundwork for that functionality by supporting multiple cameras on a single device. Indeed, Google had the foresight to specify a front-facing camera on the Nexus S, though you couldn't use it for much other than taking pictures of yourself when the device first launched.

Other new features of Gingerbread were targeted more at developers than end users: NFC support, for one, which was available on the Nexus S by way of a special antenna embedded in the battery cover. For many months, this capability was little more than a novelty — you could scan Google Places signs in some cities to collect URLs with more information on the location, for instance, much as you would a QR code — but Google later used Sprint's version of the Nexus S to launch Google Wallet, a major mobile payment initiative. Many companies are betting the farm on the future of NFC and mobile payments, and Gingerbread was on the bleeding edge of that push.

Google also used the launch of Gingerbread as an opportunity to gain some footing in the mobile gaming market, an area where it had lagged iOS significantly. The new version gave developers lower-level access to audio, device controls, graphics, and storage, which allowed them to write considerably faster native code — absolutely key for creating the rich, graphics-intensive 3D games that the platform lacked.