With Android devices invading the market, it’s clear that Google is projected to win the mobile wars. Earlier this week, the guys at Lifehacker got to ask Yu-Kan Lin, Android’s product manager, some questions about Android’s direction as well as questions related to Android platform updates, battery life issues, and tablets! Without further ado, here it is:
What are the big priorities for the Android team at the moment?
The first theme for Android is really about bringing innovation to mobile, and specifically all the goodness of the Web to mobile. That’s why we got into Android in the first place. The second point was in order to drive this innovation the system has to be as open as possible so we went for an open source approach and let everybody see our code base. We have a very open marketplace that lets developers put up all sorts of apps. We believe that this diversity of apps and devices is ultimately offering consumers a lot of choice and that it what they want. We really believe in that innovation driven by openness which ultimately fosters diversity and a whole ecosystem. That’s the overall theme for Android as a whole.
With that as a backdrop, what we’re focusing on now is we’re seeing a lot of success with devices, obviously. What we’re really focusing on is how do we take the user experience to the next level. In the last year, you saw us take a step in the direction of hardware where we did the Nexus One which was really our experiment in terms of how far we could push the envelope in terms of hardware development so that it matches and can showcase all the great stuff on the software platform. Now that we have a lot of basic pieces of the platform done, the next step is really to improve the user experience beyond what it already is, so to really have a polished experience around not just the core OS, but scaling across different devices and different form factors: different screens, different types of input, camera, GPS, all those things. That’s the big direction in which we’re moving in now, and I think you’ll see a lot of new features being released going forward.
How has Android helped you organise your own work life better?
There’s a couple of things I do all the time with my phone. One is we have this Chrome to Phone feature which lets you take whatever on my browser and hit a button and it gets sent to my phone when I’m running out the door. Just that seamless integration between the browser on my phone and my desktop is really fantastic.
Another thing I really love and I find very useful is that I manage all my contacts through Android. Before, when I used to switch phones all the time, they’d all end up on my SIM and then sometimes I’d lose my SIM. Now with Android automatically syncing everything to the cloud, I either add something via Gmail on the Web or I add something to my phone and it automatically syncs to all my phones.
If you want to read more, you can find the full interview HERE.
Source: LifeHacker
