Features of Android

As Android is open source and freely available to manufacturers for customization, there are no fixed
hardware and software configurations.

 However, Android itself supports the following features:

➤ Storage              —     Uses SQLite, a lightweight relational database, for data storage. Chapter 6 discusses  data storage in more detail.

➤ Connectivity      — Supports GSM/EDGE, IDEN, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth (includes
A2DP and AVRCP), WiFi, LTE, and WiMAX. Chapter 8 discusses networking in more detail.

➤ Messaging         — Supports both SMS and MMS. Chapter 8 discusses messaging in more detail.

➤ Web browser      — Based on the open-source WebKit, together with Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine

➤ Media support    — Includes support for the following media: H.263, H.264 (in 3GP or MP4
container), MPEG-4 SP, AMR, AMR-WB (in 3GP container), AAC, HE-AAC (in MP4 or
3GP container), MP3, MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP

➤ Hardware support — Accelerometer Sensor, Camera, Digital Compass, Proximity Sensor,
and GPS

➤ Multi-touch            — Supports multi-touch screens

➤ Multi-tasking         — Supports multi-tasking applications

➤ Flash support          — Android 2.3 supports Flash 10.1.

➤ Tethering                 — Supports sharing of Internet connections as a wired/wireless hotspot