Android’s come a long way in a short space of time as a mobile operating system. But it’s not finished yet – as Gus over at Lifehacker discovered in an interview with Android product manager Yu-Kuan Lin, the next step is all about the user experience.
When asked what Android’s big priorities are at the moment, Yu-Kuan Lin responded:
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.
In other words, Google are making a real effort to tackle the problem of multiple hardware specs working across multiple versions of the OS and how to make applications scale across them all in a user-friendly way.
You should definitely head over to Lifehacker to read the rest of the interview, where Yu-Kuan Lin discusses battery life, Android on different devices and shares some very Lifehacker-ish tips on productivity.