Yesterday Google announced the release of Android, the operating system for mobile devices, version 2.3, codename Gingerbread.

Android 2.3, based on the Linux kernel 2.6.35, shows a more refined user interface to allow users to learn its use more easily and in general to do various operations more quickly. For example in Gingerbread it’s possible to use a dictionary to correct a word while you’re writing a text and functions such as a word selection and copy/paste are now more efficient.

Power management was improved in various ways, a vital point for an operating system created for mobile devices. Now users have a better visibility of the situation with the power consumption by the various applications and it’s possibile to configure the shut down of applications that work in background or keep the device awake too long.

Another important factor for mobile devices is the possibility to communicate so here’s the introduction of the possibility to communicate through the Internet with users who have a SIP account and the addition of an NFC Reader to allow users to read and interact with “near-field communication” tags.

People who use Android on a cell phone can be content with games such as Sudoku or a solitaire and videos with a relatively low quality. Instead people who use a pad or a netbook may want to use games such as 3D shoot-em-ups and watch videos of a certain quality so in Gingerbread various technical improvement were introduced to allow big games performance improvements and support for video format VP8 and open container format WebM were introduced.

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For developers in general SDK r8 together with NDK r5 were released to allow the creations of portions of your applications in native code.

There are many improvements in Gingerbread, soon we’ll see the comments from users and developers and their importance in Android’s struggle against its competitors.