Google Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) review

After the big improvements that made their way into Android 2.2 it’s fair to say that Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) offers a lot less in terms of features. What it does do is refine the Android operating system, making it feel smoother and more complete.

Launched on the Google Nexus S, the OS should start to appear on other handsets soon; however, as per usual the exact deployment of Gingerbread relies heavily on each handset manufacturer. As it stands, Gingerbread hasn’t even been released for the Google Nexus One.

Still, when you do finally get the update, here are the features that you can expect to see. Gingerbread is all about making the phone easier to use, so many updates are tweaks. One of the first is the new keyboard.

According to Google, this has reshaped and repositioned keys for improved targeting. We’re not entirely sure that these make a huge difference and we found we could type at the same speed on the Nexus S running Android 2.3 as on the Nexus One running Android 2.2. It’s good to see that numbers can now be typed with a long-press on the QWERTY keys at the top of the keyboard, although this is a feature that HTC owners have had for a long time.

Auto-correct has been improved, too. Once you’ve finished typing, you can tap any word to bring up auto-correct options; in the previous generation of Android, you could auto-correct the word you were typing only. In practice, it makes things quicker, as you can go back and correct a mistake you didn’t notice.

One of the best improvements is, finally, proper copy-and-paste. With previous versions of Android, selecting text was a rather random affair. Now, selections are made by moving bounding arrows in a similar way to the iPhone. This method is available across all applications, and works really well. HTC and Samsung have implemented their own versions of this, but Google’s is neater.

Application management has been improved, too. For starters, the OS will keep better track of running applications and even terminate ones that are using too much processor time while running in the background. In practice it should improve battery life. Certainly, the Nexus S lasts around a weekend of normal use, while the Nexus One only lasted around a day; however, until we get chance to upgrade the Nexus One to get a real comparison it’s hard to say how good this feature really is.

There’s now a link to Manage Apps from the context-menu in the Homescreen. This makes it easier to see which applications are running and terminate them manually if you need to, partially removing the need for third-party managers, such as Advanced Task Killer.

We love the new Download Manager, which gives you a single place to access all of your downloads, rather than hunting around using a file manager. It’s much neater and is something that we would have expected to see sooner.

While you can now make SIP VoIP calls using Gingerbread’s in-built client, it’s not particularly exciting and most consumers will probably find installing the Skype client. Once this has been updated, Gingerbread’s support for multiple cameras will make video calling possible.

Near-field Communications (NFC) is one of the big features that Google talked about at the launch of the Nexus S. With Android 2.3’s support for the technology a handset with an NFC chip can be used to make payments. With Orange and O2 both planning NFC payment services, this technology is close to being useful. That said, it’s not exciting enough to warrant a handset upgrade until your contract is due.

While Android 2.3 isn’t the big upgrade that Android 2.2 was, it successfully makes Google’s mobile operating system feel a lot more polished. In fact, after using it extensively since the Nexus S launch, we think it makes ‘plain’ Android a satisfying experience and, in many ways, better than tweaked versions of the OS, such as HTC Sense.