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Essay about Specifications of the Kitkat Operating System

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The latest released of Android operating systems for mobile devices is version 4.4, codenamed KitKat. The API version 4.4 (KitKat) comes with revamped home screen and app launcher. It is designed to run fast, smooth, and responsively on wide range of devices. After three Jelly Bean releases (API 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3), Google has released KitKat with a major revision, adding many new features such as support for hidden system and status bars, printer support, and lower memory usage. It also has a number of user-level improvements, including a new dialer, a Google-infused home screen, and user interface refinements.

Unlike Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich, KitKat requires minimum of 512MB RAM. To provide a smoother processing and increase …show more content…

New to KitKat are a couple new low-power sensors - Step Detector and Step Counter. These composite sensors let developers to build applications that can monitor user’s steps when they are walking, running, or climbing stairs. Android 4.4 introduces platform support for hardware sensor batching. Sensor batching improves efficiency by collecting and delivering the sensor events in batches, rather than individually. This improves device’s power consumption because when the device waits to send events while they are being batched, the processor remains in a low-power idle state.

The new Android API replaces messaging app with Google Hangouts, which is now the default way to send SMS messages. Google Hangouts Chat and SMS are now handled by the default app and the new API manages the app's message storage and retrieval. SMS or MMS messages are managed by the new SMS provider and APIs which define a standardized interaction model.

KitKat comes with a new "Immersive mode" that can hide the status and system bars in any app, if the app has this feature enabled. The “Immersive mode” can provide rich visual experience for users by allowing content such as photos, videos, maps, books, and games to use all the available pixels on the screen, without any distraction of status or notification bars. On top of that, Android 4.4 introduces a new transitions framework, for developing animation and

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