Differentiate by Delivering a Superior User Experience

Accelerate Boot Time to Use Time

Wind River Solution Accelerator for Android, User Experience provides boot-time technologies that support an "instant-on" capability and minimize power consumption during the boot-up process for different use cases. A typical Android boot process takes about 45 seconds, from pressing the "on" button to showing the home screen. With expectations for an "instant-on" experience, a slow boot time just isn't acceptable anymore.

Wind River has optimized the Android operating system to speed up the boot process, provide determinism, and improve real-time performance with two different technologies:

• Accelerated boot: This technology can speed up the Android boot time by 30%. It is hardware agnostic and can run on different hardware platforms with little or no customization effort.
  
• Hyper boot: To address more aggressive boot-time requirements, hyper boot implements a hibernation-like technology to enable Android devices to resume from RAM in less than one second and from Flash in eight seconds. A small amount of power is required to keep the RAM refreshed during power off.

 

Visually Representing Multitasking Capability

Originally built for smartphone screens, the Android operating system was not designed to present multiple windows on a small screen. As Android evolves to larger screen devices such as tablets, however, the multi-windowing feature, commonly found on PCs, is a must-have user experience capability.

Wind River has implemented a multi-windowing functionality for Android devices. This unique capability supports multiple navigable and concurrently executing active windows on the screen. Multi-windowing is suitable for tablets, automotive infotainment systems, media phones, and industrial devices.

Application windows are sized based on the remaining portion of the visible screen, meaning that users are not limited to automatic sizing but can size windows based on importance or immediate need of the application. Users can minimize, resize, and arrange application windows to provide a personalized experience.

Interconnected Through DLNA

Device-to-device connectivity has become more important than ever. The ability to seamlessly share media and content between devices can be a significant differentiator for your product.

Wind River Solution Accelerator for Android, User Experience includes Wind River Media Center. Media Center provides multimedia interoperability for Android-based devices. It enables Android devices to connect to other devices to access, view, and share digital media. The Media Center functionality follows the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard. Wind River's implementation is comprised of three key components:

• Digital Media Server stores content and makes it available to networked digital media players.
• Digital Media Player finds content on digital media servers and provides playback and rendering capabilities.
• Digital Media Controller finds content on digital media serv¬ers and plays it on designated players.

Deliver the Most Up-to-Date User Experience

The Wind River Android firmware management system delivers firmware updates to Android devices. It supports both online and offline update methods and helps address a critical missing element in the Android framework. A well-designed and tested firmware management system can assist mobile operators and device manufactures with efficiently delivering product updates that can significantly improve the user experience. The system must be able to address the following:

• Recovering from failures: Corrupt update packages or power loss during updates, for example
• Preventing malicious attacks: Unauthorized update pack­ages, for example
• Interacting with other parts of the system: Updating the modem firmware, for example

Unlike many other firmware over-the-air (FOTA) solutions, simplicity is the key principle in the design of Wind River’s solution. It allows a lightweight update method to be quickly integrated into any Android system with much lower cost. The solution provides the following:

• Browser-based and USB disk/SD card–based update mechanism
• Error tolerance from power off, corrupt package, and disk error
• Security that allows only authorized and signed update pack­ages to access the device
• Software-specific updates including boot loader, boot (Linux kernel), system, data, recovery, and firmware