Chet is showing slides that say there are now north of 500 million Android devices out there.

Now, he’s showing numbers that put Android apps in February 2011 at over 150,000.

Today, however, that number is at over 300,000.

This keynote is titled Android Awesomeness, and is presented by Romain Guy, senior software engineer at Google, and Chet Haase, also senior software engineer at Google.

They’re starting out with a history lesson.

Romain intimated that originally, each release of the Android OS was named after a robot, such as Bender.

Copyright issues negated that, and the team moved to the sweeties theme.

Chet is showing slides that say there are now north of 500 million Android devices out there.

Now, he’s showing numbers that put Android apps in February 2011 at over 150,000.

Today, however, that number is at over 300,000.

Chet: “if we took all of those poeplt hat had a new android device every single day and stacked them on top of each other, it would take only 764 days for that stack to reach the moon

.” Romain: “And this makes absolutely no sense what so ever.

” Chet adds that, today, it would only take 404 days to reach the moon.”

On to Ice Cream Sandwich. Romain “Android 4.0 has everything that every previous release has.

The platform, when there’s a version 4, we won’t have APIs that won’t exist from one release to the other.

If there’s an API in the platform, it will stay there forever.

Romain is going over the improvements in Honeycomb.

Better UI, USB host mode, new apps.

Revamped Gmail app, added books and movie studio, and a redone Market.

Chet: “There were also new widgets in the platform with Honeycomb.

YOu could take your gmail app and drop it on the home screen and read your email without opening the Gmail application.

And there were a bunch of dev improvements, Fragments.

The whole purpose of fragments was to create the ability for devs to write one source that could target multiple devices.

You no longer have to have a phone app as well as a tablet app, you can have an app that can cofigure itself to run on both.”

Romain: “Action Bar was also one of the biggest changes in Honeycomb.

This is widely used by applications on the market.

This replaces the hardware menu key.

Instead, we put all the elements on screen.

Renderscript was introduced. You can use it to render 3D on screen using the GPU, when you do processing with it, it will ultimately work on multiple cores.

One fo the benefits of Renderscipt is the speed of the code, but it’s easy to write.

Chet: Live wallpapers and the YouTube video wall, Books, and the carosel feature of that use Renderscript.

Chet: “Layers was part of what we did to make thigns faster on the device.

New API for allowing you to cache rendering for quick animations.

Takes up a bit of memory so you don’t want to use layers for everything.

If all you’re doing is copying that thing around or fading things in and out, it can make things faster.

Chet: “Email got various little improvements.

The swiping feature we can see again.

The action bar allows you to switch between accounts.

Now we have the navigation elements at the top, and the actual actions we can perform and the overflow menu is on the right.Romain: “Google Maps has not changed much but it looks awesome on this device.

One of the new Labs feature, you can enable pre-cache map area, then all you do is go to the map, long press, and here you can click pre-cache.

Downloads 10 miles around where you want to go, and it downloads the maps.

I’m going to a conference and there won’t be a signal there, so I can download the maps and not get lost.

For developers, Chet: “We have lots of social stuff in the system.

APIs for plugging into Google Plus.

Enabled to do more sharing of contacts.

Other new features: Social API, new Calendar API, Visual Voicemail, Android Beam, Wifi direct, Bluetooth Health Device Profile.

You can now add events to a users calendar.

There’s ways to integrate directly into the built in voicemail system.

Android beam uses NFC to tap two phones together to send what’s on one phone to another: a web page or a game, for example.

Chet: “There’s Wifi direct, so you can now connect devices directly so devices can talk to each other.

Medical devices can be connected to via Bluetooth.”

Chet: “The ability to set watermarks for data usage on your phone.

If you went over usage you may not have realized it.

You can set watermarks so you get a warning when the system reaches so much data.

You can also set that per application.”

Chet: “Not only is there a new API for users to interact with this, you can interact with it as well.

Media: you can connect to the media layer at a very low level.

New camera capabilities.

Media effects on textures.

Audio remote controls.”