14 DAY TRIAL // Mountain View-based Internet giant Google has lately been rumored to plan the addition of brand new, highly appealing features to the camera capabilities of the Android platform, and some more info on the matter is now available.
Previously, Google was said to be working on new camera API that would bring support for RAW photography to Android, and this is now confirmed.
Spokeswoman Gina Scigliano has reportedly confirmed that support for said capabilities has been included in the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) of the operating system, namely in that part of the firmware that is in charge with direct communication with the hardware.
"Android's latest camera HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and framework supports raw and burst-mode photography," she said, a recent article on CNET reads.
"We will expose a developer API [application programming interface] in a future release to expose more of the HAL functionality."
Apparently, Android 4.4 KitKat arrived with a series of hidden, Experimental Java camera APIs, in addition to featuring all the camera enhancements that Google has been packing inside Android since version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
In Nexus 5, the HDR+ mode in the camera already takes advantage of the burst mode mentioned above, though the RAW camera feature is still missing from the package.
Apparently, Google is not yet ready to make the new APIs available for developers out there, though it is expected to incorporate them into an upcoming platform version, as mentioned above.
In the meantime, however, other companies have already brought RAW photography to mobile devices, namely Nokia and Microsoft, which allow owners of Windows Phone 8-based Nokia Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1020 devices to enjoy increased image quality.
In the meantime, Google will focus on the burst-mode capabilities of Android’s camera, it seems. According to Scigliano, the new HAL and future APIs are centered around burst-mode photography.
"The basic idea is instead of taking a single shot with a given set of parameters, you instead have the power to queue up a request to take multiple shots each with different parameter settings such as exposure gain," she explains.
However, Google does agree that the imaging capabilities of smartphones are equally influenced by the hardware inside them and the software features loaded on top.