Android 4.0 Graphics and Animations

[This post is by Romain Guy and Chet Haase, Android engineers who have been known to collaborate on the subject of graphics, UIs, and animation. You can read more from them on their blogs at curious-creature.org and graphics-geek.blogspot.com. — Tim Bray]
Earlier this year, Android 3.0 launched with a new 2D rendering pipeline designed to support hardware acceleration on tablets. With this new pipeline, all drawing operations performed by the UI toolkit are carried out using the GPU.
You’ll be happy to hear that Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, brings an improved version of the hardware-accelerated 2D rendering pipeline to phones, starting with Galaxy Nexus.

Enabling hardware acceleration

In Android 4.0 (API level 14), hardware acceleration, for the first time, is on by default for all applications. For applications at lower API levels, you can turn it on by adding android:hardwareAccelerated="true" to the <application> tag in your AndroidManifest.xml.
To learn more about the hardware accelerated 2D rendering pipeline visit the official Android developer guide. This guide explains how to control hardware acceleration at various levels, offers several performance tips and tricks and describes in details the new drawing model.
I also encourage you to watch the Android Hardware Accelerated Rendering talk that we gave at Google I/O 2010.

For more details click below

Android 4.0 Graphics and Animations