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At a developers' conference in San Francisco, Google demonstrated features including a built-in compass that works with an accelerometer to enable a neat new trick in Google Maps. Bringing up a shot of San Francisco in Street View, Android's engineering director Steve Horowitz showed that turning to face another direction automatically panned the map to follow.

"This is one of my favourite new features on Street View," Horowitz said, to much applause. "The device can actually track my movements."

Taking a queue from the iPhone's unlocking gesture, Google has also employed a swipe motion on the touchscreen to

These advanced features obviously require certain hardware, but the operating system is designed to work with almost any handset, Google said.

Although it supports touchscreen devices, the software will also work with trackballs or menu buttons, and can even be run on simple handsets without screens, if necessary.

A new notification menu has also been added, showing received text messages, emails and calendar items on the main screen, and web bookmarks can now be placed on the desktop. A smaller addition is a version of Pac-Man.

That will be an exception. Google is focused on creating a stable and adaptable operating system, leaving the creation of applications and games to the open-source development community.

Google claims that once the first handset using Android emerges on to the market, version 1.0 of the software will be released and that the first handsets to use it will emerge in the second half of this year.

But despite its claims that the code is open source, it has yet to be released to the public.

Matthew Sparkes / Simon Aughton