Google has started rolling out a major update of the Android Market application for smartphones. It offers a more sophisticated layout, an improved visual style, and some significant new features—including support for renting movies and buying books.

Virtually all of these features are already present in the Honeycomb version of the Android Market, but were not previously available in the smartphone version. The update brings feature parity and a unified look and feel between the phone and tablet variants of the market.

The new version remedies some of the performance and usability issues that plagued the previous smartphone version of the Android Market. It also modestly improves application discoverability, though it is still not as good as the Web interface or the AppBrain website.

The main landing screen displays blocks representing the high-level content sections along the left-hand side. You can easily descend into the sections of the market that house applications, games, books, and movies. The rest of the screen is filled with promotional blocks for popular content items. There are big banners at the top and bottom and a number of smaller blocks next to and below the section selectors.

There are a few minor problems with this interface. The type of content for each of the promotional blocks is not immediately obvious. For example, I had to click a banner promoting The Lincoln Lawyer in order to determine that it was a movie rental and not the book. Another issue is that the star ratings on the main landing page aren't always accurate—they sometimes show one star ratings across the page.

Each content section has a "featured" page with more promotional banners. You can flick the screen left and right to navigate through the tabs in the section. The tabs differ slightly between the top-level sections, but there is generally a list of top free items, top paid items, and recently-updated items. The apps section has a few extra tabs, including one that lists "trending" applications and "top new free" applications.

Each section also has a tab that lets you filter the content by category. In the application section, the category tab shows the usual application groups—such as communication, finance, education, etc. In the book and movie sections, the categories are basically genres—like fantasy and science fiction.

The actual content items are displayed in a table, much like the layout of the Honeycomb market application. On a smartphone, the table has two columns in portrait orientation and three columns in landscape orientation. It's a much more condensed view than the previous single-column list. It feels a lot more practical and lets you see much more at a glance.

The Android Market search interface has been extended to support the new content sections. It will show you the top results and number of hits for each section. You can click one of the content items to jump to it directly or you can click a section header to see all of the results for the section.

The update is rolling out gradually to users within the United States. It will likely be included by default in Ice Cream Sandwich, the next major version of Android.

Listing image by Photograph by Matt