{Android 1.5 Early Look SDK released}

Touted to power the next Android device, aka “Android on Steroids”, the Android Developer Blog has announced the early release of the Android 1.5 SDK ,  which is to be released in its complete glory, to its developers, at the end of the month. For the time being, developers can get-a-hang of the new API, which is drawn from the Cupcake branch of the Android Open Source project.

Prominent features of the new SDK are :
Speech Recognition, Soft keyboard, Improved accelerometer and Video recording and uploading capability.
A complete list of the Android 1.5 Highlights.

The biggest improvement from a developers perspective is the AVD Concurrency. Developers can now create Android Virtual Devices with different names and work with emulators in parallel. Also, the choice of multiple targets (including Android 1.1 and Android 1.5), means that developers can continue to test their compilations for older targets (1.1 and earlier), but the catch is, you lose network connectivity (known issue in this SDK). So if you are developing an application which uses network access, then you have to wait for the release version of Android 1.5 SDK.

Eclipse developers, will have to uninstall the ADT 0.8 plugin and install the ADT 0.9 plugin to make use of the new SDK.

It is not yet clear if the team has enhanced the code to handle errors such as – memory overrun that needs ‘bitmap recycle’ and ‘audio flinger ‘ when looping sound files, atleast in this release.

For the user, however, the question remains how far the G1 will continue. With the 1.5 SDK onslaught, we are definitely looking at a G3 (as per the API Level). There are inherent limitations to firmware upgrades, as it needs a supporting underlying hardware. Also, with the addition of the soft keypad, can we expect the new device be thinner ?

The G1 device certainly needs more RAM (55MB ? come on guys – the iPhone 3G will have 128MB, what is Google thinking?)

But for now, it is hoping for rosy days ahead for our favourite platform – Android.