While we are all waiting this month for the HTC Magic phone, developers can already get the Android SDK 1.5, commonly known as Cupcake in the development branch. The 1.5 include lots of new features, APIs, and UI enhancements, especially the soft keyboard which will be used for the first on HTC Magic.

Keep your eyes on the Android developers blog in the next days since there will be a series of articles to highlight new APIs and other changes. HTC Magic should be available this month in many countries, we will post more details about availability and features.

User interface refinements

• System-wide:
  • Refinement of all core UI elements
  • Animated window transitions (off by default)
  • Accelerometer-based application rotations
• UI polish for:
  • In-call experience
  • Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
  • SMS & MMS
  • Browser
  • Gmail
  • Calendar
  • Email
  • Camera & Gallery
  • Application management

Performance improvements

• Faster Camera start-up and image capture
• Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
• Smoother page scrolling in Browser
• Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

New features

• On-screen soft keyboard
  • Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
  • Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
  • User dictionary for custom words
• Home screen
  • Widgets
    • Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
  • Live folders
• Camera & Gallery
  • Video recording
  • Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
• Bluetooth
  • Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
  • Auto-pairing
  • Improved handsfree experience
• Browser
  • Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
  • Copy ‘n paste in browser
  • Search within a page
  • User-selectable text-encoding
  • UI changes include:
    • Unified Go and Search box
    • Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
• Contacts
  • Shows user picture for Favorites
  • Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
  • One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
• System
  • New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
  • SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
  • SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
• Google applications
  • View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
  • Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
  • Upload videos to Youtube
  • Upload photos on Picasa

New APIs and developer tools

• UI framework
  • Framework for easier background/UI thread interaction
  • New SlidingDrawer widget
  • Horizontal ScrollView widget
• Home Screen framework
  • APIs for creating secure home screen widgets
  • APIs for populating live folders with custom content
• Media framework
  • Raw audio recording and playback APIs
  • Interactive MIDI playback engine
  • Video recording APIs for developers (3GP format)
  • Video and photo sharing Intents
  • Media search Intent
• Input Method framework
  • Text prediction engine
  • Ability to provide downloadable IMEs to users
• Speech recognition framework
  • Support for using speech recognition libraries via Intent
• Misc API additions
  • LocationManager – Applications can get location change updates via Intent
  • WebView – Touch start/end/move/cancel DOM event support
  • SensorManager – redesigned sensor APIs
  • GLSurfaceView – convenience framework for creating OpenGL applications
  • Broadcast Intent for app update install succeeded – for smoother app upgrade experience
• Developer tools
  • Support for multiple versions of Android in a single SDK installation
  • Improved JUnit support in ADT
  • Easier application performance profiling

Download Android SDK 1.5

A Quick security update of the Android SDK have just been released fixing mainly a security issue involving handling of image files. Android SDK version m5-rc15 is available for download. There is no API change or new features introduced in this release, but it is recommended to upgrade.

The update doesn’t change any of the Android APIs or introduce any new ones. Eclipse users don’t need to update the ADT plug-in either. Once you’ve unzipped the file on your machine, you will want to update things like your PATH variable and, if you’re using Eclipse, the SDK location setting for ADT (hint: Preferences > Android).

Notice that if you did not yet upgrade from m3 to m5, you might take a look at the upgrade instructions and then the API changes overview. For even more details on the changes, there is an API differences report.

No big changes should be expected after the m5 release and the major API change in the SDK, in the next months at least. There will be more bug fixes and API improvments until we get hands on the first Android Handset.

The most awaited update of Android SDK is finally available! Most notable change in this release is the new user interface; I really feel this time that I’m on a Linux-based mobile phone. The interface looks really much better and definitely ready for the prime time, even with work in progress. The bad news is that for the first time we started talking about “porting an application” and “API change”. At this time everything is under development, but it’s worrying for the future of Android platform if we see many version of the SDK where applications are not compatible and have to be changed and recompiled, and go back to old times !

Highlighted features in this release :

• New user interface – totally remodeled interface, new design and icons, looks much better.
• Layout animations – Developers can now create layout animations for their applications using the capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package
• Geo-coding - android.location.Geocoder enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code (i.e. translate an address into a coordinate and vice-versa), and also search for businesses.
• New media codecs – The MediaPlayer class has added support for the OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA audio file formats.
• Search Manager – A new search API is now available android.app.SearchManager, providing the ability to to search for user, system or network based data, making search a seamless, system-wide feature.
• Updated Eclipse plug-in – A new version of ADT is available and provides improvements to the Android developer experience. In particular, check out the new Android Manifest editor.

Something very interesting in the new interface is the new menus. Now it is more iphone-like – if I can say – Menus have been iconized which make it easier for touchscreen phones, and we can see the blurred menus by the end, so you can scroll down/up to see more menu options. To dig into the new Android interface here is some screenshots from the new SDK :

Home of the Android Platform

Android dialer

Android Dev Tools

Browser Menu replaced by icons

By clicking on more you get the entire menu

Android New Contact

Android Call Manager

Ready to go ? download the new Android SDK, read M5 announcement on the Developers blog.

In the latest interview, Brendan mentioned that SDK releases have slowed down and here is today the official Android blog announcing the immediate availability of the new release m3-rc37a. Highlited features in this release :

• The ability to inject SMS messages into the emulator, which will allow you to more easily test IntentReceivers for incoming SMS messages (Telnet to Android then run: sms senderPhoneNumber senderPhoneNumber)
• Android Debug Bridge (ADB) supports multiple emulators on one host computer
• The audio problem with the emulator on Windows should be fixed
• There’s a new emulator control panel that you can use to control network events like radio state changes and incoming calls.
• The Eclipse plugin now does color syntax highlighting on the XML files, such as AndroidManifest.xml
• The new default skin for the emulator is HVGA, portrait mode. That’s the one you should focus on for your submissions for the Android Developer Challenge.

It seems there are problems with com.google.android.providers.media in this release, others are reporting that many applications are not running such contacts, maps, browser and even Xmpp settings. Here all applications are working fine and I’m able to emulate phone call, but not sending sms. We’ll try to update you as we get more information on the subject.

More changes on the release notes, and you can download the latest Android SDK release from Google code. Be sure to update the ADT Eclipse Plugin as usual, instructions available for upgrading the SDK.

I’ll say also what a week ! This Monday we got the first look into Android SDK, developers started playing with the SDK, coding the first Android applications, and certainly reporting bugs and features. It’s the first week, and Android developers blog have just announced the first SDK update version M3-RC22a including fixes for high priority issues. There is also an update for the Eclipse plugin (ADT) to version 0.3.1, so be sure to check the latest update from your eclipse environment.

The Android team was very helpful over the discussions groups and answered a lot of technical questions around the platform, when answers are required. David posted some good reading over the official blog that you might check, but here I’ll post some blogs on Android and OHA launched this week, where you can find more news on the platform :

1. Android Portal
2. Hello Android
3. OHAdev.com

Got a blog or a website on Android ? Add it in comments.