Android 1.5 early look SDK available for download

We've known that Cupcake has been floating around in dev circles for months now, but it's been clear as mud how the Open Handset Alliance plans to incorporate all of the lovely features it brings into Android's trunk, how Android will be versioned going forward, and in general, how the group plans to present a unified front to developers, manufacturers, and end users.

The Android 1.5 platform will include many improvements and new features for users and developers. Additionally, the SDK itself introduces several new capabilities that enable you to develop applications more efficiently for multiple platform versions and locales.Android SDK 1.5. this is just a early look at SDK where is final release of Android SDK 1.5 will be at the end of this month.

Android 1.5 New features

1. On-screen soft keyboard

• Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
• Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
• User dictionary for custom words

2. Home screen

• Widgets
• Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
• Live folders

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

And much more...

Android App Developer can start working on sdk 1.5 and familiar with new API’s however you should not release any application based on these APIs as APIs for Android 1.5 have not been finalized and may changed in final Android 1.5 SDK release.

Download Android 1.5 SDK Early

The new SDK has a different component structure than earlier SDK releases. This means:

• The new SDK does not work with older Eclipse plugins (ADT 0.8)
• The old SDKs (1.1 and earlier) do NOT work with this new Eclipse plugin (ADT 0.9)

There's no word on exactly how 1.5 will come to existing Android handsets in the field, but as far as we can tell, there's nothing listed in the changelog that would prevent current hardware from taking full advantage -- and the OHA is going to be releasing a series of articles about new-to-1.5 features in the coming weeks to help devs "prepare your applications for the release of Android 1.5 on phones."

Because the 0.9 ADT is not compatible with older SDKs, you cannot build against your existing 1.1 (or earlier) SDK while using the 0.9 ADT. If you already have a pre-0.9 ADT plugin installed and would like to continue developing for 1.0 and 1.1 devices, you should install a new copy of Eclipse to run the 0.9 ADT (and the new SDK). Otherwise, if you're ready to upgrade your Eclipse IDE to develop for Android 1.5, you can continue by uninstalling the old ADT and installing the new one.

The "New Android Project" wizard has been expanded to use the multi-platform capabilities of the new SDK.There is now a "New XML File" wizard that lets you create skeleton XML resource files for your Android projects. This makes it easier to create a new layout, a new menu, a new strings file, etc.Both wizards are available via File > New and new icons in the main Eclipse toolbar (located to the left of the Debug and Run icons). If you do not see the new icons, you may need to select Window > Reset Perspective from the Java perspective.

The most interesting part of android 1.5 SDK is, it is based on android cupcake branch. Android 1.5 also introduces APIs for features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition.

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

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

Installation Steps

First, download one of the SDK packages
Unzip the SDK. A new SDK directory is created that contains the uncompressed SDK contents.
If you use Eclipse, download the new ADT Eclipse plugin (0.9) zip file from the table at the top of this page. Do not unzip it.

Note that the command-line samples that follow assume that you're working from your SDK package's tools/ directory.

APIs provided in this SDK are subject to change until the final Android 1.5 SDK is released. You should not compile any applications for distribution using this version of the SDK. If you do so, your applications may not function properly when deployed to Android-powered devices running the final Android 1.5 platform. Please wait for the final Android 1.5 SDK before distributing applications built on the Android 1.5 system image.