Google Gets Ready For The Next Version of Android

April 14, 2009 by John Messina Android

(PhysOrg.com) -- Android 1.5 is right around the corner and this version promises better camera and GPS performance, support for video recording and Bluetooth stereo. Also included in this new version is support for soft keyboards, live folders and speech recognition.

Software developers will have the option to target different Android platform versions from within a single SDK installation. Developers will also find improvements to install Android SDK add-ons to access extended functionality that might be provided by OEMs, carriers, or other providers.

In order to help developers prepare their applications for the release of Android 1.5 on phones, Google will be publishing a series of articles on their Android Developers Blog to highlight new APIs and other changes. In addition to the new APIs, other topics that will be covered include OpenGL, asynchronous tasks, system settings, and new Activity callbacks.

From a user perspective, some improvement performances include faster camera start-up and image capture, faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS), smoother page scrolling in Browser, and speedier GMail conversation list scrolling.

At present there are only two phones based on the open-source operating system. The HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) and Vodafone's HTC Magic. Samsung will be launching three Android phones this year; however release dates from Android supporters LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson are not clear.

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kirel - Apr 14, 2009
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Like many others, I'm sure, I'd love to get one, but it doesn't communicate with Exchange/Outlook. Thus - I can't use it for business. :(
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earls - Apr 14, 2009
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Third party solutions are available... But I believe they're constrained to certain versions of Exchange/Outlook.

For me, unfortunately, the hardware/subscription just isn't cost effective. Not that it matters, because Verizon doesn't currently have any android phones.
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