April 14, 2009 by Tap
A preview SDK for Android 1.5 has been released and I have to say it's looking good. This is no minor update and the list of improvements is considerable. It seems like the 'cupcake' offshoot finally seems to have merged itself back into the main SDK so thankfully we can stop talking about cupcake updates and just focus on Android 1.5.
As I said, the list of improvements is considerable and you can view the highlights here but here are some of the things I'm most looking forward to.
UI Improvements to the Browser, Gmail, Calendar and Email
Although the new web versions of Gmail and Calendar are great I still find myself using the native Android versions of these apps on occasion. It will be interesting to see how the 1.5 versions of these applications compare (batch updating in Gmail is already a big improvement). On the subject of Android's browser, there was no mention of security improvements. A big issue I have is the inability to access Windows password protected websites which I'm sure is a problem for many business users. Let’s hope we see a fix for that in the near future.
Home screen widgets
There has been a serious shortage of home screen widgets as a result of potential security issues. One of cupcake's features was support for secure widgets and this has now been included in 1.5 so hopefully we will start to see some useful third-party widgets in future.
SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
When I first got my G1 I had a hell of a time trying to get it to see the SD card properly (and I know I'm not alone in this regard). After much fiddling and formatting I eventually got it to work but it would have been nice if there were some built-in tools to check SD cards.
General Usability Improvements
- Accelerometer-based application rotations – at last, we will be able to use apps in landscape mode without opening the keyboard.
- Faster Camera start-up and image capture
- Much faster acquisition of GPS location
As you can see, there are some significant improvements which are aimed at providing real benefit to end-users - this is not just a developer-oriented update. All that remains now is to see how long it takes to reach our phones. Not too long I hope.