posted Aug 19, 2008 6:08 AM by Ronald Mathies
Google has released version 0.9 of it's Android platform, there is quite a lot of things happening at the moment. Not so long ago the news came out that Android (Or at least the HTC Dream won't have GPS, this is really a pity, especially because there were demo's of Google Maps running on the Android platform for navigation. Now again they have some bad news, the Bluetooth API has now also been removed along with the GTalkService. So now two key components have been removed from the platform. I personally wonder how this phone is going to compete agains the Nokia N96 and the IPhone 3G. So far i have not seen any information to when these features will be made available, nor is there any information if the hardware will be there but it is just not available in the softare (so that it becomes available by a patch). Of course there is also some good news, the following features have been added with this release:
- First and most obviously, the new Home screen is included, along with a ton of UI changes for 1.0.
- Some
new applications are included: an Alarm Clock, Calculator, Camera,
Music player, Picture viewer, and Messaging (for SMS/MMS conversations.)
- Several
new development tools were added, such as a graphical preview for XML
layouts for users of Eclipse, and a tool for constructing 9-patch
images.
- Since we've got a new Home screen application now, we
thought the now-obsolete version from the M5 early-look SDK might be
helpful to developers, so its source is included as a sample.
- A number of new APIs are fleshed out and improved, and others are now close to their final forms for 1.0.
- Tons of bugs were fixed, of course. (If you had problems with the MediaPlayer, try it now!)
If you want to know what the feature will look like then you could take a look at the developer roadmap. If you want to see all the details about what has been changed then read the Release Notes, the Change Overview and the API Delta Report for the details.
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