The Google Android development team announced that development of Android 2.0, codenamed Eclair, is far in development than first thought. In fact it will be released in November making its debut on Motorola’s Droid handset.

Not long ago Google pushed out the Android 1.6 aka Donut to handsets offering various improvements to performance along with some nice additional features such as a more visual indicator of processes using your battery, a power widget enabling you to toggle WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, Data Sync and Brightness, an improved camera, Speech Synthesis, Global Search and more. Look forward to a more indepth overview of what Donut brings to the table soon here on iLuvAndroid.

As soon as Donut was pushed over-the-air (OTA), many people started asking about the next firmware update, Eclair. This would be a major revision of the Android Platform, unifying many features that were previously only found on licensed handsets from HTC. Here’s a rundown of what to expect.

Contacts and accounts

• Multiple accounts can be added to a device for email and contact synchronization, including Exchange accounts. (Handset manufacturers can choose whether to include Exchange support in their devices.)
• Developers can create sync adapters that provide synchronization with additional data sources.
• Quick Contact for Android provides instant access to a contact’s information and communication modes. For example, a user can tap a contact photo and select to call, SMS, or email the person. Other applications such as Email, Messaging, and Calendar can also reveal the Quick Contact widget when you touch a contact photo or status icon.

Email

• Exchange support.
• Combined inbox to browse email from multiple accounts in one page.

Messaging

• Search functionality for all saved SMS and MMS messages.
• Auto delete the oldest messages in a conversation when a defined limit is reached.

Camera

• Built-in flash support
• Digital zoom
• Scene mode
• White balance
• Color effect
• Macro focus

Android virtual keyboard

• An improved keyboard layout to makes it easier to hit the correct characters and improve typing speed.
• The framework’s multi-touch support ensures that key presses aren’t missed while typing rapidly with two fingers.
• A smarter dictionary learns from word usage and automatically includes contact names as suggestions.

Browser

• Refreshed UI with actionable browser URL bar enables users to directly tap the address bar for instant searches and navigation.
• Bookmarks with web page thumbnails.
• Support for double-tap zoom.
• Support for HTML5:
  • Database API support, for client-side databases using SQL.
  • Application cache support, for offline applications.
  • Geolocation API support, to provide location information about the device.
  • <video> tag support in fullscreen mode.

Calendar

• Agenda view provides infinite scrolling.
• Events indicate the attending status for each invitee.
• Invite new guests to events.
• Sync support for contacts from multiple data sources including Exchange. Handset manufacturers can choose whether or not to include Exchange support in their devices.
• New way to hover on a person to see more info and select communication mode (for example, phone, SMS, email).

Media Framework

Revamped graphics architecture for improved performance that enables better hardware acceleration.

Bluetooth

• Bluetooth 2.1
• New BT profiles: Object Push Profile (OPP) and Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)

To help visualise what exactly all these changes mean and look like, check out the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

iLuvAndroid will be covering Eclair in more depth over the next few days, include the very exciting Google Navigation – Google’s answer to Satellite Navigation.

Something went rather wrong not long ago to iLuvAndroid where the bandwidth limit was breeched and thus the site was down for a good number of days. Thus far the issue has been resolved and hopefully won’t appear again so again I apologise for the downtime and look to get this place bang up to date!

The world of Android has been moving at a rapid pace with news of Android 2.0 aka Eclair making its debut in November with Motorola’s Droid handset. Keep an eye here as I fill you in and offer some opinions about where Android might be going.

With Opera Mini making strides in the Mobile Browser Market, people have been asking why there hasn’t been a Mozilla FireFox version available just yet for the dynamic Android platform. However recent news has filtered in as to why exactly development hasn’t been smooth sailing.

“Until recently, Android was Java, but they released Android NDK which uses C/C++ and that is what we program in, so we are now looking at developing Firefox for Android,” said Jay Sullivan, vice president of Mobile for Mozilla.

Previously everything had to be done in Java which was within a VM (Virtual Machine). Now that a more powerful and universal language like C/C++ is available to use, we should expect other programs to follow suit. It’s exciting news as I’m sure Mozilla are aiming to become the market leader in the mobile webspace, they even dropped a bombshell to those who wait:

“Mozilla Firefox will be the first mobile browser to support add-ons,” boasted Sullivan, pointing to the fact that nearly 2 billion Firefox add-ons have been downloaded to date, and they’ve spawned successful companies such as StumbleUpon. He expects similar traction for Firefox on the mobile. “We have been spending a lot of time on making sure that JavaScript and our engine work really fast on ARM processors,” Sullivan said. “That has taken some time.”

This will certainly be an interesting addition, however talk of performance  issues and security still need to be debated. No estimate as to when the browser will come about, even in a beta stage but as soon as news breaks, it will be reported upon.

Quite some time ago, the European Union decided that they wanted a more accurate GPS system and one that didn’t rely on US only satellites. After much discussion the Galileo project was born which would consist of European satellites orbiting the world and providing a much more accurate form of GPS of within a few feet.

Last week a precursor to the Galileo project was successfully launched, called EGNOS (The European Geostationary Navigation Overly Service). It consists of three satellites, four control centres and about 40 positioning stations which combines with data from existing US GPS satellites to provide information which is accurate to six feet. This is compared to around 60 feet for the US GPS signal alone and thus is much more accurate.

Many of the major brands already have EGNOS support and should see marked improvements in terms of accuracy and subsequent GPS systems should have support for it too.

The Samsung Behold II has changed for its second iteration by now joining the Android ranks. In the USA, the Behold II will be available on T-Mobile and features a 3.2″ AMOLED touchscreen, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and video recording capabilities, LED Flash, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 and a microSD slot with support of up to 16GB.

Samsung have been pushing their custom interface called TouchWiz, and the Behold will be no different with it being adapted on Android. The TouchWiz interface is based on a 3D rotating cube system where each face of the cube represents an individual shortcut for example to your media player, web browser and YouTube.

No word as of yet in terms of pricing and availability, however it has been rumoured to be ready “in time for the holidays”.

Today Adobe has officially confirmed that Flash will be supported for mobile devices in early 2010. As part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe is set to bring the rich media format to mobile devices to address the issue of Flash on multiple devices along with support for hardware acceleration. This is exciting news as native flash support for mobile devices has been limited due to the closed source nature that Adobe has implemented. However Adobe has noticed the trend in mobile use and thus the Open Screen Project was born.

The Open Screen Project is led by Adobe themselves and consists of nearly 50 industry leaders working together to provide a uniform and consistent environment for mobile Flash to be based on, removing previous barriers to push such content onto mobile screens.  Partners of the Open Screen Project include Antena 3, Atlantic Records, ARM, BBC, Burda, Cell, Chungwha Telecom, Cisco, Comcast, Conde Nast, Daum, Disney Interactive, Fox Mobile, Google, HTC, Intel, LG Electronics, Lionsgate, Marvell, Motorola, MTV Networks, NBC Universal, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, NVIDIA, OpenTV, Palm, Paramount, QNX Software Systems, Qualcomm, Stern.de, RIM, RTL, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, The New York Times, Toshiba, Verizon Wireless and Ziilabs amongst others.

An expected beta for Android should arrive by early 2010 along with Symbian OS and RIM for native flash support. Those on Windows Mobile and Palm OS should expect a pubic beta later this year. There are also plans for hardware acceleration via GPU’s such as nVidia’s Tegra chipset and the SnapDragon CPU for smooth playback of possible HD media.

Below is the official press release.

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today unveiled Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 software for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices, allowing content created using the Adobe Flash Platform to reach users wherever they are. A public developer beta of the browser-based runtime is expected to be available for Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. Public betas for Google® Android™ and Symbian® OS are expected to be available in early 2010. In addition, Adobe and RIM announced a joint collaboration to bring Flash Player to Blackberry® smartphones, and Google joined close to 50 other industry players in the Open Screen Project initiative.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across devices. Using the productive Web programming model of the Flash Platform, the browser-based runtime enables millions of designers and developers to reuse code and assets and reduce the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different operating systems and browsers. Flash Player 10.1 is easily updateable across all supported platforms to ensure rapid adoption of new innovations that move the Web forward.

The browser-based runtime leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization. New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities include support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience. Flash Player 10.1 will also take advantage of media delivery with HTTP streaming, including integration of content protection powered by Adobe® Flash® Access 2.0. This effort, code-named Zeri, will be an open format based on industry standards and will provide content publishers, distributors and partners the tools they need to utilize HTTP infrastructures for high-quality media delivery in Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe® AIR® 2.0 software.

To learn more about Flash Player 10.1 and to see video demos visit Adobe Labs.

“With Flash Player moving to new mobile platforms, users will be able to experience virtually all Flash technology based Web content and applications wherever they are,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are excited about the broad collaboration of close to 50 industry leaders in the Open Screen Project and the ongoing collaboration with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers worldwide. It will be great to see first devices ship with full Flash Player in the first half of next year.”

“We are excited to join Adobe and other industry leaders in the Open Screen Project,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of Product Management at Google. “This initiative supports our common goal to move the Web forward as a platform and to spur innovation in the industry through technology such as Adobe Flash.”

“Adobe Flash technology provides a key experience on new Windows phones, enabling people to enjoy rich Flash based games, videos and other interactive Web content on the go,” said Stephanie Ferguson, general manager, Product Management, Microsoft Corp. “We look forward to bringing in the new capabilities of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 to the Windows phone browser when it becomes available.”

“Motorola is excited to be one of the first handset manufacturers to ship Android based devices with Flash Player support early next year,” said Christy Wyatt, vice president of software applications and ecosystem at Motorola. “As the No.1 platform for video on the Web, uncompromised browsing of Flash technology based content is essential for a rich mobile experience and something users expect from Motorola today.”

“As a longtime partner of Adobe, and more than 400 million Nokia phones shipped with existing Flash technology to date, we are excited to see Flash Player becoming a reality for mobile phones and other mobile devices,” said Purnima Kochikar, vice president, Forum Nokia. “Nokia is excited about full Flash Player coming to devices and we are committed to supporting Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices in 2010.”

There has been a bit of drama happening over the last few days over at the XDA forum and from Google themselves. Cyanogen has revealed that he was issued a “Ceast and Desist” letter from Google about his immensely popular CyanogenMOD for Android mobile phones.

As most people perceive that the Android platform itself is Open Source, not everything is cut and dry. For example, while Google is happy to create APIs (Application Programming Interface) so that other applications can talk to services just like Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Talk, YouTube and so forth, the programs themselves are not explicitly Open Source and thus free to distribute.

Where does Cyanogen and other ROM Developers fit into this? Installing a custom ROM from any developer to date also pre-packages Google Talk, YouTube, Google Voice, Google Search, Android Market and more which are not available to freely distribute. The only exception to this is Google Maps which can be downloaded via the Android Market.

Having any of these applications and certain libraries thus makes the ROM illegal to distribute and that’s part of the reason why Google are a bit upset. It has been rumoured that the main reason for the Cease and Desist letter was that Cyanogen compiled and released the Donut version of the Android Market before Google was ready. Not only that, the latest Experimental Builds from Cyanogen were built from the latest source code available and thus was actually the Donut build (Android 1.6).

Being built on the latest Android 1.6 version not only meant that many enthusiasts were the first to experience the multitude of improvements but also caused some issues with developers who have yet to code their own application to be compatible with Donut. For those who have owned an Android device, many will remember the teething problems from many applications after upgrading from Android version 1.0/1.1 to 1.5 aka Cupcake.

The situation is a lot worse for those running a custom “Hero” build as they contain a lot of propriety and closed sourced applications such as Teeter, QuickOffice, HTC_IME (the HTC version of the virtual keyboard), HTC_Music and more, all being totally illegal in doing so.

Google had this to say on the matter on their developer blog:

Lately we’ve been busy bees in Mountain View, as you can see from the recent release of Android 1.6 to the open-source tree, not to mention some devices we’re working on with partners that we think you’ll really like. Of course, the community isn’t sitting around either, and we’ve been seeing some really cool and impressive things, such as the custom Android builds that are popular with many enthusiasts. Recently there’s been some discussion about an exchange we had with the developer of one of those builds, and I’ve noticed some confusion around what is and isn’t part of Android’s open source code. I want to take a few moments to clear up some of those misconceptions, and explain how Google’s apps for Android fit in.

Everyone knows that mobile is a big deal, but for a long time it was hard to be a mobile app developer. Competing interests and the slow pace of platform innovation made it hard to create innovative apps. For our part, Google offers a lot of services — such as Google Search, Google Maps, and so on — and we found delivering those services to users’ phones to be a very frustrating experience. But we also found that we weren’t alone, so we formed the Open Handset Alliance, a group of like-minded partners, and created Android to be the platform that we all wished we had. To encourage broad adoption, we arranged for Android to be open-source. Google also created and operates Android Market as a service for developers to distribute their apps to Android users. In other words, we created Android because the industry needed an injection of openness. Today, we’re thrilled to see all the enthusiasm that developers, users, and others in the mobile industry have shown toward Android.

With a high-quality open platform in hand, we then returned to our goal of making our services available on users’ phones. That’s why we developed Android apps for many of our services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Voice, and so on. These apps are Google’s way of benefiting from Android in the same way that any other developer can, but the apps are not part of the Android platform itself. We make some of these apps available to users of any Android-powered device via Android Market, and others are pre-installed on some phones through business deals. Either way, these apps aren’t open source, and that’s why they aren’t included in the Android source code repository. Unauthorized distribution of this software harms us just like it would any other business, even if it’s done with the best of intentions.

I hope that clears up some of the confusion around Google’s apps for Android. We always love seeing novel uses of Android, including custom Android builds from developers who see a need. I look forward to seeing what comes next!

Cyanogen has recently said on Twitter that he is planning to release a CM 4.2 version of his ROM which will be the first “bare-bones” ROM is his to be made available. This basically translates as his latest ROM will still be based on the source code Google releases, but will have none of the offending, closed source applications. This however is more difficult than simply stripping out the offending applications to begin with but iLuvAndroid will be covering that in detail in another post.

Just to note, it has been stated as well that Cyanogen is in no way competing with Google about the Android platform and was open in working out a resolution to the issue. It will be interesting to see and hear what the developers think about this and what their next steps will be.

Vodafone has announced that it will be launching the HTC Tattoo in October next month and exclusively in black! The HTC Tattoo was designed to be a lower-end Android powered mobile phone and thus becoming more affordable for everyone to use. That said, it is still pretty full featured, containing a 3.2 auto-focus megapixel camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, Quadband support, MicroSD support and a 2.8 Capacitive Touch screen.

Below is the official press release.

VODAFONE UK ANNOUNCES EXCLUSIVE HTC TATTOO

Following last week’s announcement of the Nokia E72, LG GM750 and Sony Ericsson XPERIA™ X2, Vodafone UK will be ranging another innovative smartphone exclusive. The new Android-powered HTC Tattoo is a smartphone which will keep you entertained and up to date wherever you are.

The HTC Tattoo, available exclusively in black on Vodafone UK, lets you customise your own mobile experience using the latest HTC Sense technology. It delivers lots of the features of the enormously successful HTC Magic at an affordable price, for example, you can create shortcuts to your favourite internet sites, social networks, games, widgets and applications – and there’s an amazing opportunity to personalise your phone further with thousands more applications and widgets available for download in the simple to use Android Market. Android also gives you quick and easy access to popular Google services such as Google Maps, Google Mail and Google Search as well as favourites like YouTube.

Take your favourite snaps with the 3.2 megapixel camera with sharp focus, and view them on the HTC Tattoo’s high resolution screen or upload them to your social network via the handset’s superfast internet connection. And you are able to alter the look of your phone further with the unique covers that you can design yourself and purchase, or simply choose one from popular cover designs available.

Key features of the exclusive black HTC Tattoo include:

• 3.2MP Camera
• Android technology
• FM Radio and MP3 player
• 2.8″ Touchscreen
• Unique personalised covers

Available in October, customers can pre-register for the Vodafone exclusive HTC Tattoo here: http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-phone/htc-tattoo

No word on prices and the price plans available for a free handset but HTC are throwing their weight behind the dynamic and impressive Android platform and with the HTC Tattoo, it should reach a wider audience beyond the currently released HTC G1, Magic, MyTouch and Hero devices.

Cyanogen has released a new version of his Experimental Build which has fixed the Camcorder audio issues an updated many other modules. Below is the changelog!

Download Cyanogen Experimental Build 4.11.1

—- v4.1.11.1
* Fix the bad signature on Phone.apk that was causing problems if you had wiped before installing
* Added another 1 to the version number

—- v4.1.11
* Audio recording (camcorder) is fixed. ** DO NOT use the current volume hacks with this- they will break recording on Donut! **
* Fixed crash in Market notifications menu
* New Busybox + xbin stuff
* Updated Browser patches from Loccy
* Updated kernel
* More scheduler tweaks
* Removed the nasty/scary logging from HTC_IME
* Error checking during A2SD startup
* Fixed free memory calculation so swap is taken into account (thanks |Rain|)
* Fixed signature on the FilePicker apk
* Included new fix_permissions script
* A bunch of other small things

Going head to head with Twitdroid, which now has both a free and Pro version, iTweet was one of the first Twitter clients on Android with an impressive interface and features. Previously a paid application, it has now totally free, so if you haven’t tried out this application before then now is your chance!

News has though has been hard to swallow for some users who have paid for the application, with no news of refunds available or not. Certainly I don’t know if there is anything within the Terms and Conditions of the Android Market to protect clients who have bought applications and games, but this is good news for everyone else.

Download it by searching in the Android Market or use your barcode scanner on the image below and be sure to check out our iTweet Review!

iTweet Client