iLuvAndroid – Feeding your Android Addiction with news, reviews and guides

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.

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.

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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.

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