Google releases Android 1.6 'Donut' developer toolkit

The new release of the Operating System includes a number of new features including CDMA support, support for higher resolution screens, device wide search functionality, updated camera, camcorder and gallery applications, VPN support, a battery usage monitor allowing you to analyse power use by application, text-to-speech functionality, new developer APIs, an accessibility framework and an updated 2.6.29 kernel module. Phew!

The Android Market gets a makeover for 1.6 too. Users can now quickly access 'Apps', 'Games' and 'Downloads' categories and sort by paid, free and popular within those categories. Screenshots finally come to the Market too, providing a much improved end user experience.

Windows, Mac or Linux developers can download the new SDK today (for free, of course) and fire up Donut in the emulator. In addition to the new OS features, the new SDK includes updated developer tools, fixing a few little bugs... including the ability for the ADB tools to work with the Samsung i7500 device, which I can now confirm works properly! Hurrah!

Devices featuring the 1.6 release are expected to come to market very rapidly - as early as October. It is not known at this stage which existing devices will be upgradeable to Donut.

Tags: 1.6, android, android 1.6, Android1.6, donut, opensource, osupdates