Android 1.5 devours Cupcake

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 14 Apr 2009 at 09:29

Google has announced the availability of Android 1.5, which folds in all the tasty innovations found in the Cupcake development branch.

The Cupcake development branch progressed alongside the main release, and introduces a raft of features to the operating system, not least of which is support for the new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine, which promises to speed up website rendering. There's also support for home screen widgets and live folders.

Cupcake will also add support for cutting and pasting within the browser, as well as a find function and the ability to pause and resume downloads.

The camera will also be given a boost with the introduction of video capture.

Third-party developers will also be offered a series of APIs allowing them to tailor their own input methods, including virtual keyboards.

Alongside the new features, the Linux Kernel powering Android has been upgraded to version 2.6.27, bringing a host of bug fixes and some "basic x86 support".