Android SDK 1.5 early version available for developers

I’ve just read an announcement that the Android SDK 1.5 will be released around the end of the month. In the mean time developers can get access to a pre-release version to enable them to start using the Android SDK 1.5 during development. It looks like a bunch of Cupcake mods will be made available in SDK 1.5 of Android. Some of the new features in Android SDK 1.5 include soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition.

In addition, the new SDK’s from version 1.5 forward will now contain different platform versions. For instance version 1.5 of the Android SDK will also contain version 1.1. One very nice thing about this new structure is that developers can create versions of their products that allows them to target different platforms.

With some manufacturers experimenting on using Android on netbooks, there is a great chance that some set of API’s may be available only for the netbooks and not for mainstream Android. Also, network providers may introduce special API’s for their own networks. With the new structure, it will be easier to target different versions of the Android platform.

A new version of the Android Developers Tool plugin for Eclipse has also been released. You can also download a copy from the download link below.

Download the pre-release version of Android SDK 1.5.