According to multiple reports, Google is now offering developers a crack at some Android 2.0 features at the Android code repository. Android 2.0, which was codenamed “Donut,” was discussed at the Google I/O developer conference earlier this year. To listen to what Google had to say, watch the following clip (the Android part starts a couple minutes in).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX9nt8CpdqgAndroid 2.0 comes equipped with Android Search, which lets you search your phone and the web from one location. Gesture support is also included, which is said to let you draw a letter on your screen to bring up contacts, rather than having to scroll through your contacts list until you get to the appropriate letter.
Text-to-speech technology via Google Voice is part of it, and so are CDMA support, automated backups, a new camera application, multitouch, wpa enterprise, vpn support, and supposed better performance.
“Perhaps more excitingly, the community is hard at work on a couple major fronts here: first off, the Donut build is actively being ported to current handsets, and an Android Dev Phone 1 / T-Mobile G1 version is already available (though very, very crashy and incomplete right now),” says Chris Ziegler at Engadget, who has a couple interesting screenshots. “Secondly, work is being conducted to extract major elements of Donut (some of the new widgets, for example) and roll them into cooked 1.5 builds, making the best stuff available in a more solid, accessible form without having to wait for 2.0 to become stable.”
Though the excitement of “Donut” is running high throughout the developer community, there seems to be a general consensus, that it would be prudent to wait for the stable release is announced before you go tinkering around with it. Some are no doubt already cracking away on it though.
