Android Engineers Working on Eclair & Final Sprinkles on Donut

Google Android engineers are putting the final sprinkles on the Donut branch and moving onto Eclair this week.

Interestingly some sprinkles are also going to be added to CupCake as well which would be minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Once a branch is near finalization does NOT mean a corresponding release will be pushed out, but it does mean that a release COULD come out with many of its branch improvements.

In a way a release would be a leaf off a branch and in the future one leaf could be part of many branches – this is part of the evolution of Android.

JBQ pushed the latest Donut source code to the Open Source servers last weekend for developers to access which SHOULD lead to a new release coming out late this Summer as part of my Android predictions and in tandem with some of the next round of Android phones coming out.

A potential release to the public can only occur once elements of a branch is merged into the master which currently Donut is NOT cooperating with.

As Mark Murphy correctly stated at AndroidGuys this does NOT mean an immediate release or its going to be Android 2.0 so the below list is not a guarantee of what will be in the next release but does provide a peek to whats being worked on and potentially ported over to your current or future Android device :

• CDMA support – Key for Android phones working on Sprint & Verizon

• Comprehensive Search – Easily find items on your phone

• VPN & WPA2 support – Important for businesses & security

• Speech Recognition & Talk Back – Important for Translations & Turn By Turn direction