Android News
Another taste of Android Donut to gawk at
July 26, 2009 | by Andrew Kameka
Android OS
Want a quick glimpse of what’s to come in the Donut build of Android? Thank your friends over at the XDA Community for showing a few images and notes of the latest version of code released by Google. “Donut” is the next major branch of Android – not Android 2.0 as Google employees like to remind people – that is expected to upgrade Android. From the looks of the latest Donut code released to developers, we know there will be:
- Gestures
- Multitouch
UPDATE: Android team member Romain Guy says multitouch is not supported in Donut, despite what users claim to see. Cyanogen clarified with the following tweet: “Regarding multitouch in Donut.. Nothing in the Android code itself, but there ARE new kernel commits to support it.”
- Speech synthesizer
- CDMA support
- Universal search
- WPA enterprise
- VPN support
- Automatic backups
- Increased performance
- Built-in toggle widgets
We already knew that Donut would include universal search, and it doesn’t surprise anyone that CDMA (required for Android to come to Sprint and Verizon) or that multitouch (seen in the Hero) appears in Donut. However, it’s nice to know that gestures are coming, too. We’ll also see speech synthesizer (computer voice Text-To-Speech library) judging from the Google I/O conference video and Donut screenshots below. I hope it will improve on the current TTS library available for Android.
Cyanogen has built a ROM to run on the G1/HTC Dream to see how well Donut – in its current stage – performs on the Dream. It’s far from a final product, but we should see certain elements of the build in the G1 eventually. Let’s just hope it’s not another adventure in cupcakery.
Fast forward to 4:14 if you just want the goods
I am hoping that the Dalvik JVM will finally be upgraded to add a just-in-time compiler (JIT). The performance of 'pure' android apps is severely limited by the current implementation which favours memory footprint over runtime performance (I suspect this is because the current hardware has limited RAM).
6 months down the line, all android phones should have at least 256MB of RAM so a JIT option would allow the creation of performant applications within the sandbox. A compiler flag could be added to enable or disable the JIT based on the RAM available for each handset.