While working towards open-sourcing Android, the team continued to work on new features in their own private development branch. These have now been published publicly in the “cupcake” branch. There’s a lot of interesting new features and bug fixes included. We’ve got a rundown of many of the significant additions after the break.

The A2DP and AVRCP profiles were both added to the Bluetooth stack. This means support for stereo headsets and remote control. Dial Up Networking wasn’t added, but preliminary work was done on USB Gadget Framework support, which means future devices could appear to the host device as just an ethernet interface.

The browser has been bumped up to the November release of WebKit with the optimized JavaScript engine SquirrelFish. Copy/paste in browser and a 5x draw speed improvement were also added. The trackball now does accelerated scrolling.

Hardware accelerated video recording and playback, an often noted oversight in the initial T-Mobile G1 release, finally show up. A framework for an on-screen keyboard and predictive text are being worked on. Android lets you run background processes and users will be pleased to know there’s a process manager now. Finally, a new Linux 2.6.27 kernel and the least explained addition “basic x86 support” round out the branch.

While there are many good improvements here, there is no indication as to when G1 users will see them or when Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1) owners will be able to build the release themselves. [Disconnect] points out that there were some other gems included in the branch that aren’t in the announcement like mounting an encrypted e2fs volume which could enable installing apps on the SD card.

[photo: tnkgrl]

[via GotOnTheInter.Net]