Oh, Android – How do I love thee? Let me count the ways; I love that you’ve essentially eliminated the need to hypothesize what might be coming in future firmware updates as, due to your open source nature, it’s put out there for all to see. I love that.. well, there are other reasons, but none relevant to this post. No offense, Android.
In the recently published roadmap for the work-in-progress “Cupcake” Android development branch, a laundry list of bugs fixes and coming features is on display.
The big things on the feature front:
- Browser: Copy/Paste, (Hold the shift key, highlight the text with a drag or the trackball, release shift. Ta-da!), inline search (Find text on the page you’re looking at), support for the ultra hasty SquirrelFish javascript engine
- Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) profile support, Bluetooth Remote Control (AVRCP) support
- “Basic x86 support” – this is a bit ambiguous, but it implies that Android will be able to run (natively) to some extent on the processors used by most modern computers. While that theoretically opens the door to Android netbooks, it’s not clear what all this entails
- “Input method framework, for soft keyboards and other on-screen input methods” with the ability for third parties to make their own onscreen keyboards.
- Perhaps most notably (Hell, I’d do a drumroll if the title hadn’t already spoiled it): Video recording.
Stereo bluetooth, onscreen keyboards, video recording.. that covers a huge chunk of the gripes people have with the platform. No word yet on how (one big update? lots of little ones?) or when all of this will be rolled out (we’ll go ahead and assume the ETA is “When it’s done”), but it’s good to know whats on the way.
They also detail bug fixes across the board, from the depths of the framework to the camera and the music player. If you want to give the list a glance to see if your (least) favorite bug is getting nixed, you can check it out in full here.