Click to View

Australia's Sydney Morning Herald reports Google's Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android, its Linux-based open platform for cell phones and smartphones, has already been downloaded an amazing 750,000 times.

The SDK enables developers to create applications for so-called gPhones. As a platform for mobile development and an operating system, Android falls under the auspices of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which - in addition to Google - is composed of major mobile telephony, semiconductoer, and mobile handset players.

While it's almost certainly not just developers who've downloaded the SDK, the reported number of downloads is still impressive. Especially considering that the only gPhones seen thus far have been prototypes and demonstration units, the first real Android-run phones won't ship until sometime during the second half of this year, and, according to many, the SDK itself was not quite ready for primetime when first released.

About that last point, a couple of weeks ago Google rolled out an upgrade to the SDK, called version m5-rc14, which will almost certainly push the number of SDK downloads to a million and beyond.

The SDK update, based in part on developer feedback, provides new and improved Android APIs and developer tools. These include a revamped user interface and the addition of the ability to integrate layout animations and geo-coding into applications. There's also an updated Eclipse plug-in and support for a number of new media codecs.

Google expects to keep making changes and updates to the SDK as Android evolves toward a production-level release. It has also extended the deadline to receive submissions for the first part of its $10 million Android Developers Challenge by over a month to April 14th, so as to give developers time to use the new SDK to create their application submissions.

[via Pocket-lint]