Google releases new Android SDK and phone for developers

Last night I was playing around with twitter (you can follow me @eburnette), and a tweet from Dan Morrill alerted me to two announcements for Android Developers.

Android SDK 1.0_r2

First, the Android 1.0 SDK, release 2 is now available. It's a minor bug-fix release; see the release notes for all the details. So far I've only seen two changes that might impact developers:

• You can no longer use the Java Reflection APIs to access private or  protected fields and methods. This is just to enforce basic Java security.
• You can no longer use the android.R.styleable class. However, you can still access the platform's styleable attributes from your resources or code using a <declare-styleable> in your project's res/values/attrs.xml file. This change will help assure backward compatibility in future versions of Android.

There's an example of using <declare-styleable> in the ApiDemos example, along with a new example of how to create shortcuts on the Home screen.

Android Dev Phone 1

The second announcement is that developers can now buy a SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked device:

The device ships with a system image that is fully compatible with Android 1.0, so you can rely on it when developing your applications. You can use any SIM in the device and can flash custom Android builds that will work with the unlocked bootloader. Unlike the bootloader on retail devices, the bootloader on the Android Dev Phone 1 does not enforce signed system images. The Android Dev Phone 1 should also appeal to developers who live outside of T-Mobile geographies.

The new phone hardware is exactly the same as the T-Mobile G1 from HTC. It's available now for registered developers $399 (USD). For more information, including pictures from all angles, see the Android Market site.