About 20 minutes ago, jbq (aka Jean-Baptiste Queru, Android engineer and community friend par excellence) announced on the #android IRC channel that Android 1.5 - the release formerly known as Cupcake - was done, tagged and released. And that being done, he was going on vacation...

There's a somewhat full feature list here, but the things I'm really interested in are:

• A2DP, or stereo Bluetooth support, coupled with AVCRP for remote control. To be honest, I'm not hugely bothered about it being stereo as such, since I mainly listen to podcasts and other spoken content, but without A2DP, only calls can go over Bluetooth, regardless of the number of channels in your audio. I had A2DP on my Treo years ago, thanks to Softick Audio Gateway, a third-party shareware A2DP driver, and it's good to know that Android has caught up a bit.
• On-screen keyboard. The G1 is the first phone I've ever owned which slides, flips, rotates or otherwise isn't a single block with a keyboard on the front, and while the slide keyboard is pretty decent for a phone, it's pretty annoying to have to flip the phone open to enter a URL, a search term, or some other short text - and it's almost unusable one-handed, say when holding onto something in order not to fall over on a moving vehicle. I've had a fiddle with the soft keyboard in the 1.5 preview SDK, and it seems pretty usable, at least for short things. Not sure I'd want to type an email, blog post, IM, etc. on it, but we'll see
• Widgets. One of the most-requested features for the home screen - apart from not taking a few seconds to rebuild itself after being kicked out of RAM to make use for something else - widget support appeared as somewhat of a surprise a couple of months back, and not quite in the expected way. Rather than being HTML/CSS/Javascript widgets, they are implemented as an application interface, so they are richer (and probably faster), but a little harder to write. There are already lots of ideas floating around, and at least one community widget competition which should hopefully produce some interesting things. I wonder how long until the 3-screen home screen becomes limiting?
• Browser performance. Not that the existing browser is particularly slow, but it'll be nice to see it faster.
• General polish and performance. There's been a bunch of screenshots floating around recently, and thing are looking a little more form-over-function. Not that it really really matters, of course, but prettier phones sell more units, and I want Android to sell as many units as possible - both because I think it's a good platform and good for the mobile market, and because, selfishly, I hope to release some Android software soon, and more users (customers?) would be better

The interesting question, of course, is when it'll get shipped or pushed to users. The HTC Magic should be the first device shipping with 1.5 out-of-the-box, and it's expected to be released on May 5th, which really isn't far away. For the G1, T-Mobile Germany have already announced that they expect to push a 1.5 update to users in May, so it's not unfair to expect T-Mobile in other countries to do something similar - I have a US G1, so I should get the push whenever T-Mobile US gets round to it. I suspect Dream (same device, but not T-Mobile branded/released) users might have to wait slightly longer, but hopefully not too long.

Roll on donut!