Over at the Android bat cave, there's some interesting news going down. Today, Android announced the public release of its "cupcake" branch. This new branch offers a number of application enhancements, including bug fixes, a video recorder, the ability to save MMS attachments and more. System enhancements include better bluetooth support, better HTTP handling and, most importantly, a new JavaScript engine built on SquirrelFish.

Unlike the main Android trunk release, which is built on Linux 2.6.25, cupcake has been built on the updated Linux 2.6.27. Notably, the new system software offers basic x86 support and will allow third party manufacturers to develop and deploy their own handset-specific APIs.

Cupcake is a development branch rather than a release branch. According to the cupcake roadmap page, it remains distinctly a work in progress. This first release represents a big commit of changes since Android's 1.0 release; future plans are for smaller updates as the cupcake changes stabilize. The announcement page emphasizes that cupcake is an outgrowth of Android's roadmap; the roadmap allows for project forking with development continuing on in private branches, which is what cupcake is.

The cupcake branch updates will eventually be merged back into the main Android trunk. This will probably not happen until early to mid January due to the American holiday season. Given the number of bug fixes covered by the cupcake release, this will likely be a welcome update for most Android users.