It’s been about a month since Google released the first preview software developer kit for Android 3.0 Honeycomb. In that time we’ve seen people do some amazing things with it such as running the operating system on the NOOKcolor tablet or Google Nexus One smartphone. Of course, that’s not really what the SDK is for. Instead, it’s a platform that lets developers dig into the operating system so they can write apps to run on Android tablets. And now Google has released the full version of the SDK.

The full version has stepped up the rendering of layouts so that things should look more like they will on an actual Android tablet. The SDK also has tools for using the new Renderscript graphics engine.

I suspect it won’t be long before we start to see more custom ROMS based on the latest version of the SDK. But things will get even more exciting when Google releases the full source code for Android 3.0 and not just the software developer kit.

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...