Google this week released an 'early-look' version of the SDK for Android 1.5 with a smorgasbord of features to keep developers busy for quite some time. Google crammed so many goodies into its latest release that it would probably be easier to list what's not included, like no Microsoft Exchange sync, but where's the fun in that? Here's just a sampling of what's new:

• On-screen soft keyboard
• Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
• Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
• Widgets
• Video recording
• Video playback (MPEG4 and 3GP formats)
• User-selectable text-encoding

And the list goes on and on. But it's not just new features that find their way into Android, but several existing ones have been polished. Even the SDK itself has been tweaked and "introduces several new capabilities that enable you to develop applications more efficiently for multiple platform versions and locales."

Check out the whole kit and kaboodle here.