A post on the Android Developers blog announced on Monday that developers could have a glimpse at the next variant of the Android platform. According to the post, the new version is 1.5, it has been developed starting from the cupcake branch from the Android Open Source Project, and it comes with new APIs for features like soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition.

In addition, the developer tools and the structure of the SDK itself have been changed a little, and the blog post states that future Android SDK releases will come around with multiple versions of the operating system, a move that is meant to offer developers the possibility to access different platforms within a single SDK installation.

At the same time, multiple platforms included in the same SDK will enable developers to install Android SDK add-ons so as to gain access to extended functionality offered by OEMs or carriers. While the Google team uses this feature already, the early-look SDK is stated to include an add-on for the Google APIs, which will offer support for the Google Maps API, previously included in the “core” SDK.

The blog post also announces that the team intends to offer support for developers that want to come up with applications for handsets that will run under Android 1.5, and that a series of articles on the changes and new APIs, as well as on OpenGL, asynchronous tasks, system settings, and new Activity callbacks, will be published during the following weeks.

Given the fact that this SDK is not the final release, some changes are expected to surface when the platform comes to the market, so no applications based on the early-look SDK should be released into the wild. The final Android 1.5 SDK release is expected to become available at the end of the month. Those who would like to download the early-look Android 1.5 SDK can find it here.