WIRELESS AND MOBILE NEWS

Android developers can now download the third release of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK)  from the Android developer site.

It can be used to target devices running Android 1.5 and higher. In addition to a few bug fixes and improvements, this release includes toolchain improvement, OpenGL ES 2.0 suppport and a new name "r3."

The toolchain binaries have been refreshed for this release with GCC 4.4.0, which should generate slightly more compact and efficient machine code than the previous one (4.2.1).

Applications targeting Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher can now directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This brings the ability to control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language.

This NDK release is just called "r3", for "Revision 3", to indicate that it is not limited to a specific Android platform/API level. Some developers thought that the previous release's name (1.6_r1) was confusing and indicated that it could only be used to target Android 1.6, which was not true.