Video: Cupcake's growing feature list demonstrated

In light of the new Cupcake build that is finding its way onto developer’s G1 Android devices, we thought we would do a little round up of the videos that have hit the big world wide web over the last few days. We will also discuss a few of the new functions we look forward to experiencing sometime in the not too distant future. Aside from the heavily anticipated on-screen keyboard that Cupcake is probably most famous for, users can one day expect the following key features:

Live folders
New and improved glamorous window transitions
Smiley’s in the messaging application
A larger set of languages has now been added

This list has been gleaned from a few videos, two of which are embedded below for your viewing pleasure. There is some controversy over the Live Folders functionality, which is demonstrated using Digg in the video. The downside here is that many of the titles are very truncated therefore making Google Reader itself somewhat more viable. However, the key thing to remember with Live Folders is that, by my reckoning, they can contain pretty much anything, such as bookmarks, contacts, music or even your email. They also auto-update, which is nice. This basically makes Live Folders a quick and easy way to access information from Home. Not necessarily to read RSS feed off the internet!

This build of Cupcake seems fairly stable, but is missing some functionality that requires root access. Similarly, it is not ready for mass consumption since in its current flavour, many people would most likely react adversely to the taste. However, the progress looks good, and there are some promising improvements, not least of which is the battery life; according to Android Developer Joey Sochacki, it’s on par if not better than R33. We can’t wait to see more!

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