Hello everybody! good news for Android developers!! There is a new release of SDK tools available. There are some major enhancements and bug fixes in the new SDK and ADT r17.
Interesting new features:
- Emulator support for hardware accelerated graphics and virtualization mode for x86 system images
- New Android Lint checks, including checking for API calls higher than the minSdkVersion in your project manifest.
- The ability to suppress Lint warnings in both Java code and XML resources.
- Live network usage display in DDMS.
- Support for multitouch on tethered devices(adding experimental support for Multi-Touch input through a tethered Android device. Meaning you can use your Android device to control the emulator!)
Note: We need to upgrade the SDK and the ADT in parallel for this release of the tools. Also, JDK 6 is now required, and the ADT plugin needs Eclipse 3.6.2 or later.
Key enhancements in emulator:
With contributions to AOSP from Intel, the emulator now supports running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X. This allows the emulator running at near native speed. The drivers are available through the SDK Manager.
After adding webcam support and sensor emulation, they are adding experimental support for Multi-Touch input through a tethered Android device.
Enable CPU based acceleration for emulators:
Many modern CPUs provide extensions for running virtual machines (VMs) more efficiently. Taking advantage of these extensions with the Android emulator requires some additional configuration of your development system, but can significantly improve the execution speed. Before attempting to use this type of acceleration, you should first determine if your development system’s CPU supports one of the following virtualization extensions technologies:
Intel Virtualization Technology (VT, VT-x, vmx) extensions
AMD Virtualization (AMD-V, SVM) extensions (only supported for Linux)
The specifications from the manufacturer of your CPU should indicate if it supports virtualization extensions. If your CPU does not support one of these virtualization technologies, then you cannot use virtual machine acceleration.
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html#accel-vm
Reviews:
The new AVD is very much faster than the older one, with BenchmarkPi app testing on older emulator pi value calculated in 16132 milliseconds, same app runs in newer sdk with CPU accelerated emulator takes only 519 milliseconds, 16132/519=31 times faster than the older emulator for this app!!!.
more info,screenshot:http://forum.blrdroid.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2#p11 (thanks to Soham)
Bugs, Bug fixes:
Bugs!!!!??? yes this x86 Native Support and Experimental Multitouch update contains usual sort of bug fixes (for Lint) and adding performance improvements specifically, to the emulator for x86 devices.
But we need to be careful because new sdk,ADT itself having some bugs, bug fixes !!
for more info http://forum.blrdroid.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2#p12 (thanks to Pranay)
So good news for Android developers with awesome sdk with faster Emulator!!