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Everyone is expecting significant Android buzz this fall, with Motorola and Sony Ericsson both looking to kickstart their turnaround plans with their first launches based on the open OS. Now it seems Google, the main mover behind Android, is not helping its allies, with release 2.0 of the system failing to live up to expectations.

Major players like Sony Ericsson (SEMC) and Sprint Nextel have held back on Android until it supported features they regard as essential in the smartphone race, such as multitouch and advanced multimedia support. These were expected to appear in release 2.0, aka Donut, over the summer, but now it appears that Donut will be just a step upgrade, and that the full release 2.0 could be pushed back, affecting subsequent releases too, and any phones that rely on those.

Although T-Mobile started pushing out a small firmware update for its current Android phone, the HTC G1, this came with no new features, only bug fixes - sparking a call for clearer information on when Donut will appear. Eric Zeman, Information Week's mobile blogger, points out that the Android developer community shared features of Cupcake as early as November 2008, six months ahead of release, but "we know next to nothing about Donut", even though Google has pledged three more updates to the core Android OS by year end (all with dessert related names - Donut, Eclair and Flan).

All we know about Donut, except what SEMC has said about improved multimedia support, relates to the search experience - it will allow users to perform a search across the entire device, and to transition from local device searches to online in an instant. Google also promises to open the text-to-speech API in Android and has dropped vague hints of improved social networking capabilities to be integrated into the base platform. And now Android engineers say Donut will not support multitouch, which will have to wait until the full 2.0 release, which could be late this year.

This could be a blow to SEMC, which will launch its first Android phone, Xperia X3, for the holiday season smartphone race - this is designed to support high end multimedia features and a 4-inch WVGA touchscreen (not supported in the current Cupcake release of Android). Sprint CEO, Dan Hesse, also justified his company's decision to wait to launch an Android phone, saying it would only be ready for prime time with release 2.0. However, speaking at the Brainstorm conference last week, he indicated that Sprint would release an Android handset by year end, running release 2.0.

No indication of which vendors Sprint is talking to, and the initial interest in Motorola's planned launch device - probably targeted at the midrange and therefore less dependent on Android upgrades - seems to be coming from Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, as previously reported. Motorola is looking to revive its standing with its homeland operators by offering them shares of application revenues and more prominent branding - both important goals for the cellcos as they seek to maintain brand and customer control in the open mobile world.

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