Life can be tough; here are a few SDK improvements to make it a little easier

It's been just over a month since we gave developers the first early peek at the Android SDK. We've been hard at work since then on some nifty new stuff we think you'll really like. We hope to show that to you soon, but in the meantime, we wanted to fix some of the important issues you've raised. We're very pleased to announce the immediate availability of m3-rc37a. (What a great name for a droid!)

Our servers are quivering in anticipation of the opportunity to deliver these bits fresh to your desktop. Don't be shy! But if you need further enticement to download the new version, here are a few of the improvements you'll find therein:

• The new default skin for the emulator is HVGA, portrait mode. That's the one you should focus on for your submissions for the Android Developer Challenge.
• We've added the ability to inject SMS messages into the emulator, which will allow you to more easily test IntentReceivers for incoming SMS messages.
• The choppy audio problem in the emulator on Windows should now be solved.
• There's a new emulator control panel that you can use to control network events like radio state changes and incoming calls.
• The Eclipse plugin now does color syntax highlighting on the XML files, such as AndroidManifest.xml.
• Some of the more annoying bugs in the Eclipse plugin have been fixed; for instance, the application launcher retries if the first try times out while waiting for the emulator to start, and "R.java" files are no longer flagged as read-only.

You can find a full list of changes for this and every release at the Release Notes page. If you're looking for tips on upgrading your SDK installation, we have those too.

We hope that these humble tweaks make your life just a little bit better, or at least, the part of your life you spend writing code.