After the excitement over finding new code in the Android development repository, it’s now time for the usual clarifications, provisos and news tweaks that inevitably follow.  While Donut was initially suggested as being one and the same with Android OS 2.0, one of the Android framework engineers, Romain Guy, has spoken up to suggest than in fact Donut is not the same thing as 2.0.

Perhaps more frustratingly for end users, Guy also maintains that there is no multitouch support in Donut, despite what initial feedback from the developer community may have said.  The touchscreen feature – which the current crop of Android smartphones are technically capable of supporting, though which Google’s official Android code falls short of enabling – was initially believed to be present in Donut, along with such things as VPN support, CDMA support and more.

The takeaway part to all this is the distinction between development branches and official releases.  As AndroidGuys explain, Donut is a development branch – a chunk of newly developed test code, patches and other tweaks – which Google is pushing out so that it can be tested, evaluated, and have OEMs check for compatibility with their hardware.  Some of those new features may find their way into an official release – we don’t know if that will be 2.0 or any other release number, though Guy’s comments suggest that it’s not 2.0 as we expect it – while others will be put on the backburner or junked altogether.

[Thanks Robert and simms22!; via Engadget]