[Cupcake] was a parallel branch that was used for further development while [the Android team] took on the task of converting a main code branch into an open source format. They merged it back when they were done with the open source transition, not because the engineers working on cupcake had produced a final solid product-worthy result. So, some “works in progress” that had been going on in a dead end parallel branch was merged into master. That doesn’t mean it is ready for release.
That’s according to T-Mobile.
Okay. Cool. So what IS new with my Chocolate cupcake? 
1. New Local Setting Page – Gives you option to pick different locales and pick different text inputs.
2. New Option to view running and third party applications – An option to view running and third party applications from the normal application list. Does not provide a way to terminate them.
3. New windows opening/closing animation effect – a new popping effect when windows are opened/closed.
4. New default notepad – a very simple and ugly default notepad.
5. New Global Time application – not sure if it will be provided by T-Mobile but it’s just a rotating Earth and I couldn’t get it to do anything else.
6. New Spare Parts Application – Once again not sure if the official version will have this, but it provides a number of extra settings such as setting windows animation and transition animation speed, font size, end button behavior and etc. It also has a “display rotation” option which supposedly should allow auto-rotate base on orientation across the entire os, but it is not currently working.
7. New Virtual Keyboard – The virtual keyboard will pop up on every edit box. I didn’t feel any haptic feedback but I am thinking that it’s just not there on the example keyboard. Because the phone does not auto-rotate (an option exists but it doesn’t work), it’s very hard to type on it. The sample keyboard also does not provide auto-corrections.
8. Slightly better looking buttons with more shadow.
Screenshots:
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