While continuing to develop my application and test it on a real phone, I need to have the release version of it on the same phone, for demonstration purposes (
You may want to try this technique using ant, Jenkins and perhaps other tools to automate package renames as suggested by @LAS_VEGAS.
Although not what you asked for, this cool code snippet can help you find out at runtime whether your code is debug or release.
Another interesting such attempt can be found in this thread. I am not sure though if it works on Android.