Well, we’ve got good news, and we’ve got bad news. I’ve always been the type to just tear the band-aid off, so we’ll go with the bad news first. The bad news: It’s not cupcake. The good news: an update has just been pushed to the G1! Crap. It doesn’t make sense in that order, does it? I’m horrible at this.
We really could have guessed as much at this point, but T-Mobile’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Neville Ray has put it on the record that G1 followups are on the way in 2009:
Do you have balls of steel? If you answered “YES!” or “SORT OF!” then you might have what it takes to flash the firmware on your T-Mobile G1 in order to get this multi-touch hack up and running, courtesy of developer Luke Hutchison.
The T-Mobile G1 has an update in the works. When the firmware will be available to owners is the main question after most of the details leaked out of the kitchen. Cupcake, as it’s been dubbed, should improve the look and the feel of the OS. The buttons should pop a bit more, there is a new transition when opening and closing apps, but most importantly is the new virtual keyboard. That particular new feature doesn’t seem to provide much function in the physical keyboard-equipped G1, but hopefully the G2 or the upcoming Huawei handset will take full advantage of it. Early screenshots after the jump.
Isn’t funny how everytime you get your hands a super-duper secret phone or random gadget, the one camera nearby is your crappy camera phone? Funny. Anywho, supposedly what you see above, and after the link, is HTC’s next Android-powered phone dubbed the G2. According to Giz, it’s a touchscreen phone that lacks a physical keyboard and will likely find its way into T-Mobile’s stable. Real or fake? Your call. Check out the phone’s backside after the jump.
T-Mobile is set to bring the G1 to more even more counties. Germany and Poland will be the first counties outside of the US and England to receive the Android-based phone with a launch of February 2nd, 2009. Eventually though, Netherlands, Czech Republic and Austria will all have the phone from the region’s T-Mobile branch. Pricing for every region, except Germany, haven’t been announced yet. Germans, however, will be able to pick up the G1 for 1 Euro with a two year contract.
Is that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me not have to recharge your G1 every two hours?
Looks like Slacker isn’t the only one using CES to push their mobile radio goods. FlyCast has long been available on the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms, taking a slightly more traditional approach to mobile radio; unlike Pandora and Slacker, FlyCast’s radio stations are all preprogrammed streams, though songs can be skipped at the user’s leisure on about 1/4 of the stations. This morning, they’ve announced that Android compatibility is one the way. It’s still “coming soon” – but G1 owners, keep an eye out.
RemoteDroid allows you to use the touchscreen and keyboard of your G1 as inputs for your PC. I’m trying to think of a situation in which this would be handy and not just cool, but I can’t. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s totally awesome. Actually, it could be useful for a home theater PC setup, or for making people think your computer is haunted.
The wait for a suitable extended battery for the G1 is finally over. I picked up the $42.95 Innocell 1400mAh battery from Seidio.com and I’m happy to report that the promise of 15% longer battery life seems to be legit.
2009 is set to be Google’s Androids big year with more and more manufacturers jumping on the open-source platform. Garmin has at least one smartphone slated for the second-half of ‘09 release and with perhaps more on the way.
If you own the T-Mobile G1, you might find yourself longing for an extended battery to replace the included 1150mAh battery that comes with the phone.
Word is that Samsung is planning on launching its first Android-powered sometime in the second quarter of ‘09 on both Sprint and T-Mobile.
Here’s a nice idea: a charger for your G1 Android-powered phone that simultaneously charges the phone and a second battery. Peter complained about the battery life of the G1, so maybe picking up a spare battery isn’t a bad idea if you live and die by your smartphone. For $17 at netimes.com, this is a pretty easy way to ensure your Android always has the juice it needs!
We all knew the white G1 was lurking somewhere out there — but now it’s actually whitening T-Mo stores near you. Do you really need a link to prove it? I didn’t think so. Personally, I prefer the black one, but I also prefer the black iPhone and Black Dice.
Anyway, if the color was the only reason you weren’t getting a G1, your time has come at last. No longer will you struggle to find your ebon-hued mobile in a darkened room!
Revising their previous target of 600,000 HTC G1s shipped by the end of 2008, HTC CEO Peter Chou has disclosed that the company now expects to ship at least 1 million of the world’s first Android handset by year’s end.
While it’s not quite as mind-boggling as the 1 million iPhone 3Gs Apple sold in just 3 days after launch, pushing one million handsets in 2 1/2 months is no small feat.
Back in April, Opera released a technical preview of Opera Mini for the Android SDK. The version of the SDK it was developed for was far from the final version, so by the time the G1 was launched in October, the Opera Mini package wouldn’t even make an attempt at installing itself to the device. Love it or hate it, the G1’s built-in browser has been your only web-perusing option since launch – until today, that is.
While there hadn’t been much indication that Opera had continued pushing forward with Opera Mini on Android since that preview release, they’ve gone and pushed an Android version of the just-released Opera Mini 4.2 to the market.
Caution: Pink Floyd blasting as soon as you hit “play”
I’m pumped about this because I just got a G1. This video shows a pretty basic paint program tracking two inputs at once — it’s pretty hacked together but it clearly works okay. We knew it was possible technically, now we see it’s possible practically, and hopefully soon we’ll see it supported officially.
HTC earned a lot of criticism, and rightfully so, for not including the industry standard 3.5mm headphone jack rather opting for a mini-usb to headphone joke-of-a-plug in the G1. Thankfully, an adapter is now included with the Googlephone so users should be able to use quality ear buds rather than the OEM ‘phones. We just wish the cord wasn’t so fraking long.
Whenever the G1 vs iPhone debate gets underway, iPhone purists are quick to flag the G1’s lack of multi-touch input support. Turns out, it might just be able to handle it after all – on the hardware end, at least. Whilst tearing his G1’s workings apart line-by-line, a crafty coder going by RyeBrye came across an interesting artifact. It seems the driver for the Synaptics touchscreen has some code commented out; after recompiling the kernel with said code back in, he was able to track two finger presses at once.
