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android
My first impressions of the new T-Mobile G1 Android update (aka cupcake)
I just spent a full day using the new Android 1.5 release (also known as "cupcake") on my T-Mobile G1. I manually installed the update, because I am too impatient to wait for the auto-update from T-Mobile sometime next month. It was a quick and easy install, via the instructions here and I highly recommend it.
Here is a quick list of some of the new features I noticed:
- Menus and dialogs looks a lot nicer and more polished, with nice animations and transitions. Very iPhone-ish.
- The screen can auto-orient and an on-screen keyboard is now available. I really like the hard-keyboard but I can see myself converting over time. The iPhone virtual keyboard frustrated me the few times I've used it, but I felt the Android virtual keyboard was more accurate. It's much more convenient than sliding the keyboard open and turning to landscape mode every time you need to input some simple text.
- The Gmail app now has the same functionality as the mobile website which makes taking action on multiple emails at once a breeze.
- A Calendar widget. I'm excited about getting new widgets soon, now that it is part of the API.
- You can now copy any text from the Browser. You select "Select Text" in the menu then drag your finger over any text which then gets copied to the clipboard.
- GTalk was moved out of "IM" into it's own app. Which is nice because I never used the others (which send messages over SMS... what's up with that?)
- You can now more easily snap a photo using an on-screen button, or change the camera mode to... VIDEO!
It's awesome that after a simple software update my phone now has a video camera. Here is my first video, uploaded straight to YouTube:
Sure the quality is not near as good as my HD pocket cameras like the Creative Vado, but it's not that bad and it gets the job done, although the audio is very low. Hopefully mobile streaming services like Qik and Kyte will soon support it.
The future is mobile, and I think the android platform is positioning itself to big a big part of that (even running on netbooks). I just downloaded the Android SDK and plan on creating my first mobile app. Maybe I'll even have something to talk about at this week's mobicamp.
Filed under //
Android
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