photo from ToastyKen on flickr

Android is nearly a year and a half old. However, its flagship device, the T-Mobile HTC G1/Dream/ChinPhone/GPhone has only been active since October, 2008. In that time, the rolly-polly green robot started with:

• A fledgling OS (designed by geeks with a love for UI but lacking in aesthetics)
• Running on a lone device that looks like the plain jane developers’ mockup passed around in its infancy (As much as I love the G1, the chin gets me no respect from the iPhone 3G using boyfriend)
• A crippling in the US by T-Mobile’s lack of nationwide 3G (shortly after this year the G1 went for sale in other countries with better cell service than the US… but not as affordable.)
• No onscreen keyboard, automatic rotations, or multitouch, no bluetooth, widgets were a hack (When the G1 was hacked to find that the screen had the capabilities for multitouch, the crowd went wild. HTC calmly said (paraphrased) “it wasn’t in the plan to have multitouch for the G1, and besides… the screen can’t do real two finger tracking anyway.”)
• A weird confusion of what to qualify itself (Was the G1 a Gphone? Is it safe to call them all GPhones? Do we call them [the devices] Androids? It’s an open platform but Google is all up in it? Who calls the shots? T-Mobile or The Google?)
• A battery life that isn’t so bad if you live in the other thousand cities without  3G, but hellish if you lived in NYC, Baltimore, DC, etc.
• A Marketplace that showed a lot of promise but only had a handful of cool apps. Nothing you could buy, all free.

Time passes. I unboxed my first Android phone on October 21st, 2008. I was SOOOO excited. Finally, I was free from having to use Windows Mobile that, while fun to hack, not the most efficient thing to use. I packed my old T-Mobile Shadow away (with the three extra batteries) and accepted The Google as my Personal Data Savior…

Read the rest of this entry »

Whats this to the left? Its a QR-Code, a 2d barcode that holds text information like vCards, poems, or even links to the Beta release of Brightkite’s Android app. Since the launch of Android and the G1 last year, BKiter’s like myself have been wondering where the Android app was.

Well, out of no where yesterday, Brighkite uploaded this code to their feed with a simple hint: “try it on your Android phone using the barcode Scanner app.” If you have a G1, or a Magic, or whatever, use Barcode Scanner (download it from the market for free if you don’t have it already) and grab the direct link to the APK. You may need to have the setting checked on your phone to allow installs from unknown sources…

This is a beta, but it seems pretty full featured and awesome already. Its fast and accurate, and looks almost exactly like the mobile application (i.brightkite.com). Expect the official app to drop into the market either this month or next… I don’t see what else they have to test. Thanks Brightkite!

P.S – Brightkite is like twitter for your locations. You can check into a place, upload photos, make comments and see people in your area.

I’ve been playing around with Android 1.5 in the last months, using hacked roms and lately the Android Developer candidate release.. Now that the Cupcake update has pushed to all users, I’ve reverted back to the T-Mobile release of Android 1.5. The big thing with 1.5, besides stereo bluetooth, is widgets on the home screen. I’m not a huge fan of widgets, they take up icon space and can slow down the home screen, but I do use a couple to increase my productivity. My most recent and exciting find in the Market has been Twidgit lite. It impressed me so much, it kickstarted me into blogging about Android again.

I use Twidroid for my main twitter browsing and functionality, but Twidgit offers an at-a-glance view of the latest update from your friends’ feed. Tap on the widget to see the tweet in full, with options to reply, or create a new tweet. Twidgit gives you the option to set the update frequency to as little as once every five minutes, to once every hour, or even manually (there is a little refresh button on the widget for that).

Twidgit isn’t perfect; every so often it crashes, but it is very hard to make anything work with Twitter and keep running 100%. However, you can track the development and talk to its creator (Matt Woodfield) via twitter.

PS – Twidgit Lite is free.

Oh me of little faith. And here I was thinking the goodness wouldn’t come to the G1 till Summer of 2009…

The core Android development team just announced a roadmap for  a special branch of code, called “cupcake” that will be merging into the main branch in January 2009, giving much needed fixes and features to G1 users.

via the roadmap - During Android’s transition to an open-source project, some development has continued to happen in a private branch.  We are working to move the rest of these changes into the open as soon as possible, and all future open-source work will happen in the public git repositories.  All changes that have already been submitted to the public repositories will be merged into the newer code base, so nothing should be lost.

Click though the jump to read about some of the features and improvements that cupcake has for the G1.

Read the rest of this entry »