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... And it wasn't an iPhone . I've always stayed away from the iPhone, any time I've used it I never felt productive, millions of apps and hardly any of  'em are any use if you can't run programs in the background, cut and paste, or beam shit. That wasn't an iPhone rant. I'm so happy ya'll finally got to use cut and paste... I'll admit that while its still a little dumb to use it has more functionality than Android's cut and paste. And its pretty, I'll give you that, but I'm pretty too. I want my phone to have the brains. Android needed to grow up fastlike. The iPhone had a year on the streets (now two years and three fucking generations to get shit halfway in the right direction) and the G1 didn't get any slack. If Android showcased its power in a sleeker form it might have impressed more people (like the gays with money)... The G1 is a little clunky. The physical keyboard was great for me but turned others off, mainly those with iPhones used to an onscreen keyboard, and those who believed that real keyboards were now archaic. GPS and the first smartphone with a magnetometer (compass) were serious pluses, but the lack of a 3.5mm audio jack made it hard to stand up as the great media player it could be. And the chin... now a signature look when HTC makes a phone for Android... the chin was the bad idea that stuck, no matter that it lets the trackball hang out, its weird. That being said, Android moved on. It was actually pretty nice. We got to see the first real open (sorry Symbian, your days are numbered) operating system in the wild, sell a shit ton of phones for T-Mobile and spread worldwide like a virus. The idea of what Android is came clear when the "cupcake" update was announced. I couldn't wait for the official update, so I rooted my phone to allow the modded Sapphire 1.5 build. I tried about 4 different flavors of Android in the month it took the update to drop. Even Donut (the upcoming 2.0 release by the end of the year) is running out on the web in some chopped up form or another. Hackers took the best of the cracks and compiled their own editions, like the builds by JesusFreke. Google summed up its customizability by mentioning that in the official world there would be be exactly three flavors of Android: those with a lot, a little, or no Google Experience (Email, search, browser, Calendar, Contact syncing, and other Google Apps, all linked to your Google acct) Widgets used to just be a clock, a search-bar, and a picture frame. Boy, you can never have too many clocks. The homescreen had three pages, which soon grew to a possibility of dozens when home screen replacements first hit the market. Homescreen and even keyboard replacements showed that you didn't have to install a hacked ROM to change the look or functionality of  your device.  Custom widgets showed up on a Homescreen replacement app first, and The Google Android Development Team watched on, even supportively mentioning that there could be a security risk with custom widgets and they were working on new permissions to make them safer when widgets came out for real in 1.5. When 1.5 went live widgets took off and added the extra layer of functionality Android needed to compete as a smartphone. I have never been more productive with a phone. I love my G1, despite the dents and scratches,  minor sluggish moments, and the stupid chin. The best feature with Android are its intents. An Intent is a process by which applications running on Android can share data across other apps, augmenting the OS's power. For example, when I take a picture, I can send it to PicSay to edit the colors and crop, then twitpic it directly with Twidroid. When I click on a youtube or twitpic link, an app grabs the link and pulls a thumbnail preview so I don't have to launch a browser. Android multitasks pretty damn well, too. The number one gripe with smartphones that multi task are that it drains the battery.  Of course it drains the battery... because it's being useful. I'd rather carry an extra battery around than have a phone I could only run one app at a time. With over a million G1 units running in the US, its time for the next wave of the expansion. T-mobile has announced the My Touch 3g (the HTC Magic) is available for pre-order for an August launch. Motorola's Morrison plans to attract the sidekick users with a affordable android device aimed for a younger crowd. Samsung's Galaxy is for sale in germany on O2, and will hit the US sometime by the end of the year. LG even plans to make a Prada phone that runs on Android for some serious highend looks and brains. Remember when I placed my bets on Sony Erricsson? Looks like they plan a XPERIA based device codenamed "Rachael." This could be the shiny phone that gets my boyfriend off the iPhone bandwagon and into the multitasking arms of Android. check out the specs, pics, and UI preview below. Did I mention this phone is mad pretty? Specs - Built on a Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon chip that can give speeds up to 1 Ghz, 8 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5mm audio jack, standard miniUSB jack, 4" touchscreen with WVGA resolution at 800 x 480 pixels. Custom SE designed Android interface (2.0 AKA Donut). 3d Graphics capabilities.

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.

• MMS - The ability to save attachments, plus some performance increases when scrolling through conversations lists
• Email - Fixes most if not all of the bugs and troubles facing those using the Email (not Google Mail) app. Noted improvement handling POP3/IMAP connectivity.
• Alarm clock - has its own intent and the alarm fires directly. Fixes issue where some modal dialog boxes block the alarm.
• Music player - allows for music to fade back in after a call ends. New intent allows for Song title, album, or artist to be searchable (think being able select a song that's playing and sending the info to an app that can find similar music, Pandora style). also works with video and Youtube.
• Browser - Updates Webkit and Javascript engine. Copy and paste text in browser by holding "shift" and dragging over the text. also adds the ability to find text within a page. General performance improvements.
• Voice Dialer - open apps with voice commands
• Camera - This is the big one: video recording, and native  local playback. Share video intent, and thumbnails for video files.
• Bluetooth - A2DP & AVRCP (stereo bluetooth) profiles finally supported. Still holding out for BPP (Basic Printing Profile). Fixes connectivity with certain automobiles (Mini Cooper, and late model BMW)

Once the holidays are over, we can expect more progress with the branch merges, and possibly hope for an early february OTA update.  Stereo  bluetooth (along with video recording, though it will probably be a novelty) has been the one feature I've been needling for; I'd really like to use my Motorola S9's again. All in all, the cupcake branch fixes a lot of worry that Android would be a stunted OS, and if the development community works as well together as they have been, we can expect even greater things this Summer. Source.Android.com