While I’m all for celebrity appearances to help boost Android’s appeal, I’m not so sure that Whoopi Goldberg, Jesse James, and Phil Jackson were the right choice. Then again, if one wanted to emphasize Android’s unique ability to be customized from one extreme to the other, then I guess picking polar opposites for spokespeople was a good choice. T-Mobile’s pitch for their 2nd Android device (but 1st fully consumer friendly Android offering) is that the myTouch can be 100% you. With pre-installed home screen customization, and enough accessories to rival the Razr, it looks like the myTouch could be a popular device. I’ve been sincerely tempted to purchase one to replace the G1, but I’m clinging to the last shreds of common sense that tell me to wait for Christmas.

*and for those of you clueless like I am, Phil Jackson is the coach for the Lakers.

check out the mini site for the myTouch.

My G1 totin buddy Ethan Cox told me yesterday that his wife was getting T-mobile 3G bars over at Buffalo General Hospital. He didn’t have it, and a glance down at my device let me know I didn’t either. Today I was gallivanting about in Williamsville when 3G lit up for the first time. it kept kicking in and out then dropped to edge when I came in to Lancaster/Depew. Arriving home I’m back in the warm and battery draining embrace of 3G. This is right on schedule too. The MyTouch was just released, and August was about when I said it would turn on so I’m pretty happy.

Ever since I got the T-mobile G1, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get 3G service in the Buffalo area. While T-Mobile hasn’t waivered in their efforts to slowly but surely release 3G over their network, the Buffalo/WNY area has been left out… till now. Maybe.

The attached screenshot shows an internal email listing all sorts of places to marked “to light up 3G” in Q2-Q4 of this year. While Buffalo isn’t on the list, Rochester, NY and Cleveland, OH are scheduled to light up in Q3. Possibly service in Rochester will be enough to expand to Buffalo as well. This could all be fake, but I doubt it.  Via TmoNews

Back in November, I wrote about the discovery that while Multi-touch wasn’t available on the HTC Dream (aka the T-Mobile G1), the Synaptics screen had the capabilities for two-fingered gestures. This was discovered by developer Ryan Gardner, who found that the kernal driver had lines commented out that watched for the second input. His methods were simple, though it required a recompile, and a flurry of rumors started as to why multi-touch was disabled if the G1 had screens to support it. HTC and Google stayed out of it, with only HTC stepping up once to say that the G1 was only ever meant to be a single touch device.

However, the Android community wouldn’t take no for an answer, and today we have working evidence that should bring more light into what the G1 can do in terms of Multi-touch, and why it will never be supported, on the G1 at least.

Android Developer Luke Hutch has managed to activate multi-touch without having to recompile the kernal, and only rewriting one classfile. He has a video demonstrating his application, and explains the current limitations of mulititouch.

Luke says that the Synaptics screen is not a true 2D touchscreen, but rather a 2×1D, which basically means that it’s hella responsive for single input, but would cause overlapping touchvalues when fingers cross the x or y axis. He does show that gestures like swipe and pinch would work, but rotation and other complex gestures would not be possible on the current hardware.

What does this mean?

Nothing. Unless the Android Source team decides to support this (read: NO), it will never make it on the G1. It would also be foolish for developers to write gesture only applications at this time, seeing that the only people to benefit are developers themselves. This is not an end-user solution, and though the community is still looking for official multi-touch on the G1, the answer today is still “well, yes.. but no.”

You can check out his very detailed explaination, as well as download the sourcecode for free at his site: http://lukehutch.wordpress.com/android-stuff/

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 »

My Maps Editor is a recent free addition to the Android Market, the result of 20% time from Brian Cornell, a software engineer at Google. The app allows full viewing and editing of the My Maps section of Google Maps, with a few bonuses like GPS support and local caching. With My Maps (you can find this as a tab in google maps), you can add placemarks, shapes, and paths, upload photos, and insert HTML formatted content in the placemark description. You can then share your custom map, keep it private, or open it up to collaboration.

With this application you can create, edit, share, and view personalized maps on your Android powered phone synchronized with the My Maps tab on Google Maps. It supports full editing functionality for markers, lines, and shapes, plus the ability to mark your location using GPS or attach a photo directly from your phone.

Click through to read the rest of the review, and see lots of pretty screenshots.

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Droid sans Tweak Tools Lite is a utility that activates a yet-to-be supported window transition effect in the Android OS. You can control the speed of the window slide, as well as window fade speed (effect you see when notifications pop in and out). You also have the option to turn it all off and go back to the boring way you were before but I bet you won’t.

For icing on the cake, Tweak Tools Lite also lets you deactivate your data connection for those not on a all-you-can eat data plan. I’ve not tested this since I have unlimited data, but I did demo the transition effect for you below.

Note that there is another app in the Market called Tweak Tools, which does other things (written by the same dev) but only runs on rooted (modded RC29 or RC30) G1 units.

DroidSans

I do a lot of text messaging, most of which is either to Twitter, BrightKite, or John. A caveat with smartphones is that with more functionality comes more steps to get to the simplest of actions. Luckily, Android lets you put shortcuts to your favorite apps, email labels, and contacts right on your homescreen. Any Cut, a free app from the Android Market, unlocks even more possibilities. This tip shows you how to use folders and Any Cut to organize a two tap quick SMS list.

Read the rest of this entry »

There may come a time when you need to reset your G1 phone because some jerkbag set your touch pattern and locked you out and you forgot your gmail password and reset it but it didnt sync so you have to reset the whole damn thing. If that ever happens, here’s some handy instructions on what to do…

Master reset the T-Mobile G1 from Nathan Strang on Vimeo.

I’ve had the T-Mobile Android G1 for well over a week, and while I could say that I waited so long to get a good review of the G1, truth is, I’m lazy. I never realized how peaceful yet out of the loop one can be while on a blogging hiatus. Additionally, I never thought it would be this hard to jump back on the horse after nearly two months of nothing. Lets get back into it shall we, and please if you will, welcome me back into your feeds with my 9 day review of Android’s first born child, the T-Mobile/HTC G1 “Dream.”

What wacky family the G1 gets to grow up in. First, its mother is Google, who got knocked up out of nowhere and went through a wild and bumpy pregnancy after banging nearly every cellphone company (except Sprint, who’s into Asians) only to get knocked up by T-mobile, the runt of the litter. Gotta hand to T-Mo, they’re like a guy with a small dick. Though he can’t plow you as well as the other guys, he tries a hell of a lot harder to please you. Then we have HTC, who swears he’s the real father. And while the G1 looks exactly like him (ya know, shitty internal memory, slow camera, and a disfigured USB port), T-Mobile promised to raise the G1 as his own.

Physicalities and such

I’ll admit, the G1 is no looker. Sure the 3.2 inch touchscreen with 320×480 resolution looks baddass, but everything else about the phone is all wrong. Why? HTC can make beautiful tech. Shit, if they can make a windows mobile phone droolworthy, then why can’t they make a new phone with yet to be set design rules so freaking turdlike? The answer is probably because this is the same exact hardware that was built to test the Android platform on. HTC probably had plans to sex up the design a bit, but time constraints and the general need to just get this thing out to developers is probably what greenlit the dev model into production. Maybe I’m a little rough, because I love the phone, I love that its the first of its kind, and that it totally looks like an akward geeky toy.

There are a lot of buttons on the G1: Call, Home, clickable trackball, Back, End/Power, Menu, Camera, and Volume controls, not to mention the QWERTY and a dedicated search button. everything is flush or near flushed, making accidental clicks less likely but harder to navigate blind. The camera button is a bit awkwardly placed; try gripping it for portrait mode and your thumb will push the slider up into your index finger which is trying to press the camera button to take the shot which will come out blurry 75% of the time because HTC put yet another slow camera (albeit 3.2 Megapixel with autofocus) in another supposedly high end phone. Another awkwardness is the little curved banana nub bottom half that gets the mic 2mm closer to your face but hates on your chubby fingers when you try to use the keyboard. One handed multitasked typing on this thing is surely a skill to master.

I have to say I wasn’t so much disappointed about the lack of a headphone jack in lieu of a duel use micro USB port. I’ve had HTC devices before. Its what they do. The supposed proprietary port will actually allow any micro usb connection but also accommodates certain HTC only accessories with the special connector. I really like the one connection port. reduces the exposure to damage and helps to ease the clutter. If I absolutlely have to charge and use a headset at the same time, I’ll plug in the HTC port splitter (came with my Shadow) that lets you get kinky with some double penetration.

The trackball is very responsive and can navigate 98% of the phone without having to use the touch screen. While the phone is sleeping it won’t turn the phone on or register any function. This is nice because its the only button that sticks out. Everything else about the phone is sturdy. The slide mechanism operates almost like a switchblade, and all the buttons respond to a nice firm press. Physically, the G1 is a sound device, well made despite its fuglyness.

A new operating system, a whole new world.

I can’t begin to explain why Android is so important to the mobile industry. Its just going to have to play out, but I made sure I bought my ticket to glory early. I don’t normally early adopt, but I stuck with T-Mobile despite the lack of 3G in Buffalo just to get this phone. This was in February. I committed to buying the G1 in February and I wasn’t disappointed.

The G1 comes loaded with all the goodies to put Android to the test: 3G, Wifi, GPS, capacitive touchscreen (easy on the touch, heavy on the response), a compass, and accelerometer. I’d say it has everything but for some reason while there is bluetooth, there is no A2DP profile and its more crippled in that regard than a verizon phone. Specwise, it has enough to fly: 528MHz Processor, 192MB RAM, and an internal storage of 256MB. CDMA, Quadband GSM; yup, its a world phone.

Syncing to my Gmail account is a breeze, even on EDGE (no 3G in Buffalo). I’m using my Google Apps account @buffawhat.com to sync, too.  For someone that relies on Google for just about everything, you’ll find that Android is your friend indeed. Your calendar, contacts, and email are all kept in the cloud, but pulls and syncs seamlessly and with no effort from the user. You can set sync schedules if you are that controlling type, but its best to let the G1 do its thing.

After a slight learning curve, the Android becomes a breeze to use. Its not as intuitive to use as the iPhone but you won’t get another touchscreen experience like on the Android. It feels so much like a mobile computer, and even more so when you find out you can put folders on the home screen.

The homescreen is a mashup of OSX with spaces, and vista with widgets. left and right swipes of the home screen reveal two new spaces to put icons, folders, gmail shortcuts, even widgets (android shipped with a clock, search bar, and a photo frame).

I realize that I have a lot to talk about the android operating system, but that will come later. This is only part one of a never-ending (I hope) relationship with Android, right up until the day they all gain consciousness and we lose it all. And it may seem that i totally thrashed the phone in this mini review, but its all tough love..

P.S. – It has cut and paste. and does it fucking well.