I wasn’t planning to have a donut today, but T-Mobile just sent Android 1.6 to my phone.
I’ve had it almost a year now, and it’s actually a better phone now than it was when I bought it! How cool is that?
Wow! Glad I didn’t move to a MyTouch! The G1 isn’t in the Top 10 Radiation-Emitting smartphones list, but it’s not exactly low either. The MyTouch, on the other hand, is #1.
I love my T-Mobile G1, but it’s no secret that the phone has way too little internal memory. Now Engadget reports that the limited memory could prevent the G1 from running future versions of the Android operating system.
You can add plenty of data storage (images, music, app data) by dropping in any size Micro-SD card (IIRC it came with 1 GB. I’m currently running it with an 8 GB card). But the phone system, all the apps, and the cache for updates all have to share the measly 256 MB internal storage. Android and Me breaks down the partition structure, and points out that the current system, Android 1.5 “Cupcake,” already fills 99.5% of that space. Since software usually gets bigger with each successive version, it’s been challenging for Google to keep the OS within that limit.
It seems like it would be easy to just move the update cache to the SD card and double the size of the system partition…except that it would require reformatting the phone. Doable, but risky.
Before we get too gloomy, T-Mobile has stated:
We plan to continue working with Google to introduce future software updates to the T-Mobile G1. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate.
Now, this may simply mean that they’ll continue issuing bugfix/security updates. Or it may mean that they’re working out ways to squeeze newer Android versions onto the phone.
Let’s face it: the G1 is a first-generation device. It’s right there in the name (Generation One). All of us who bought it are early adopters, and that carries a certain degree of risk. Just like all those people who paid, what, $600 for the first iPhone only to see the price drop heavily less than a year later.
Even so, with Cupcake, Android is already quite a capable OS. Whether the G1 hits the wall at Cupcake, Donut, Eclair or Flan, the phone won’t stop working just because it can’t get major updates. Whatever happens, it’ll still be usable for the duration of a 2-year contract (and presumably beyond).
I do worry about incompatible apps, but that’ll start happening anyway as more devices with varying hardware specs appear on the market.
Really, though: this is the first phone I’ve ever owned that had software updates of any substance. I think one of the two RAZR variants had a bugfix release that came out before I even bought the phone, but that’s it. The fact that my G1 is actually a better phone now than when I bought it is pretty damn cool!
Trying out Sherpa. It thinks I’m still in San Diego. And local search turns up several places that have been closed for years. It also has lots of miscategorized stuff. It’s a Grind as groceries instead of coffee? And it lists the “Irvine Meadows Amphitheater.” Where are they getting their data?
I’ve been having trouble trying to find a good Twitter app for my Android phone.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. I’m extremely happy with Twidroid, which I’ve been using since I got the phone. The problem is that I need a good second app, because I have two accounts I want to use. Update: This is no longer a problem (see end).
I keep going back to Twidroid for two main reasons:
That second item is really the key. Most other Twitter apps I’ve tried tend to get in the way. Want to post something new? Hit the menu button, then choose an item from a pop-up toolbar. Want to open a link? Press and hold, then select from a big long menu.
With Twidroid, buttons for posting a new tweet, showing replies, posting/viewing direct messages, and refreshing the view are right there at the bottom of the screen. One tap and you’re posting. One tap and you’re pulling in new messages. One tap and you’re looking at replies. And you open links by tapping a message, not pressing and holding.
It’s like the “easy button” from the Staples commercials.
Twidroid also ties in to the Android OS, making it easy to share a link directly from the browser, or share a photo directly from the image gallery.
Another nice feature is that it can break down background notifications by category. If I want it to check for replies and direct messages and sound an alert, but not worry about general posts until I look, I can tell it to do so.
I Tweet ($2.99) is very close, and I’ve been using it as my secondary app for several months. It ties into the OS, does photo uploads and URL shortening, lets me customize notifications, etc… but it has a tendency to get in the way. The user interface is pretty, but cluttered. The things I want to do most often require multiple taps (or worse, press-and-hold, like opening a link).
The worst part is that if I don’t let it check periodically for new messages, I can’t tell it to pull in new ones when I launch it… and it won’t always retrieve older posts. If I post something before hitting refresh (which is hidden behind the menu button), it won’t pull in anything further back than the post I just made.
At this point, I’ve got my personal account @KelsonV set up on Twidroid. That’s the one I have linked to this blog and to Facebook. I’ve got @SpeedForceOrg running on I Tweet. I’ve been using it a lot lately with the lead-up to Comic-Con International, and those few problems have started really bothering me.
So I tried a bunch of others this weekend.
So I’m back to Twidroid and I Tweet for now. I’ll probably end up swapping the accounts again and putting SpeedForceOrg on Twidroid, since that’s the one I’m likely to be using most during the con. *sigh* Why do I have to make things more complicated for myself than they have to be?
Update: A few months after I wrote this, Twidroid released Twidroid Pro, which adds several features on top of the free version…including multiple accounts!
I have to confess: I’ve started seriously thinking about a netbook.
Not that I actually need a netbook. I’d only really end up using it for conventions that I’d want to post live (which would probably boil down to Comic-Con International), and I have the ability to do that using either my G1 or the laptop.
Long-time readers (all five of you 🙂 ) may remember that last year I agonized over upgrading my phone to something with real web capability until they announced wifi, and I just lugged the laptop around. Which worked fine, but it was heavy, especially the day I was also carrying around Comic Book Tattoo.
Of course, now I can use the G1 to post to my blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or (almost) anywhere else even without wifi.
Except…
The camera issue shouldn’t bother me. Chances are I’d just end up doing what I did for WonderCon this year: post the occasional phone pic to Twitter and then upload the good photos to Flickr each evening. Just like I’d mostly be writing brief posts from the convention and detailed posts at the hotel.
But then I remember the post I made on the Tori Amos signing last year. After the signing I was so hyped that I found a table, set up the laptop, banged out a blog post, hooked up the camera and added a couple of photos…and the post ended up getting linked on a major Tori fansite, producing a traffic spike so big that not only is the following day still this blog’s busiest day ever, but that post, even though traffic fell off over time, is the 8th most-viewed post on the site over the past year.
Still, the promise of another 15 minutes of blogfame isn’t enough to justify several hundred bucks. (Though the < $200 models that pop up on Woot from time to time have been tempting.) So I’m making an effort to practice typing with the G1, both the physical and on-screen keyboards. I’ve got Twidroid and I Tweet for posting to two Twitter accounts. I’ve got wpToGo to simplify blogging. I’ve got a plugin that will automatically liveblog using Twitter, which I still need to test.
It’s just a matter of making full use of the tools I have, rather than running after the latest cool toy.
Update: I posted this last night, but somehow it ended up backdated to the day I started it on May 20. I think wpToGo must have set a publishing date when I posted the draft. Yes, I started this post on my phone.
