Technology and Making

Discover provides an elegant and powerful interface by which to transfer files between your computer and your G1 over a wireless network. With Discover running on the G1, you just direct your computer's browser to the designated IP address (you can find it under Discover's "Server Info" menu option) and you'll see a fast web-based interface through which to manage your files. It should work on any operating system, and you can assign passwords to protect your files from hostile action.

A minor triumph of the open source model, this free application from the Market allows you to enter text via an onscreen keyboard without opening the slide on your G1, one of the most exciting features of the much-delayed Cupcake update.

It's pretty easy to use but not immediately apparent - I had to go and dig through android7's boards before I figured it out.

When you run Softkeyboard, it loads in the background and appears in your Notifications list. Whenever you want to enter text, slide down the notifications bar and choose Softkeyboard. You need to enter your text, click on the Return icon in the lower right corner and then (this is the part I couldn't figure out), long-press on the text box and choose "paste" to enter the text. Job done!

The Number 1 must-have application for Android. aTrackDog finds and lists all your applications, then checks them all for updates in one go, even if they're not in the Market. Updated versions are brought up in a list, and you can tap on any one to go straight to the Market or the developer's website and download an update. Since many Android apps are updated several times a week, this is your most important piece of software.

Developed by one man, SnapPhoto is a new Camera application for Android and adds most of the features you're missing - adjust the white balance, night mode, take multiple shots, etc. etc. Best of all, it uses the phone's accelerometer to judge when there's a stable moment to take the shot - you focus, push the button, then hold it as still as possible, and SnapPhoto will take the shot at the very moment the camera is most still, getting you the clearest possible picture.

It's updated steadily, and has become very stable and featureful. Bookmark the developer's FAQ Page to keep track of the latest changes, they're not listed in the Market entry.

This application gives you the ability to record video on your G1, a much-desired feature. It will drain your battery really fast, and it's still in beta and a little buggy, but overall it's working well for me. There's no sound as yet, but that's scheduled for an update in the very near future. Overall, a very exciting third party offering.

There are a few applications to give you easy picture uploads to the web. These are, in my opinion, the two best.

Picasa, which is the official release from Google, lets you upload any picture to your Picasa web albums. This is essentially a new addition to the core Google apps bundled with Android - the fact that it has to be downloaded from the market may mean development ran a bit behind, and this may be bundled with later Android phones, even newer G1s.

PixelPipe is a remarkable service. With clients for pretty much every desktop and device under the sun, it provides quick photo upload to over 50 websites, including blogs, photo hosts and many others. You'll need to sign up for a free account to use it.

Because both these applications appear in the "share" menu, they'll let you upload photos from any app that supports it - new camera applications like SnapPhoto, for example.

Out of the box the G1's Android operating system supports Google Chat, the Instant Messaging system which has grown out of Google's Gmail email service. You can view your Buddy List at any time, appear available whenever the phone is in network range and messages from your Buddies come up as notifications in the bar at the top of the screen. US users have support for other networks, although I am informed that they pay for use - the price of a text for every message.

Facebook Chat is so far supported only by andFBChat, a Google Code project. It's not yet in the Market, so you'll have to install from the website. It's also pretty buggy and frequently fails, but may improve soon - I'll be keeping an eye on it and posting here, as this is one of my must-have applications.

There is good support for AIM with Hello Aim! and Myspace with MySpace Mobile, As yet, I can only find support for ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber, and MSN in Meebo and IM+ - see below for details.

The only multi-protocol messengers for Android that I've found so far are Meebo and IM+.

Meebo connects to AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, its own Meebo protocol, and the MSN and Yahoo networks, and should support Facebook Chat soon - this feature is being worked on in collaboration with the Facebook team. However, it's still very buggy, and you have to log in to each service each time you load it - it doesn't even save your details.This may be improved soon.

IM+ supports AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ and Myspace. It's got a much better interface, automatically logs into all your networks when open and is more stable, but it's paid software, costing $19.95 after the 7-day trial. There is no word as yet on when it will support Facebook Chat.

This insanely featureful to-do list manager has a slick interface, the ability to sort your lists by all kinds of categories and create your own customized smartlists, and every option you could hope for. It also synchronizes with the web-based to-do list managers Remember The Milk and Toodledo, giving you both a backup of your tasks and a set of lists you can access from anywhere.

I've tried several to-do list programs for Android and I think this is the best by a significant margin. Personally I use Toodo for keeping track of my tasks when I'm out of the house, Remember The Milk for managing the details and the RTM plugin for my Google Homepage to give me a quick overview of what I have to do.

You can check out the Toodo Development Plan to see all the features they're planning to implement. This is a textbook open source project - hardworking team, total transparency, keep their users up to date.

Between them, these programs give you full control of your G1's ringtones. Rings Extended allows you to use any audio file on your G1 as a ringtone, and Ringdroid allows you to edit any audio file, via a very easy to use drag-and-click interface, cutting it to whatever length you want - so you can clip out your favourite sections of a track and use them as ringtones or notification tones.

Note: Ringdroid also allows you to convert any audio file into Android ringtone format, but you won't need this feature if you have Rings Extended installed.

This program's been causing a storm on the iPhone for some time, so it's got a fair amount of development work behind it, as well as having gathered a slew of awards.

TuneWiki works as a featureful audio player, indexing and playing all the audio files on your G1 and letting you build playlists on the fly. But it's also a social network in its own right, allowing any user to create and edit lyrics, gathering the community's favourite tracks, and incorporating geographical data to show you when your favourite bands are playing nearby. It also has a built-in Youtube search which allows you to save your favourite music videos to a library.

As a jukebox application, TuneWiki is rock-solid, and the ability to build playlists on the fly is very neat indeed. I hate to admit, but with a bigger SD card and better battery life, the G1 and TuneWiki could easily replace my 80Gb iPod.

There are two good contenders for access to Last.fm's streaming music. The third-party application known just as Last.fm has a good feature set, with the ability to search for artist information, manage playlists and select between several recommended tracks from each radio station. Unfortunately it's still very unstable, in fact I can rarely get it to play a track without failing. Definitely one to watch as it becomes more reliable, though.

Last.fm have now released their own Android client, listed in the Market as "Last.fm - Personal Radio". It has a more basic feature set, but includes good solid Notification area integration, and it is rock-solid stable in my experience.

Two simple programs that do two simple (but important) jobs.

Podweasel grabs the latest episodes of your favourite podcasts, saves them and plays them back. To be honest, I'm hoping that Tunewiki will be adding this feature in the future, and save me an application. There's no word on that yet, but I'll keep watching the news and post here if it does. For now, Podweasel does the job nicely.

PureRSS keeps you up to date with your favourite RSS newsfeeds.

From Android Talk (3rd of February):

"To ensure a great experience with the T-Mobile G1 with Google, customers with these devices will receive an Over the Air (OTA) update to their devices between February 5 and February 15. This OTA will include new system enhancements such as the ability to save pictures or files to file by long-pressing an item, check for system updates, and use the Google Voice Search feature. The OTA will also fix a number of known issues. New G1 activations will receive the OTA up to three days after service has been activated."

This update seems to be pretty much as listed above, adding the ability to save pictures and files with a long press, fixing a few minor bugs (none of which I've personally experienced, but which have been bothering other people) and adding Voice Search (which is apparently pretty cool). It's come to a bunch of customers in the US but there's not much more in terms of information about it, probably because it's pretty basic. There seems to be some concern about Voice Search becoming available in the UK - apparently it has a problem with our accent! This may delay or alter the UK release. More word when I know.

If you don't want to wait for the push from T-Mobile, there's a trick to allow you to force the G1 to check for updates, courtesy of a poster on the Android Talk forums. You'll need Anycut installed from the Market. Now long-press in a blank space on your screen, and choose Shortcut/Anycut/Activity/Device info. When you tap this shortcut, it'll take you to a screen with a bunch of interesting system info. Scroll all the way to the bottom, and there's a button to check for updates! If you click it and it just says "CHECKIN_SUCCESS", there's no update yet.

Coming Update - Cupcake

The official Google position is still that it's ready when it's ready, but is targeted for the first quarter of 2009. We do know that a very early version was released to application developers around the 16th of January, and that T-Mobile have taken note of the flood of emails and calls about the issue and are trying to push this forward as fast as possible from their end.

So what is this coming update to Android? It comes from the development branch called Cupcake, and will include a bunch of fixes and improvements and add a lot of features to your phone. It should download straight to your G1 over the air and update easily.

Some predicted features for this update are:

• Option to save pictures and attachments from text messages
• Ability to copy and paste text in the browser
• Search-within-text for the browser
• Improved video support - video recording, better playback and thumbnails
• Stereo bluetooth support
• Onscreen keyboard, so you can type on the screen rather than having to slide the keyboard open
• A reduction in battery drain, mainly through more efficient use of processing power.
• Screenshots of a development build have shown some kind of local daylight time application with a 3D globe, which seems like more chrome than a practical feature.

The soft keyboard is one of the most eagerly-awaited features of Cupcake - the ability to enter text via an onscreen keyboard, without having to open the slide on the G1. This feature is now provided by a third party application - dotphone.org's Softkeyboard, available in the Market now. See the entry in Part 2: Applications if you want more details and some information how to use it (the functionality isn't immediately obvious).

Headsets

Bluetooth headsets seem to work fine on the whole, but the device doesn't yet support stereo over bluetooth, so any audio playback will be mono sound only. This will be fixed with the Cupcake update.

The wired headset that comes with the G1 gives good sound quality, but the limitation of the phone is that it doesn't have a regular headphone/earphone socket, so for wired accessories you have to buy those that are specifically designed to be compatible with the phone.

However, in the US the G1 now ships with an adaptor which allows you to plug in a regular 3.5mm headset. This is not yet the case in the UK, but T-Mobile have told me that if they receive enough feedback they make well change this policy and even ship out adaptors to existing customers. If you are a UK G1 customer, go to T-Mobile's Contact Us page, scroll down to "send us an email" and fill in the form to let T-Mobile know their customers want this accessory!

I got a response to my own form, telling me that T-Mobile have no plans to make this change in the UK. That basically means they haven't had enough complaint emails/calls to make this an issue - let's get on this, people!

As yet, disappointingly, Android doesn't support file transfer between the phone and your computer by Bluetooth. This should be added with the Cupcake update. Because this feature is actually missing from the underlying structure of the operating system, it's almost impossible for somebody else to add it (through a downloaded application for example) until the update.

File transfer over the USB cable works fine, although the method has changed from the Quick Start guide that comes with the phone, which has confused some people (me included). When you plug the USB cable in, a prompt will come up on the G1's notifications area (the pulldown at the top of the screen), saying "USB Connected - select to copy files to/from your computer". Tap the message, and when the next box pops up on screen select "Mount". After that, your computer will see the G1's SD card as an external drive, just like a Flash drive.

Everything the phone has stored on your SD card is organised pretty clearly, and your digital photos are under the folder called "dcim". You can copy your music, photos etc. into any folder and the G1's software should find them.

File transfer over wifi is now available using the Android Market application Discover. It's very easy to use and powerful, does the job nicely. See the relevent section in Part 2: Applications for more details.

The G1 is designed to synchronize seamlessly and continuously with Google's own solutions for calendar, contacts, email etc. Therefore there are unlikely to be direct solutions from Google to sync your G1 with your Windows, Linux or Mac desktop over Bluetooth or a cable.

However, there are a number of ways to sync Google's online services with your desktop, giving a two-stage solution. I'm not going to go into them here because I feel they're outside the scope of this article, but they're well documented on Google's own help pages and on the web. If you're really stuck, drop me a comment and I'll see if I can help.

Hooking up your G1 to a laptop or desktop computer, so the machine can access the phone's internet connection: Again, this isn't yet directly supported by the operating system. However, there is a workaround which will let you do it, as long as you don't mind tweaking a few settings. "Tetherbot" by Graham - a guide to tethering your G1 as a USB modem. Note: The easiest way to point Firefox to the proxy is to install the Foxyproxy plugin.

It's still experimental and tricky, but now it's been proved possible, someone will no doubt make a friendlier easy-to-use solution very soon. When there is one, I'll post it here right away.

June Fabrics are in the early stages of developing a tethering solution for Android phones, and an Android version of WMWifiRouter is also in development. Both will be commercial (but affordable) solutions to the problem, and (if they work like both companies' previous releases) will effectively turn your G1 into a wifi hotspot without needing any other software installed, making them compatible with any desktop operating system. Further news when I have it.

At the moment Android can play audio in the following formats: AAC, AAC+, AMR-NB, MIDI, MP3, Ogg, WMA and WMV. Playback is pretty good and stable in my experience. See my separate post on applications for more information. Other formats may be added with future operating system updates, or new applications may expand that list.

The G1 can record audio, and a few applications already use the functionality.

Right now the Android only supports video in MP4 format and from YouTube (not through the browser but through dedicated programs, which are actually grabbing MP4 versions of the YouTube videos), and it has to be in quite a restricted format. You can use any video converter compatible with the iPod Touch or iPhone to make videos which will play in Android - Videora is very good.

Other video formats will probably have to wait for an operating system update, although someone may figure out a way to add formats with an application. Although Android doesn't yet officially support video recording, a third party application does now provide this feature. This is exactly why an open source phone is an exciting proposition - the potential for unofficial third party projects to fill the gaps in the available functions!

Dotphone.org's Video Recorder/Video Camera, now available from the market, provides recording of video to the SD card and playback with some efficiency. It's still in beta and a little flaky, but works pretty well for me - although it will drain the battery in minutes!

The big failing of the G1 is battery life. Between the big screen, multiple wireless connections and heavy processor use from the constantly running background applications, the installed 1150mAh battery doesn't last long.

Current word from T-Mobile is that they have no plans to release an improved battery for the G1 in the UK. Some G1 users in the US have been shipped replacement batteries - an internal memo has apparently instructed their helpline advisors to do so in response to complaints - which increase battery life by 22% without increasing the size of the phone.

If you are a UK G1 owner, I recommend going to T-Mobile's Contact Us page, scrolling down to "send us an email" and filling in the form to let T-Mobile know their customers want this service. With enough users pitching in, we can demand a better device for our money.

Managing your wireless features can help. The Power Manager application from the Market allows you to control bluetooth, wifi, GPS and cell location in one screen, and flip from 3G to 2G, all of which extend the charge on the battery.

The big drain is the 3G - the G1 wastes a lot of power searchingfor a 3G connection when one isn't available (hopefully this will be improved with the Cupcake release). I'd suggest turning it off when you're not actually browsing/downloading - your email etc. will still sync just fine, and if you get notified that, for example, a podcast is downloading in Podweasel, you can flip it on. This added almost 50% to my battery life immediately.

Many users can also improve things by calibrating the G1's Lithium Ion battery. It turns out that Li Ion batteries have internal electronics that keep track of their charge level, but sometimes need calibrating, and the G1's battery often doesn't ship ready-calibrated.

To calibrate your battery, let the G1 run all the way down, past the warning messages about low battery charge, until it turns itself off. You may need to turn it on again a couple of times - keep going until it won't power up at all. Then recharge to full and leave on charge for at least a couple more hours. You should find a significant improvement in battery life. This may need repeating every month or two, but don't do it too often as fully cycling the battery causes extra wear (mostly due to heat).

The G1 is fitted with a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, although unfortunately it doesn't have a flash. The onboard camera application is currently pretty limited, although it is predicted to improve with the Cupcake update. A much better camera app is SnapPhoto, available from the Android Market - see Part 2: Applications for more information.