Silverknife - Technology and Making

Image via CrunchBase

So, the 1.5 update to Android downloaded to my T-Mobile G1 yesterday morning, and I've been playing around with it for a fair bit of the last 24 hours.

My first impressions: The tweaks to the interface are very nice. Everything feels a little more solid and easy to use, including the use of paler backgrounds in a lot of applications (the calendar in particular is a lot easier on the eyes).

The new rotation feature, where the display switches to landscape mode when you rotate the phone (instead of when you slide open the keyboard) looks smart. The fade over from one mode to the other is an obvious attempt to distinguish it from the iPhone's spin effect - it looks snappy, but can be a little slow.

The new windows animations (which you will have to turn on from Settings - they're not on by default) giving a slide from one screen to another - also very smart. They're shiny without being too distracting. The new dialogue boxes which pop up to the screen look good too.

I've only used the soft keyboard a couple of times, but I'm very impressed. It's very precise despite the small keys - I've yet to hit the wrong key - and pops up fast when it's needed. There are a few features which aren't immediately apparent, and are only explained in the System Tutorial which is hidden in Settings/About Phone: You can hold a letter key to get a popup menu of accented versions, and hold the number/letter switch key to bring up some additional options.

The new camera and video camera (camcorder) are just excellent - Google have somehow managed to significantly improve the focussing speed, images are definitely sharper and there are more features, and the interface for both looks very smart.

Video comes out looking very good for the compact size of the device. The previous option for video recording - Android7.org's unofficial video camera hack - suffered from a very high rate of battery drain. Hopefully this integrated solution will be more economical.

On the topic of battery drain, I have yet to determine how much better Cupcake's power economy is. I discharged it fully yesterday afternoon and charged it to 100% in the evening to start a full power test, but stupidly left it on the cable this morning for an hour or so while swapping some files around, so I've had to start again. I'll give a full figure on average battery lifetime when I have it.

Labels: Android, cupcake, Google, HTC Dream, iPhone, over-the-air, release, smartphone, T-Mobile G1, update

Image via CrunchBase

OSNews has a post about Android version 1.5 (commonly known as Cupcake from the development branch which has driven it), believed to be coming in a couple of weeks, with a list of features and tweaks. This is certainly one of the most complete release descriptions I've seen so far.

Of course, it's by no means guaranteed that we'll actually see all these features at release, even in the US and particularly in Europe. We've already seen the previous Over-The-Air update stripped of a lot of predicted features in Europe, rendering it largely a bugfix. Until the thing actually arrives on someone's phone, we just have to wait and see.