G1 News

Seems like the G1 has managed to steal a march on the iPhone in an important category - turn-by-turn satellite navigation.

Co-Pilot Live app has recently rolled out on the Android Marketplace, offering GPS guidance, lane indicators, speed camera locations and voice directions on your mobile for the princely sum of £25.99 for UK/Ireland maps and £59.99 for all of Europe.

Supported by the holy trinity of Android phones, the T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and HTC Hero/T-Mobile G1 Touch will even allow you to divulge and share your location to your mates, Google Latitude-style.

With no monthly charge or extra costs outside of your 3G usage for services like live traffic, fuel prices or weather updates, Co-Pilot Live seems like a great, cost-effective way to get you going in the right direction!

Source: Electric Pig

When talking to Pocket Lint about the slick new HTC Sense interface on the Hero, CEO Peter Chou made mention of it becoming available on handsets already on the market!

“HTC Sense will be available on some other existing devices”, he confirmed at the HTC Hero launch. He was more reticent to mention which handsets will be blessed with the update, but was adamant that they are in shops now.

Since we can count the number of HTC Android handsets currently available on two fingers, it is highly likely that the ‘own brand’ keyboardless HTC Magic will see it, as opposed to the ‘T-Mobile G1 With Google’.

I’m sure there’s a very real reason that the ‘with Google’ tag stayed there for a reason, and a new firmware might just break the very specific G1 agreement.

Still, we know that there are other ways to make it happen…

UPDATE: Confirmed. As we thought, got a ‘with Google’ phone? This ain’t for you.

In an expected and welcome move, HTC has stepped up the Android ante by releasing their latest handset to an expectant crowd in London this morning.

The new HTC Hero takes visual cues from the HTC Touch Diamond 2, sporting a more demure ‘chin’ than the T-Mobile G1 and a new interface based on Google’s ‘Android’ operating system called ‘HTC Sense’.

Focused on people rather than features, the Sense interface allows you to view loads of your most used widgets directly on the home screen placing messages, contacts, Facebook updates and even Twitter feeds within easy reach.

With a 3.2″ touchscreen, a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, GPS with a digital compass and a 3.5mm headset jack, the HTC Hero has the technical specs to turn heads. With 512MB of memory, the SD card slot lets you boost your memory to up to 16GB, whilst a trackball supplements navigating the touch screen, and compensates for the lack of a physical keyboard.

Get a glance on what it looks like, and can do, on this video.

The ease of switching between menus, clean and simple user interface and arresting looks on the HTC Hero show that some competitors know how that software is equally as important as hardware in challenging the iPhone.

With a July release on T-Mobile and Orange (the network’s first Android handset), the important thing for the HTC Hero to do is persuade those not yet swayed by the iPhone’s luxurious charms that impressive form and function is now more affordable…if you are prepared to wait a little while.

We’ll finally see the mobile web catching up to the graphically rich desktop experience, thanks to Adobe working with manufacturers and gearing up their famous web interface and video player for smartphones.

Adobe’s Flash Player 10 is coming to Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Web OS, Betamax, Hi-8 and George Foreman Grills in beta from October of this year.

Following the impressive demo from an earlier press conference showing off Flash on the T-Mobile G1, it was always a matter of when rather than if.

Still, there’s no word of support for one other phone in particular…I forget which.

It might have been a little slow to get going in the West, but the allure of a robust, free open source platform has the Far East banging out an array of Android powered devices in the coming months leading up to Christmas.

HTC have been the standard-bearer for a while, and in addition to the phone they are launching in the UK tomorrow (widely rumoured to be the Hero), they will be bringing out 3 more devices in the second half of 2009.

The Korean contingent are coming through from Q3, with Samsung i7500 due to make an appearance (what happened to the Jet/S8000 running Android?) and three Android handsets due from LG.

With the new breed including Huawei’s glass-loving iClone and handsets from Acer and Lenovo sporting the Google-made OS, it will definitely be exciting to see what kind of niche Android carves for itself when the phones running it have to be counted on two hands…

The first Android handset from the Chinese manufacturer Huawei was finally revealed, was a powered U8230 smartphone allows users to switch between full and half QWERTY keyboards and to navigate programs easily via a 3.5-inch LCD touch screen. Huawei’s U8230 uses the Google Chrome Internet browser which supports a variety of Google applications such as Google Map, Google Search and Google Talk. It is also fitted with a battery which has a capacity of 1500 mAH - the longest battery capacity among Android-powered handsets currently available.

Source: MyOCWorkbench

With all the major lappy manufacturers getting their toes wet (or in Acer/Asus‘ cases diving straight in!) in the mobile phone market, it was a strange anomaly that the number 1 - Dell - had nothing.

Murmurs came and went, there rumours that their initial Dellphone was so dull that it was prematurely ditched, but there was still no sign of it…until now.

There’s the Dell logo on a phone in the above pic, it’s running Android, and it’s suspiciously lacking in buttons, like a shiny black egg (and not unlike the Palm Pre!).

Note the Chinese characters at the bottom right, could they be using the same software that is powering Lenovo’s oPhone?

Either way, a surprising initial entry for the American manufacturer. No Windows Mobile QWERTY slider? Perhaps this is just one device from their opening salvo, but it is all a lot more interesting than I had expected from Dell either way.

Will they be able to customise it enough to stand out from the phalanx of Android phones coming in the second half of ‘09? We’ll see.

One of the best Android apps since launch is ShopSavvy, a great barcode scanning program which we loved since the days of seeing the first GoCart videos!

The latest version of ShopSavvy is 3.5, and brings with it a wealth of great new features to take the pain out of the shopping and comparison experience (just like Omio does with mobiles)!

Still using the camera to scan the background, they have added over 750,000 items (bringing their total to over 20 million products),  1000 retailers and faster laod times to make ShopSavvy even more useful.

Stock notifications, integration with Google Product Search and the ability to even visit retailers beyond ShopSavvy through the app makes this a must-have download.

Get ShopSavvy from here!

Re-tweeting a post on Android Guys, what do you think of Cupcake now its out there? Love it? Hate it? Wish you could install Rosie and move on?

Let me know!

I know most of you already have your Cupcake updates working nice and smooth, how’s about having another detailed look at the slick and sexy interface of HTC Rosie, running on a T-Mobile G1!

Said to come with the new HTC Hero, these videos from Androidpit.de show off everything! The slick bookmarks, the new side-scrolling, the music player, all of it is gone over in massive detail!

The interface is set to German, but you’ll still get a great idea of what’s going on when you have a look!