G1 News

The T-Mobile G1 Google phone has a pretty great music player, and the Marketplace has quite a good selection of downloadable video players to sort out the mobile movie watching side of things, but how exactly do you put them on there without some kind of iTunes-y saviour?

Well, it’s a lot easier than you might think, and thanks to me, you too will know how!

1. Connect your Googleicious G1 to the computer via a miniUSB cable.

2. You will see it come up with something along the lines of ‘Android Device attached.’ This is a good thing.

3. Open up ‘My Computer’ and the G1 will be listed here as a removable disk (hopefully). This is the microSD which is inside the G1, and ripe to have some music moved to it!

4. Check on the handset’s ‘Notifications’ pulldown tab from the top of the screen. There should be one new note saying ‘mount USB’ or something along those lines. Do it and then the PC can talk to the G1 properly.

4. Create a folder named ‘Music’ and another named ‘Movies’ for, you guessed it, music and movies!

5. Drag and drop your fave tunes and mp4 encoded movies into the respective folders, and you should be fine!

Here is a short guide on how to delete your shortcuts from the T-Mobile G1 home screen:

1. Press and hold the shortcut icon you want removed from the G1’s desktop.

2. The phone should vibrate and the background colour of the icon will turn red. You will also see a bin icon appear along the bottom of the phone screen.

3. Drag the icon to the bin.

4.That’s it! You have now removed a shortcut from the G1 desktop.

For all the great things the T-Mobile G1 can do, one strange oversight was the lack of an accelerometer for auto-rotating the screen, iPhone-style, depending on the handset’s orientation.

It isn’t like the phone doesn’t have it, the compass mode on the street view (US-only cities, naturally) shows just how sensitive a sensor the G1 is packing, it just decided not to take advantage of it! Forcing us to open and shut the keyboard to go into landscape was annoying, and the manual selection for aspect just silly.

Well, all that’s about to change with a new app which makes the G1 able to be auto-rotated at a flick of the wrist. Hooray! Watch the vid below to see it in action!

And this is news how? Because in the US, the initial release was limited to only black and brown G1s, not the most thrilling of mobile phone hues.

Whilst we’ve been swimming in white T-Mobile G1s in the UK (where I reside!) for the best part of a month, it has just been released in time for the Thanksgiving holidays elsewhere.

Um…that’s it! If you’re American and wanted a white G1, you can get one now.

We reported about this earlier, the clever TyeBrye was able to get multi-touch working on the G1, but his site was a mass of text explaining in excruciating detail exactly what he had done.

However, he has now brought what we all really wanted…video! Now you can see the T-Mobile G1 tracking both of his beautiful talented coding fingers at once…

Magical.

We thought that the new Android handset wasn’t quite the roaring success many hoped, hence a bunch of cheap T-Mobile G1 deals appearing on websites less than a month after the UK launch.

However, word from HTC and T-Mobile is that the G1 is on course to do a “Christina” by the end of 2008!

Christina? Milian? A million, get it?

Anyway…the initial projection they had was a healthy 600,000 units across all territories, which has recently be upscaled to around 1,000,000 according to HTC CEO Peter Chou.

Not affected by the recession, he was also glad to readjust his projections for sales of the HTC Touch Diamond up from 2 to 3 million.

Don’t forget despite all the interweb getting moist at the prospect, they are talking about shipping a million, not selling a million.

By the same token, Atari “shipped” hundreds of thousands of unsold copies of E.T. into a hole in New Mexico in 1983. Those G1s could fly off the shelves or gather dust in a storeroom, but we will hope for the former!

Source: Digitimes

I had a dream last night that I went onto the Android Marketplace and found thousands upon thousands of new, brilliant, innovative apps including one which changed the entire interface, NXE-style.

I was overjoyed! Unfortunately, when I woke…it was not to be. What there was, however, excited me almost as much!

A beta for Opera mini 4.2 Android edition was sitting there, bold as brass and waiting to be taken for a spin! As brilliant as the integrated T-Mobile G1 browser is, it is refreshing to have a browser that is slightly more intuitive to use (particularly the responsiveness of zooming), and syncing my bookmarks from Daddy Opera is a nice touch!

Granted, my bookmarks were from around three years ago when I last used Opera on the PC, but it was cool to browse GameSpot and Maddox again! Like a trip down internet memory lane…

Seeing big boys like Macromedia and Opera pledge their support for Android so openly is encouraging, we hope more jump aboard and keep bringing positives over the competition to everyone’s attention!

Got music? Got a G1? Good. You’d like them to play nice together a lot more than they currently do, but with your jams all jammed up with iTunes, and DRM out the wazoo, things are not looking too good…

Well, it’s a good thing that Banshee 1.4 is here to cure your ills! It allows for a far easier way to move music onto your G1, using all manner of systems to keep your music synced up across platforms, playlists too!

It can work with pretty much any music storage system, and doesn’t require any jailbreaking or crowbarring of the G1 to get it started!

Aaron Bockover just wanted the G1 and other systems to get along…

“Because the Android platform is open source, I was able to easily figure out optimal ways of implementing Android/G1 support…For instance, I was unsure what the maximum cover art size should be on the device, so I just read the source. It was a nice for once to not have to reverse engineer or guess!”

Download the Banshee Media Player for the G1 here. It’s open source, and therefore free. So get it.

Make sure you read the instructions, however. Don’t come blogging to me about how it made you lose your Enya collection, it was probably your own fault.

One of the largest glaring oversights for the G1 (aside from no video recording and no virtual keyboard – what were you thinking?!?!) is the lack of a headphone jack so we do not have to use the supremely uncomfortable first party solution bundled with the handset.

Breaking news! Lucky new converts to the Church of Latter Day Androids are receiving an extra special present with their G1s…a damn 3.5mm audio jack converter!

Already hordes of G1 owners are descending on US T-Mobile stores in an effort to gain an adaptor, with varying degrees of no success. So I reckon that the UK side of the pond will be much the same, but do tell if you hear any different.

I bet that they’ll be only too happy to sell them to us all soon enough!

Source: TMoNews

With the T-Mobile G1 out and the Android SDK free for any enterprising developer to take advantage of, it comes as little surprise that the first new handset to run the operating system is from China, and is also cunningly named to take advantage of all blogosphere and internet hype…ever.

The SciPhone Dream G2 (real name) promises to be the most photo-friendly phone ever, and the long list of specs reveals some interesting choices beyond Android.

With neither a virtual touchscreen keyboard nor one of the physical variety, it seems like the G2 will actually harness the power of dreams to create texts and e-mail, or could go back to the T9 predictive text days on the screen.

Either way, unless you find yourself haggling in a market in downtown Qinghai for the G2 and a Coke Phone, you are unlikely to ever see this curio again. And is that really a bad thing?

Source: Trusted Reviews