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!