G1 News

Thanks to Google’s Android platform for providing this much needed piece of functionality really easily, unlike some (looking at you, iPhone)!

The T-Mobile G1 phone allows you to use any song in your music player as a ringtone.

- Go to the song in your library, hold your finger down on the song you wish to annoy others with in public! After a few seconds a menu will pop up.

- Select the “Use as phone ringtone” option from the menu and this song will be set as your ringtone.

I know, easy as pie!

May I suggest a few gems as ringtones?

The theme from the awesome video game Mirror’s Edge – Still Alive.

‘Videophone‘ from Beyonce’s new album…fierce!

I know, right? It’s the kind of thing that you would expect to know within five minutes of getting a T-Mobile G1, but this is a relatively recent discovery for me!

Think it’s because I’m used to the ‘big button = Home’ iPhone functionality of the iPhone, so I forget that little ‘Menu’ button on the G1 hides so many exciting features!

So using this button, you can set up any image to be behind your home screen, complete with that sexy parallax scrolling that makes things look cool!

Here goes…

- From the Home screen, press the Menu button and select Wallpaper from the menu. You can then select either Pictures or Wallpaper gallery.
- If you select Pictures, it’ll open your picture album. You can then select the picture you want to use as your wallpaper. Once a picture is selected, the cropper will appear. You can use the cropper to select the portion of the picture you want to use. Once you are done cropping, or if you don’t want to crop at all, select Save to set the picture as your wallpaper.

- Wallpaper gallery is a great selection of inbuilt wallpapers for the G1, all as equally appealing as the default watery one! If you select from the menu you’ll get a gallery of picture thumbnails. If you want to see a bigger picture of the thumbnail, highlight the picture. Once you figure out the picture you want, touch it to highlight it and then select Set wallpaper to set this picture as your Home screen wallpaper.

You’re welcome!

Following on from the Mystery of the High T-Mobile G1 Roaming Bill, ZDNet has been able to discover that this is not a problem which has managed to cross the Atlantic, thank goodness!

Instead, T-Mobile UK has come up with a novel solution to this matter:

In order to ensure that customers do not incur unexpected costs, roaming is disabled on new UK G1 models. There is an option which allows users to enable roaming, but when this is selected the user will receive a message to confirm that there will be additional costs incurred. At this point users are then given the option to either go ahead and enable roaming, or to cancel.

Well, all or nothing is better than all roaming, all the time. Which means when you ask them to turn on roaming and then leave the country, SHAZAM! Prepare for some big bills, as your G1 pings away happily all holiday!

I don’t know, did we win?

To corrupt a line from the seminal movie Hackers, “Android is good.”

Nevertheless it is just a touch off the ecological disaster of oil-slickness that is the iPhone’s side scrolling interface. Well, it seems with a little ingenuity and some small preference changes/installs, your T-Mobile G1 can look even cooler!

The animations do add an extra layer of class to an already beautiful operating system, see the video below for it in action!

So…you wanna get in on this? Here’s how you do it!

• Fire up the Android Market on the T-Mobile G1 and download/install the APKInstaller application.
• Get a microSD card ready.
• Download Development.APK to your computer. Find the file here.

1. Ensure that APKInstaller is installed on your T-Mobile G1.
2. Connect your T-Mobile G1 to your computer via USB.
   1. Mount the G1 in order to access the microSD card.
3. Transfer the Development.APK file from your computer to the microSD card root directory (drag the file onto the mounted removable drive).
4. Fire up the APKInstaller application from the Applications tray.
5. Navigate to the SDcard directory and choose the Development.APK file.
6. “Dev Tools” will install
7. Open Dev Tools
8. Change Window Animation Scale to “1x,” and Transition Animation Scale to “1x” (you can change these settings.
9. Enjoy your animated screen transitions!

Thanks, as ever to the industrious minds at XDADevelopers for making this happen!

Source: IntoMobile