G1 News

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.

Am linking to this, as people far and wide have been breaking their G1s to get Cupcake in there the hard way. This exhaustive guide from androidandme is indispensable.

Simply follow it through and you should have Cupcake up and running in no…actually in quite a long period of time, but you will get it working.

Read it, print it, commit it to memory!

Hopefully this will be the last of our Cupcake woes…

Thanks to Gizmodo, we have some spy pictures of the HTC Sapphire 2.0 in the valley of the real, sans T-Mobile G1 keyboard, with sleek iPhone 3G-ish curves and a shiny back end!

Still runs Android, still has that ergonomic ‘chin’ at the bottom, and has a nice 3.2 megapixel camera (no flash??).

With the launch of the T-Mobile G2 rumoured as early as May, it’s nice to know that there are some physical handsets for HTC’s ‘09 line up floating about already!

Without a keyboard, that bad boy better come with Cupcake!