G1 News

PDA Street has compiled an awesome guide for how to get a little more out of your T-Mobile G1 beyond making calls and clicking out that clicky slide-out keyboard noise every three seconds!

If is brief, but makes up for that by not being lame.

Fast Apps
Tired of scrolling around to find your favorite applications? Simply tap and hold the Home key to see a pop-up window of your six most recently used apps.

Just Type
When you’re ready to call someone from your Contacts directory, you don’t need to open Contacts first. Just slide open the keyboard and start typing the person’s name. You’ll see matching contacts displayed on the screen.

Be a Smart Shopper
Your G1 could save you lots of money this holiday season. Download the free ShopSavvy app, which lets you scan barcodes with the G1’s camera. The app will then tell you where to find the lowest online price for that item.

Clean Slate
If you want to sell or return your G1, you’ll want to erase all personal data first. Here’s how you do it: With the phone off, hold down the Home button and the power button until you see an exclamation mark on the screen. Open the keyboard and then hit Alt-W.

Keep Your Focus
The G1’s camera has something you rarely see on a cell phone: an autofocus that works like a digital camera’s does. Eliminate blurry shots by holding the camera button halfway down before taking a shot. The camera will focus the image and display a green dot in the upper right corner to let you know it’s ready.

Know the Code
Type *#06# into your phone to view your G1’s unique 13-digit number. Write it down and keep it in a safe place. If your phone is ever lost or stolen, T-Mobile can use that code to track it.

Calling All Contacts
When you want to use voice dialing, simply click and hold the Call button to enter voice dialing mode.

Tiny Text
Do you find Web pages hard to read? Tap the trackball twice to call up a magnifying glass. Select the area you want magnified and then click again to bring it up.

Forward a Text
You can forward an SMS or MMS message simply by tapping and holding on the message while you’re in the conversation screen. A contextual menu will pop up with Forward as one of the options.

Rock to Your Ringer
You can use any stored song as a ringtone with the G1. Open Music, then Songs, and tap and hold your song of choice. A contextual menu will appear; select the Use as Phone Ringtone option.

Save Your Battery
Are you tired of your G1’s battery running out too soon? There are a few things you can do to save energy. First, lower the screen brightness; the screen is the biggest power draw. Next, turn GPS off when you’re not using it, and turn off the synchronization options in the Data Synchronization setting.

Save Your Breath
Is there anyone in your circle that you just don’t want to talk to? Then send that person’s calls directly to voice mail. Select their contact, tap Menu, choose to edit the contact, then choose the option to send calls directly to voice mail.

All very useful tips for use on a daily basis, rather than those ‘if you are at a barbecue and lose one shoe, you could use your G1 to find the other using GPS’-type nonsense.

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!

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.