My thoughts on the G1 and Cupcake

So it's been a week now since I got my precious Cupcake and I wanted to wait until now before I spoke about it to get a good feel of the new features etc. I originally bought my G1 as an avid fan of the Linux OS (Ubuntu) and its open source goodness. Whilst not wanting to sound ungrateful for the features that the G1 did have in the early days, there were some rather important details missed out as far as I was concerned. Simple things like an on screen keyboard, auto-rotate on turning the phone to landscape mode, stereo Bluetooth support etc. These may sound unimportant individually but add them up and it becomes a bit of a pain. For instance, you receive a text and want to tap out a quick reply but uh oh, no on-screen keyboard so you have to flip out the physical keyboard and take it from there. Minor I know but if your in the middle of a text battle and keep having to flip out your keyboard every five seconds it soon gets annoying. The same with auto rotation; you could switch the browser to landscape mode in the sub menus but this, as I say, was a button within the sub menus so your browser was fixed in landscape until you went back through the menus and switched it back. You could also flip out the keyboard and the screen would rotate, but if just want to do a quick bit of browsing this seemed a little unnecessary. Even more so when you consider the unit has had an accelerometer in it since day one.

All this changed last Thursday morning for me when T-Mobile kindly sent me the Cupcake update. I have found, since I downloaded, the phone is a lot swifter and smoother at what it does. There is now an auto rotate function (although it does do this weird blurred screen thing as its changing, which is a little disconcerting at first). We have an on-screen keyboard, which is incredibly easy to use with your thumbs in landscape mode unlike the iJesus phone. Support for desktop widgets is another great addition; I currently have a 70's style flip clock, 2 or 3 'post-it' notes acting as my to-do lists, the calendar widget as well as one showing me the space used and left on my micro SD card,all very useful little features in themselves. And of course, we come to the bane of every G1 owners life, that damn battery! Since I have had the update my battery will, depending on use throughout the day, last from when I unplug it from my laptop of a morning through to when I go to bed at night. A minor miracle considering I used to keep my wifi and GPS off all day and would, most days, have to plug it into my computer at work around midday. There is now of course a video recorder function with push to YouTube or g/email (but no Twitter yet) which is very useful as an amateur filmmaker.

In conclusion, whilst I understand that Google/T-Mobile/HTC released the G1 as essentially a demo of what they could potentially do, as a consumer I would prefer for them to have perfected the system and hardware and then released the phone; there have been many times since last October that my G1 has let me down on both software and hardware levels (mainly battery fails, but also system crashes etc). And yes whilst we all love the beauty of the iJesus Phone and how it paved the way for the future of smart phones such as the G1 it is a walled garden. A pretty walled garden but still. I far prefer being able to drag and drop my mp3's/videos/podcasts to my phone directly instead of having to use a memory hogging piece of software that is clearly trying to do too much. I enjoy being able to rearrange my desktop as I chose and I enjoy the close integration with my Google account (and the ability to place links to your gmail labels on the desktop). The G1, whilst not the best looking piece of hardware, is a damn fine and solid smartphone
and with the Cupcake date I finally feel we are going places with the 'Droid.

-Pip Wilson