Whenever the G1 vs iPhone debate gets underway, iPhone purists are quick to flag the G1’s lack of multi-touch input support. Turns out, it might just be able to handle it after all -on the hardware end, at least. Whilst tearing his G1’s workings apart line-by-line, a crafty coder going by RyeBrye came across an interesting artifact. It seems the driver for the Synaptics touchscreen has some code commented out; after recompiling the kernel with said code back in, he was able to track two finger presses at once.
So if the hardware supports it, why no multi-touch on the G1? Patents, presumably. While this in no way actually enables to you to do any kind of multi-touch funnin’ immediately (nothing made for the G1 is currently coded for use with multi-touch, afterall), it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Though we probably won’t see any official support for multi-touch on the G1 any time soon, someone with a bit of spare time to tinker will probably figure out a way to make use of it before too long.
Oh, how I love these product tear down price studies, wherein some research company grabs a product, rips it apart piece by piece, and pins a pricetag on each individual component to announce a somewhat shaky cumulative price. With at least a couple of the components in any given device being proprietary, a bit of it is educated guessing. Whether they’re dead on or completely wrong, how would we know? It’s not as if any major company is going to come out and say “Pfft, what? Product X actually costs [amount here] to make, thank you very much.”
Whatever – they tear it down, I just report it. Research firm iSuppli has stripped the T-Mobile G1 down to its naughty bits, and has emerged with a number: $144. That’s $35 bucks less than the subsidized 2-year contract price of $179, and $255 less than the full retail price of $399. While that doesn’t take into account R&D, labor, shipping, nor the money T-Mobile makes on a monthly basis from plans/contracts, I’d imagine that the numbers work out in their favor in the long run.
It was only a few days ago that we tore into the 20 dollar IM+ application for being overpriced, buggy, and lacking anything that justified that 20 dollar price tag. At the tail-end of that review, we expressed our hopes that an IM app done right would come along soon. Enter Meebo for Android, brought to you by the same people behind the awesome browser-based IM application of the same name. It’s got a clean interface, is dead simple to use, and best of all: it’s FREE. Game over, IM+.
Word of T-Mobile’s Holiday line-up just came down the wire, and it doesn’t look like they’ve kept any Christmas surprises up their sleeve. Anything that hasn’t been announced officially has been leaked for a few weeks now, so this pretty much just serves as one big confirmation.
Motorola ZN5: Pictured on right. Announced and released 2 days ago. It’s a quadband candy bar. While it doesn’t have 3g capabilities, it does have WiFi and a 5 megapixel camera with xenon flash. Not too shabby for $99 on a two year bloodpact.
Cameo: Leaked a month ago. It’s a $100 7-inch digital picture frame with its own SIM card and number. Send pictures to it via picture message, and they show up on the frame. Cool idea, but the $10-dollars-a-month fee seems a bit steep. Available in “the coming weeks”
With hundreds of thousands of G1s already pre-ordered, it looks like T-Mobile may have decided to celebrate by opening the floodgates a few days early. A number of users have reported that their order status has been changed to “Shipped”, with a tentative delivery date of Friday, October 17th. That’s just two days short of a whole week early, granting new G1 owners the whole weekend to strut their new toy around town.
I’ve played with the G1 a lot over the past few days. Unfortunately, that’s about all I can say on the matter until embargoes drop tomorrow.
Not tethered by the likes of embargoes and bravely challenging the heavy hand of their employer, a T-Mobile employee (Update: They work for a T-Mobile Master Dealer, not corporate) who doubles as a member of the AndroidCommunity forums has posted a user review of the T-Mobile G1.
Fortunately, the giddiness of being one of the first in the world with the G1 didn’t keep “kaziko” from being objective in his review. On the upside, he mentioned that the phone starts up quickly (relative to other HTC handsets), is surprisingly lightweight, has a solid keyboard, and that the call quality and speakerphone volume were satisfactory. On the downside, it “has a big memory leak somewhere” which slows things down until the device is reset, even after which point it “doesn’t run as smoothly as you would think”. He also notes the lack of a virtual keyboard or accessible file system, difficulties getting .mpg and .wmv files to play, and that the handset gets “extremely hot” while charging. (Update: Kaziko has since revised his review – see comments)
To help pacify the barrage of questions that began after folks realized they’d found someone with a G1, Kaziko has also been maintaining a Q&A.
With just under two weeks to go before the first round of pre-orders are fulfilled, expect the reviews to begin pouring in over the next few days.
Just in time to ride the tide of excitement from today’s G1 announcement, Google has released a video detailing all of the “google goodies that come preloaded” on the handset: Search, Maps, Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, and IM (Google Talk), with a strong emphasis on the over-the-air sync functionality.
I can’t imagine what the “erick.the.cyclist@gmail.com” account inbox will look like in a few hours.
Today in New York, T-Mobile finally unveiled the much anticipated G1 Android phone. The handset will hit the shelves on October 22nd for $179 on a two-year contract in the US, with pre-orders beginning immediately for existing T-Mobile customers. It’ll make its way to the United Kingdom in early November, and Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands in Q1 of 2009.
To get the rest of the details as they come in, hop on over to the Crunchgear liveblog.
Talk about cutting it close. With less than 12 hours before T-Mobile officially pulls back the curtain on the ultra-hyped G1 Android phone, the floodgates have opened. Images extracted from the depths of T-Mobile’s G1 site have begun hitting tip boxes, and now TmoNews has managed to get their hands on a bunch of specs and details.
What’s known so far:
In-store, immediate sales only available in locations within 5 miles of a 3G covered area. If a store is beyond that range, representatives will walk customers through a T-mobile.com purchase
One touch access to: Search, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Calendar, and Google Talk
Gmail account and data plan required
GPS
3.1 mp camera, no video recording
No stereo bluetooth (A2DP)
Dimensions: 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 in
Weighs 5.6 ounces
480×320 65K color screen
5 hour talk time, 130 hour standby time
Expandable up to 8GB
We’ll update as more comes in and, of course, be covering tomorrow’s happenings as they go down.
Hey, that Google phone is coming (in case you hadn’t heard). Looks like it’ll be called the T-Mobile G1 (no mention of the word “Dream” anywhere) and will at least come in black. Unfortunately when Peter “Sweet Pete” Ha clicked that “Learn more” link, he got a no-go popup. Oh well. It goes to t-mobileg1.com if you’re interested.
If you have a T-Mobile account then you, too, might be able to recreate such amazing wonderment! Just go to http://my.t-mobile.com and start digging around. Enjoy!
With the big announcement just days away, it’s no surprise that some folks out there might be totin’ the Android-powered HTC Dream (G1) around. Between all of the Google developers, HTC product engineers, and T-Mobile employees involved, in-the-wild shots were bound to get out sooner or later.
And now they have, on the blog of Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins. Rizzn got the shots through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-spy, and passed’em on for the world to see. While there isn’t all that much new to see from these shots, it sure is nice to see it out and about – and more importantly, that it doesn’t seem all that tough to type around that eyesore on the end.
While reports have ranged that the first Android handset will come out anywhere from October to sometime in 2009, the latest rumors have the HTC Dream (codenamed “G1″) going on presale for existing T-Mobile customers starting September 17th.
The guys over at TmoNews say they have some trusted sources who have priced the handset at $399, or $150 for existing customers during the presale, which will start September 17th and only last one week. A public launch, and availability for those who aren’t current T-Mobile customers may not happen until beginning/mid October.
The newest leaked features include a 3-megapixel camera, slide-out Qwerty keypad and three color varieties: black, white and brown.
