Auto Rotation Hack For Google Android T-Mobile G1

Being open source is one of the best aspects of Google Android, users of the G1 will not have to wait a millennium for certain features from the main developers behind the OS.

What we have here is a feature made possible by a third part programmer that should have made it in the first device right out of the box. Auto-Rotation is the feature I’m talking about, from the video below you can tell it works pretty darn well even when it’s off the home screen.G1 hacks are rolling in and believe me there is no end in sight.

There are Five Reasons to Be Super Psyched for Android

The launch of Android is the most important event in mobile phones since the release of the iPhone. It could actually be more important, in the long run. Even if it doesn’t exceed Google’s wildest dreams to become a ubiquitous mobile platform, it’s sure to re-stoke innovation in mobile phones as platforms slug it out for supremacy. But besides all that, Android just looks pretty damn cool. Of course, Android isn’t all Google-y amazingness—there are some definite reasons to take a step back from the love-in. So here are five reasons why you should be absolutely hyped for Android on Tuesday, and five why, well…

1. It’s open! The single best thing about Android is that’s a modern mobile phone OS that’s also almost completely open, unlike some other locked down mobile OSes. (There are a few restrictions in accessing the hardware for security reasons.) It’s based on Linux, and once Google has released Android, most of it will be totally open source, so it’ll be incredibly easy to dive into its guts and mess around, which will help build a robust developer community, along with all of the other benefits of using open software. Most of its other awesome traits grow out of its openness, actually.

2. We’ll keep the Steve references to a minimum here, but Android will accelerate the process that the iPhone helped kickstart last year—the gradual devolution of carriers to open, dumb pipes. Before, carriers controlled every single facet of what a phone could and could not do. They still do to an extent, and it’s not completely “anything goes” on the iPhone and Android, but together they have and will make the mobile landscape change far more rapidly than before. As Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner told me a few days ago, just a few years ago, carriers thought that the idea of full internet access was ridiculous, not to mention dangerous, threatening the obscenely lucrative business they have set up around minuscule bits of data like text messages, crappy “web portals” and ringtones. Android phones will be constantly connected and totally revolve around the internet, incessantly sucking down ever cheaper data—a carrier’s worst nightmare not so long ago.

3. You’ll have tons of hardware options. Android’s designed to be versatile, so lots of manufacturers will be putting it on lots of phones—ones with QWERTY keyboards, touchscreens, T9, outrageously spec’d out phones, as well as ones that are kinda crappy in the spec department, actually. But this also provides a common platform for developers, making it easy to put their apps on millions of phones. It’s the benefit of any OS that runs on a lot of hardware—like Windows or Linux, etc. Of course, this is also the Windows Mobile argument against all of the other proprietary OSes like Palm and BlackBerry.

4. There’s even more potential for amazing apps than the iPhone, because developers are almost completely unencumbered by arbitrary rules and restrictions. So awesome apps like Podcaster or Instictiv Shuffle won’t be mercilessly killed for not fitting into a tightly controlled framework or navigating a byzantine approval process.

5. It’ll have the best Google apps experience of any mobile device, and play super nicely with Gmail, Gcal, Maps and everything else Google puts out. Or at least it damn well better, since you know, it’s Google’s baby. Simple, direct syncing with Gcal is tops in our list, since doing it on the iPhone requires sacrificing a goat while chanting from a book covered in the skin of baby unicorns.

Bonus reason: Not an iPhone. And our software geek sister Lifehacker has some more too.

1. Google can see into your soul. If you’ve ever been wary about how much Google knows about you, how are you going to feel when they’re all over your cellphone? While a lot of the reason Android came to be was just to get people really using the internet on their phone (because when people use the internet, they use Google), we won’t be surprised to see contextualized local ads, kind of like the sidebar ones you see offering you a date from hot local girls in Brooklyn or whatever hovel you’re holed up in. But this will be hot girls just around the corner, since the phone will know where you’re at.

2. It’s not on the US’s two biggest carriers, AT&T or Verizon. Statistically speaking, you’ve got one of them. But so far only the two runts of the majors, Sprint and T-Mobile are going to have Android phones. T-Mobile’s 3G network is pathetically tiny compared to the other three, and well, Sprint’s the only carrier actively losing subscribers, if that tells you anything. It’s possible we’ll see some Android action on Verizon’s mythical open network though.

3. Buuut, carriers still have the right to gimp Android to their liking, precisely because of its Apache licensing. So a Sprint Android phone could have its built-in “store” stocked only with, say, Yahoo! apps—or no store at all. In Verizon’s hands, the UI could still look like it fell in a bucket of gaudy red paint.

4. Android is designed to run on a ton of different of hardware—phones with and without touchscreens, with and without QWERTY keyboards, phones with amazing specs, crappy phones, and everything in between. While this is a strong point as mentioned above, it could also be a point of suckiness. That means there won’t be a consistent Android experience, and it’ll depend heavily on the device you’re using. Devs told us that you’ll likely see different versions of their apps, so that on weakass phones, you’ll have more diluted apps, which might be an issue for people picking up a cheap Android phone expecting to do everything a more expensive one will.

5. Relying too much on developers to fill in features could result in a phone that’s not quite totally seamless and consumer-grade across the board. For instance, from what we’ve seen in the SDK, there’s not a built-in, Google-made media player. It’s rumored that the excellent TuneWiki will be Android’s default player, which is great, but doing this for too many key features could make things a bit bumpy, since you’re talking several developers instead of just one.

About G Phone’s 10 Things That We Did Not Expect Until the Launch Event

Now that the press event held by T-Mobile in New York is over (and they promise we’ll be able to watch the video from the event again later at the official website) I must admit that we have seen quite a number of surprises and unpredicted things about G Phone. There were good surprises when things we expected actually appeared to be better or something we did not expect at all was introduced. But there were also bad surprises when something we really hoped would happen was not even mentioned.

So let’s forget about our guesses and expectations – the device has been officially introduced and everything is more or less clear about it now. So what are the surprises?

Price – $179

This is no doubt the biggest surprise. The price announced today is lower than that of iPhone and lower than what we expected for T-Mobile G1 – $199. Instead they chose a lower price for the device – $179. I suspected pricing would be where Google, HTC, and T-Mobile would make some big surprise and this is exactly what happened with the price clearly intended for G1 to be competitive against Apple iPhone in pricing as well.

But there’s one unpleasant exception here: this price is only valid for new T-Mobile subscribers while existing ones will have to pay $299 for the upgrade. (UPDATE: $179 price is valid for all T-Mobile customers that are not bound by an existing contract.) But it does not stop T-Mobile subscribers from ordering the phones from the website now that the pre-ordering is open for them.

So while HTC CEO at the press conference constantly repeated his mantra about the power of mobile internet and the opportunities it offers to consumers, it is quite obvious that this low price is not about making mobile internet really affordable but about grabbing a market share from Apple and possibly Blackberry as well.

The device price is accompanied with two options for data plans (both affordable but anyway required on top of voice plan): $25 for unlimited internet and limited messaging or $35 for unlimited plan.

Official shipment date – October 22

We had two shipment dates predicted in the blogosphere – October 17 and October 20 with some people already making plans about when exactly they will need to arrive to their local T-Mobile stores to grab their G1 phones. Now the official date is announced and it is October 22, Wednesday, almost a month from now.

Existing T-Mobile customers can actually pre-order the phone on the website (for $299) to have it delivered when it is available in stores.

Anyway while we have not guessed the exact date, at least the expectation to see the phone selling in October proves to be the right one.

Quite reasonable launch dates on markets other than the US

The phone is scheduled to be launched in the UK in November and it will appear in other select European markets next year as well. So unlike with iPhone we won’t have to wait for ages to grab a device for ourselves as well – the main limitation to consider will be availability of 3G network that is the pre-requisite for G Phone to perform best (with WiFi connectivity winning in quality over both 2G and 3G, we are told).

And while there are no details about carriers HTC and Google will work with in Europe, we will sure start to get details very soon with the launch dates imminent.

Browser not exactly Chrome

We used to suspect that the primary purpose of Google’s Chrome browser would be for use on Android operating system. But what we have seen at the presentation as the browser is not actually Chrome and it hardly even resembles Chrome at all. So while we are told the browser can be dubbed Chrome mini, it has very few visual (or functional from what I’ve noticed) resemblances to Chrome at all – not even the icon we associate the browser with.

The similarity is that both browsers – the desktop Chrome and the mobile G1 browser – are also based on the same WebKit rendering engine. So this guess was also wrong – the browser is not exactly Chrome which must mean that Android and Chrome may have two very different destinations in the end.

No free email

We really hoped it would be true and we would see free access to Gmail on T-Mobile G1 as rumors had it. Better yet, I suggested access to all ad-supported Google applications could be free for users (and users could still opt for ad-free paid versions if they did not want any ads on their mobile devices). But no, this is a disappointment but it is here – no free access anywhere with a data plan required. But since the data plan is a requirement anyway and both options for a data plan stipulate for unlimited web usage, I guess it does not make sense to have access to any applications preferential and free – since you will have to buy a data plan and it will have to be unlimited anyway.

No Amazon videos

We already knew that the camera of the device would not support video capturing but we hoped that there would be some non-YouTube videos available for download by default – and the candidate to provide those videos was Amazon mobile application we heard rumors about. We suggested that a good idea would be to have Amazon’s Video On Demand service as part of the mobile Amazon application so that users could purchase and download movies and TV shows from Amazon when on the go. Unfortunately we are not seeing this happening and Amazon application will only be used to purchase mp3 music to play on the device.

Super accessibility of search

Google is a search company (at its core, at least), after all, so they have made sure that search is easily accessible on the device with just one key on the keyboard. This key will initiate the search process depending on what you do with the device at any given moment – for example, if you browse the internet, it will launch internet search for you while when you browse your contacts, it will start searching within your contacts instead.

Presence building using Gmail

At the press conference a new concept has been introduced by Google – online presence building. Gmail application along with Google Talk application running on G1 Phone (both the defaults) will work together to ensure continuous online presence for any user where you won’t have to be away any more.

While we don’t have details for now, it sure sounds intriguing – and a little scary as well. We’ll see what the concept actually looks like when in operation.

DRM-free content only

A user will only be able to use the device to play DRM-free music and videos. I believe it is part of the partnership with Amazon for music sales and an additional way to compete with iPhone with its default iTunes functionality.

Clear targeting at the general feature phones market, not smartphones only

This one may be the last (since it was the one I noted last) but it looks like the most important one for the market. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made an unexpected and stunning appearance at the presentation themselves to share their own (understandably positive only) experience of using G1 phones. But the intriguing part was Larry describing how he admires the market of mobile devices with 3 billion existing devices and 1 billion new devices per year. And he did not mention his admiration with the size of smartphones market or anything similar at all. I believe these words are a clear indication that Google is not planning to limit Android for smartphones market to compete with iPhone and Blackberry only – the bigger game is in the regular feature phones that are purchased in much higher numbers.

Basically I think we should expect cell phone manufacturers announcing partnerships with Google one by one now that the first device is announced and almost ready to be shipped.

These are a few things that surprised me (some in a good – others in a bad way) at today’s press conference where T-Mobile introduced the long-awaited and much-hyped already G1 T-Mobile phone with Google. I am sure we will start getting more information now that the companies will be open for comments during the month preceding the shipment date. But even though we have heard some disappointed voices on Twitter already, we have also seen people pre-ordering the device when they can – and this must be a good indication of a good start of the marketing campaign that T-Mobile promises will be the largest campaign for a mobile device it ever had. We’ll see how it works but for now we have all the reasons to be excited.