Testdrive G1: Android RC33

Posted on | February 19, 2009 | No Comments

while most austrian G1-users are still waiting to get Android’s latest release RC33 pushed to their handsets by T-Mobile, fellow mobileblogger electrobabe found a deep link to a firmware-binary allowing to upgrade straight from RC29 (the file is about twice the size of the usual RC30->RC33 upgrade, probably because it contains both diffs). keep in mind that this installs the US-version of RC33, so you are gonna loose the ability to set german (or any other) locale (don’t worry, the keyboard-layout is fine though). since it’s not sure if you’ll still get the official RC33 pushed to your phone after the manual upgrade, or if a manual switch to german RC33 will work at all, I’ld recommend to wait another few days for the official upgrade, esp. if you prefer the german user-interface

me, of course, I couldn’t wait, so here’s what’s new in RC33…

Amazon MP3 - browse Amazon’s US-mp3 store & buy songs without DRM for about USD 0.79 a track – checkout requires an Amazon.com account & US-credit-card.

Voice Dialer - a standalone voice dialer. I wasn’t able to get the damn thing recognize any of my contacts, even those with english names. also, it’s completely separated from the standard dialer.

Voice Search - very similar to Google’s Mobile Search application on the iPhone, but without the funny extras (like going into voice recognition mode whenever you lift the phone to your ear). like Voice Dialer, the speech recognition didn’t really work out for me even for simple queries like ‘hotel’. but maybe it’s just my pronunciation… according to T-Mobile’s rep, Voice Search isn’t rolled out on austrian phones yet.

Google Maps/Latitude - the best reason for getting RC33 is Google Latitude. works pretty well, and is integrated into the Maps-app seamlessly. for those who don’t like the idea of Latitude at all, it’s easy to completely disable the feature. you’ll also receive a notification email the first time you turn it on. 

other than that, there are just the usual bug fixes & small improvements. I haven’t found a comprehensive, official changelog, but here’s a list of changes (german, though). besides Latitude there isn’t really much to RC33…we keep waiting for cupcake!

 

Comments