Finally an Android Blog Worth Following

Why I love androidandme.com
It's been a while since I've posted an update. I was fed up with my old smart phone, a Samsung i730. It was a dinosaur of a phone and ran Windows Mobile. It was dandy when the smartphone market took off, but for some time now it's just seemed like a dinosaur to me. I had an iPod Touch, which I used for email, music, and mobile internet. Once my Verizon contract was up, I started looking at their phone offerings. I wasn't happy with the Blackberry's they had and, being the Google fanboy that I am, I was drawn to the G1.
I research every gadget that I buy beforehand and had been tracking the G1's progress since before it's release. I've had it for a couple weeks and I'm loving it. However, my usual tech source, jkOnTheRun.com, only provides sporadic and fairly infrequent coverage of the G1 and it's Android operating system. However, I've found a source for my Android fix. A source for all things Android. I finally found a site called AndroidandMe.com. It's an awesome source for Android goodness.

Pics and updates to come.

New Voice and Video Chat in Gmail!

I swear Google makes the best stuff ever. They've done it again by further improving on Gmail Chat by adding the ability to video chat from inside your Gmail chat dialogue box. Hype. Check the video...

I got my hands on the G1!

I've mentioned on here that I'm a big... big... huge fan of Google. I use Gmail (fully customized with Google Labs features), Google Calendar, Google Documents, Google Reader, Google Analytics (to track my blog stats), Google Maps, Picasa (a Google product), of course Google.com to search. I also subscribe (using google reader) to the Official Google blog as well as the Google Mobile Blog. Starting to get the picture?
This being the case, I had been watching the development of Android, Google's mobile operating system very closely. If you're a little confused, an operating system is the software that dictates how you interact with hardware. Windows, for example is a very well known operating system.
Google set out to make an operating system that works the way other Google products do, simply, efficiently, and intuitively. The new operating system, called Android, was released on it's first handset, the G1, a few weeks ago. I've been drooling over it ever since. The G1 is a dressed up version of the HTC Dream. It's got a capacitive touch screen (similar to the iPhone) and a qwerty keyboard that's hidden under a sliding screen.
I finally got to play with it yesterday at the T-Mobile store, which was sweetness. The G1 is smaller in my hands than I had thought from pictures and videos I've seen online. It's also really easy and fun to operate. Having played with my iPod Touch and my wife's iPhone, I think the touch screen on the G1 is very similar. The icons are big enough to be easy to hit even if you have relatively large grown up fingers. That's one thing early touch screen developers got wrong. Small icons require you to waste time pulling out a stylus or take careful aim rather than naturally using your fingers.
Of course, one of the really cool things about a phone with an operating system made by Google is that it sync "in the cloud" with all my Google information. For example, once I sign in to the phone, all my contacts from GMail are stored on my phone automatically. When I add a contact on the phone, it's stored online immediately. Calendar, mail, and other things work the same way. Pretty cool. What might be even cooler is that I don't have to plug it in for it to sync. It syncs to the servers wirelessly and automatically. Beautiful.
Of course, the G1 is only the first phone to hit the market with the Android operating system. That means, as the appeal and gadget lust spreads, more handset manufacturers will start turning out new phones running Android. Not sure if I'll be an early adopter and get the G1 or wait and see what else comes down the pipeline.

G1 Numbers

T-Mobile has been taking pre-sale orders for the new HTC G1 phone which is the first phone to run Google's new Android operating system. It's a pretty neat phone and I'd order one myself if I had the opportunity. I even advised my mother to take T-Mobile up on their pre-sale offer. It seems I'm not the only one who is drooling over this thing. T-Mobile has sold 1.5 MILLION of these handsets. That total is all pre-sales. That means none of those people have even held one in their hands. They expect 2 Million phones to be shipped and sold in brick and mortar stores pretty soon. Those are big numbers. Huge numbers. iPhone numbers.

New Themes in iGoogle

New themes from top designers including this one by Jimmy Choo. What it do?

 

The Dopeness from Google

Take a good look at the picture below. It's a screenshot of two of Google's newest, biggest, baddest products. I downloaded and installed the beta version of Google's new Chrome web browser. As you can see, it's pretty sleek and streamlined. It frees up a large amount of real estate by doing away with the toolbar and the other screen gobbling features that might be seen as frivolous. The url field also serves as the search field which is pretty convenient. I've been using Firefox 3 as my go-to browser. Having worked(played) with Chrome for a couple days now, I think I'll stay with Firefox for now. The main reason is that I'd miss all the wonderful add-ons and extensions that I have installed on my Firefox browser(s). Yes, I not only run Firefox on every computer I use, I also sync my bookmarks in Firefox which boosts productivity wonderfully.

 

As you can see in the pic, I also downloaded Google's Picasa 3 yesterday. I couldn't wait to get home from work today to play with... I mean... evaluate it. I must say, I am thoroughly impressed with this new iteration of Google's image editing suite. It is by far the easiest way to organize, view, edit, upload, share, and make cool stuff with your digital photos. I tried out the "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature, which adjusts the settings for each picture to automatically make each photo look amazing. These all in one editing features usually suck. I was quite impressed with how well pictures turned out after one simple click.
One of the coolest new features of Picasa is pictured in the screenshot. You can opt to have Picasa scan your entire library of uploaded photos for faces. Yes, it scans for faces. Once it's scanned all the photos in your web albums, it presents similar faces for you to tag. For example, I uploaded an album of pictures that were taken while I was out digging up fossils in Montana with my buddy Marc and a bunch of other science teachers and scientists. Picasa went through my pictures and picked out Marc's face from each picture. It then allowed me to tell it to whom that face belongs. The impressive part of all that is that it picked out his face whether he had dark shades on or sunglasses. Pretty neat.
Picasa even picked out paleontologist Paul Sereno's face in a photo I took of a tv screen at the Children's Museum that was playing a video of him talking about their exhibit.


Extremely impressive.

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