Well its Friday Tmonews readers, and this week is going to close out well for T-mobile lovers, especially those in the Android camp. Your serving of Donut is underway, bringing with it a host of enhancements to the Android experience. With Android in mind, the Cliq pricing brought a flurry of traffic this week as the next big thing in magentaville came down at a disappointingly high $199.99. For some reason T-mobile is just in love with that price point, much to our chagrin. These weren’t the only happenings for magenta this week as the following was not given front page billing, but not forgotten either.
Sams Club has discontinued the sales of T-mobile products and services as of October 1st. As Sams Club has a 30 day buyers remorse period returns can still be delivered by Sams Club for a refund, however, any exchanges will be handled by customer care.
For those brand new to Android and wondering what the whole Donut hoopla is about, here is a short list of enhancements that Donut will bring to your device:
Updated search experience that makes it easier to search various sources, such as: browser bookmarks and history, contacts, and the Web, directly from the home screen.
New battery usage screen which allows customers to see which applications and services are consuming battery.
An integrated camera, camcorder, and gallery experience that allows customers to switch between still and video capture mode with a touch screen switch.
Updated Voice Search, with faster response and deeper integration with native applications, including the ability to dial contacts.
An improved Android Market experience that makes it easier to discover great applications.
You’ve seen the Android 1.6 aka Donut preview vids, drooling as you watch them. And now its time to fill that G1 or MyTouch 3G up with Donut! According to our source, T-Mobile has plans to start rolling out stage 1 of their delicious-baked-goods plan. Select G1 handsets at 12AM Eastern Daylight Time tonight will receive the Donut update. Next, after a 24-hour waiting period, T-Mobile will extend its deliciousness to MyTouch3G handsets–that is, if there are no hiccups (meaning no bricked phones). Then, if all goes well, the rest of the users will start seeing the trickle down effect, regardless of handset. We are assuming like the rest of the launches, this release will be staggered over different groups getting the update each day. Hip hip hooray for Magenta! Sound off in the comments!
As the extending dessert list led us to believe, Google and Android has dished out Donut (well technically, they dropped new code for Android Donut). Some people over at XDA Developers are reporting that Donut will be stuffed with system-wide multitouch, universal search, text to speech, automated backups, a new camera app, and somehow (supposedly) better performance (sounds yummy). There also seems to be some CDMA support (for those lucky Sprint and possibly Verizon customers). The people over at XDA Developers are trying to get a version of Donut to work on the G1, so start getting anxious for that and we will keep you posted. Some Pictures and a video, from the Google I/O conference, showing some of Donuts capabilities after the break.
Thanks to our friends at Phonedog, we are getting a look at what is purported to be an HTC skinning of the Android interface complete with widgets, gadgets, lion, tigers and bears. Best guess, according to John from Phonedog is that its similar to the HTC Touchflo interface for Windows Mobile devices, this time just for Android. This doesn’t have the appearance of the “Donut” follow up to Cupcake, more likely just HTC going to work on their own Android makeover.Â
I know cupcake has taken up quite a bit of the news spots lately and for good reason, a million G1 users is a user base that can’t be ignored. So here we go, one more addition to the cupcake news cycle and then hopefully, and if you are still unfamiliar with the cupcake update then this sheet courtesy of our tipster might answer some questions. Of course, if you are a G1 user and unfamiliar with cupcake, you probably aren’t reading here anyway. Either way, the above shot continues to confirm the completion of the cupcake OTA rollout by the end of May, so those of you impatiently waiting may still have a little bit of time to go, but at least you know with continued confirmation by what day you should have received it. Of course if you really want to see whats upcoming for Android, check out the video below as a young hacker apparently got ahold of the HTC Hero software, possibly the “Donut” followup to cupcake and showcases a whole lot of Android goodness.Â
