So I woke up this morning and an old friend of mine had posted a late birthday gift on my Facebook wall.  The links to instructions and downloads for the new Cupcake from Google/T-Mobile.  Recently they are suppose to have it pushed to all T-Mobile Customers by the end of May.  As I eagerly awaited and informed my fellow Android users at work I found out that the date had been pushed.  Let's just say that curse words were used.

I haven't made my voice to clear on Android so far, on the internet anyways, let me start off by saying Android as I have used it to this point is okay.  Ultimately if the iPhone snafu had not occurred I would probably have one of those instead.  Now most of my gripes with the G1 are hardware related.  The Battery sucks.  You can confirm this with anyone, when I met Ron out in San Fran during Wondercon I asked him what he did to take care of the battery issues, his response was to turn everything off (which is what I currently do).  Agent X with Marvel also has a G1, my understanding is that he bought one of the batteries that adds to the thickness to the phone, which I would do only as a last resort.

Now other things that bugged me were the browser's responsiveness, unable to change orientation without opening the keyboard, no onscreen keyboard, all around bugginess (I seem to be in the minority on this one, I've had to flash my phone twice), and many more little things that annoy me.  Well in my few hours with Cupcake I can say that Google has made an honest effort at correcting a lot of these issues.

Frist thing I would like to mention is the browser.  It's much faster, doesn't act as buggy, and just seems to work better.  I used to go back and forth between the built in browser and Steel.  There is one reason to still keep Steel along with Chrome and that is to download any files that is "not recognized" by the phone.  I findd it annoying that Chrome (the built in browser) won't allow me to download a zip file.  The reason being is that I may be somewhere reading about a new program and would like to download it to my phone so that I don't forget later.

Next finally I don't have to open my phone to flip the orinentation.  Another annoyance that is gone.  This is a feature that I felt should have been there in the first place.

The on screen keyboard also arrived.  Any Android users would know by know that there are in fact other apps that have on screen keyboards.  In general they suck.  The new one is pretty good and offers spelling corrections and possibilities to what you are typing.  I like having the new soft keyboard because if I need to response to someone's text with "ok" it now takes less time, but gives me the opportunity to do stupid things like post a review in iFanboy with a slide out keyboard.

There have been a lot of little visual updates as well.  Their nice, but not needed.  I really don't feel strongly one way or another.

The last couple features I want to at least mention are Google Talk and Camcorder.  The Camcorder is okay, it's what you expect out of a phone, the awesome part is being able to upload to youtube with ease.  I haven't done this yet but in the future it would be easy to share things with friends that can be only shown in a video.  Lastly is Google Talk, an absolute tease.  All I can see if that they seperated google chat from the IM program, no new features there.

Overall Cupcake is an improvement and I wish T-Mo would stop screwing around and give it to people.  Most of my friends that use a G1 are starting to get impatient (I know I was) and when they heard it got pushed back overall morale seemed down.  I can honestly say that I feel that the G1 fell flat for me and when I get the chance I will probably replace it.  Now with Cupcake, I may consider sticking with an Android phone, but being the Apple whore that I am I will probably go with an iPhone at some point.

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