I was at the Westfield WestCity mall in Henderson just after noon on Saturday. I was sitting near the food court (and how sad is this....) wondering if / when I would be seeing the "Over the Air" upgrade of my Android phone anytime soon.
I looked at the phone...and there it was: a message on the screen telling me that updates were available and giving me the choice to go ahead, do it later or cancel. Hell yeah! I
touched "Install" and away it went.
The upgrade process took about 10-15 minutes, if i recall correctly. The phone re-booted once or maybe twice (by then we were wandering around looking for a place to have a coffee, so I was distracted).
When it was done, the system seemed awfully slow and unresponsive. I listed the apps running and it was close to 20. Pretty much anything and everything that needs to update itself at some point during a day was open, running and trying to update its data via 3G. I killed most of them off and the system began to function normally....nice and quick. The Home screenshot here is the Android default (more or less). I used it until a week or so ago when I adopted Open Home as the default, but restored the default for this screenshot. In the one on the left, you can see the smaller Google search widget with the microphone to turn on voice searching.
I kicked off Open Home (instead of the default Home app) to see if there were any compatibility issues....and everything was fine.
The new Android is better and faster on my HTC Magic. Combined with the growing number of mature apps with rich, reliable function like Open Home, Camera ZOOM FX, Picsay Pro, Twidroid and Handcent SMS and my phone is now far more than a phone. I don't need a laptop any more.
Rather than try to cover all the new stuff in one post, I'll do a short post on each, including screenshots from my phone.
One of the new features on the Android v1.6 update that I like very much is the battery usage monitor. It tells you which apps have been using your battery since the last time you were plugged in.....and how much.
