Android 2.0 on G1?

[djunio]

I think they are going to feature the use of the SD cards now as part of the phone , rather than storage for media.

They need to do both plus the 10meg more free ram hack, it makes the phone faster.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=564975
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=566410

[Pward87]

Why wouldnt you just upgrade to a mytouch instead of canceling and getting an iphone?

[Derrick]

If 2.0 is not supported on the G1, I'll cancel my TMO contract and head for the nearest Apple Store. If they can't support a phone for barely a year, screw 'em.

Well right now the question is not will T-Mo release 2.0 to G1 owners but can the update even fit on the phone's internal memory.

[thundermax]

Google maps navigation on 2.0 looks awesome and I wish I had that on my G1.

there is actually a post somewhere here that has instructions for upgrading the google maps app so you can have the 2.0 features for maps

and here it is: http://androidcommunity.com/forums/f...-6-roms-26993/

[omnibot]

If it happens that the G1 will not support 2.0, I think the right thing to do would be to offer the early adopters a discounted upgrade.
I've had the G1 since last december and I'm just about over it with all these better equipped phones coming out.

[PeteS]

I must say, I'm really not worried about whether they'll release 2.0 OTA. Here's why:

1. The development phone is still a G1. It would be suspicious if Google had, say, introduced Droid as a new development phone model, but they haven't.

2. See my previous post at AC. Android is not MacOS. They are not going to release software that is completely incompatible with recent (barely a year!) hardware. It's like someone worrying about whether the latest Fedora will run on XYZ old computer. You may not get all the features turned on by default, but they're not just going to give up on a system because of a memory/storage issue.

3. Worst case, root your phone! I have not rooted my phone because I trust my luck to result in a bricked unit, but I imagine that if Google left G1 owners out in the cold, most G1 users would opt to go away from the OTA roms and use Cyanogen or whatever necessary to get 2.0 to work. I mean, this is bound to happen eventually -- not because the G1 won't support versions of Android far into the future, but because T-Mobile can't be expected to support and help troubleshoot an infinite number of versions and new features on increasingly older hardware.

4. Maybe my understanding is wrong, but isn't this not really a big deal? The boot partition in the flash memory isn't large enough to install Eclair? If custom roms are able to play with the partition, why can't Google/T-Mobile? And because of how easy 3. is, and how much bad publicity Google/T-Mobile would get if they cut off G1 users halfway through the contract, why -wouldn't- they want to fix what seems like a trivial issue?

[extorian]

Donut leaves just a few hundred K of space on the System partition. It's REALLY tight. It's not 95% full like a previous poster said, it's more like 99.5% full.

If you download both Android 1.6 and Android 2.0 for the Emulator, you'll see that 2.0 is about 9MB bigger than 1.6.

So - Google would have to shave 9MB off 2.0 to fit it onto a G1. Maybe they can, but I'd be surprised if they can because they had this exact same problem fitting Donut onto the G1. As such they'll have already used all the tricks they could find to shrink Donut. As Eclair will have already have employed those same tricks, it would appear 2.0 is 9MB bigger than 1.6 even after optimisation.

There only is one solution to the space issue on the G1, and that's to move something onto the SD card and re-partition the remaining space to give more space to at least the System (OS) partition.

You can move either:

1) Cache to SD - this moves the 70MB cache partition, which is ONLY used to store the OS updates before they're installed (i.e. a few times a year at most), to the SD card, thus freeing up 70MB of space which can be divided between the Apps storage space and space to install the OS (i.e. Eclair).

2) Apps to SD. Also freeing up around 70MB.

They won't do either of these, for the simple reason that after moving something to the SD card you will have to repartition the memory. This means erasing ALL data on your phone. This would annoy a LOT of people if they all woke up one morning and found their phones had been completely and utterly wiped. Also, you would probably have to manually install an SPL to do it, as (as far as I know) you can't send out new SPLs OTA.

Also they won't do either of these because it requires you to have an SD card. Having an SD card (even though everybody does have one) is not a requirement for using the phone.

They won't do (2) for even more reasons - namely that the SD card, even a class 6, is around 110x slower than the internal memory according to the Benchmark app (maybe that's wrong, but that's what it says), and also SD cards have a limited number of write cycles. If you write to the same area of the SD card more than around 100,000 times it will fail. By storing Apps on the SD card (and hence stuff is being written to and saved on the SD card probably every time any App runs in any way, shape, or form) you suddenly find that people's SD cards fail after 6 months or a year. Customers would also get annoyed at this fact when they loose all their apps and their phones no longer boot.

[Derrick]

Official Eclair SDK running on G1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ijAgr7v8Mo

[extorian]

Nobody said it couldn't run on a G1 though, it can. I'd imagine the first people to get it will be the people who download Cyanogen's builds when he includes it.

The real question is whether 2.0 will be sent out OTA to (the majority) of G1 owners. On the stock G1 there isn't the room on the cache or system partitions to get Eclair.

[Derrick]

Yea I know I just posted it so people can see it in action. I might make a new thread, but who knows.... iLazy