RSST-Mobile USA: UK report on Android Cupcake is 'just a rumor'
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published March 12, 2009, 10:44 PM
Now under development for the past several months, an envisioned update to the Android mobile OS known as "Cupcake" is expected to add video recording and other desirable new features to T-Mobile's G1, as well as to future Android phones.
In a report widely bandied about this week, UK-based gadget blog Pocket-lint on Wednesday quoted a T-Mobile spokesperson as stating, "We will be offering G1 users the firmware update some time in April." Pocket-lint did not supply the name or location of its public relations source, though.
But on Thursday night, Erica Gordon, a spokesperson for T-Mobile USA, told Betanews that an April release date for a Cupcake update is "just a rumor."
Gordon didn't exactly deny the April timeline, and reminded us she couldn't speak for T-Mobile International. Yet when asked by Betanews whether T-Mobile International has confirmed an April release date, Gordon replied, "Not as far as I know."
Meanwhile, T-Mobile has released both the G1 and an initial update to the Android phone on different timetables in different countries.
After releasing an update called RC33 in the US in early February, T-Mobile started following up with a similar bugfix, known as RC9, during early March in Germany and the UK.
Yet apparently, the RC33 and RC9 updates both lack a bunch of new capabilities anticipated for Cupcake, including video recording, voice search, Google Latitude, stereo Bluetooth, and a better online keyboard.
I have the RC33 and it includes both Google voice search and Google Latitude (among several other fixes and minor updates). In addition in my opinion the battery life has been improved as well.
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|RC33 included Google Latitude, and it works just fine for me on TMO USA.
The keyboard it was missing was an onscreen or touchscreen version, not an online one. :)
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|Given that T-Mobile current release (called "RC9", more or less the US "RC33") doesn't work properly and that they have, if you ring them up and ask them, have no way of supporting the device at all, I wouldn't believe a word of it.
The marketing department doesn't live in the same world as the "support".
I've had the phone since it launched in the UK and I still can't use Google Latitude or plan walking routes using the Maps function.
A demonstration of T-Mobile support. They said look at http://www.google.co.uk/help ffs
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