Update (10/1 1:45): The Android 1.6 OTA has been confirmed.
I just got an notification from Android Market informing me I had several apps that needed to be updated. I went to check which apps had a new version and found T-Mobile My Account had been updated to 2.0.3. According to the release notes, this new version was targeted specifically to support the new Android 1.6 (Donut).
Over the past couple of weeks we have seen Google deliver the Android 1.6 SDK then HTC released the Android 1.6 images for developer phones. Some sites are interpreting the update of My Account to mean that T-Mobile is ready to roll out Android 1.6. Tmonews even goes as far to say the Android 1.6 over the air update is coming at midnight.
Based on the history of the Android 1.5 rollout from T-Mobile, I think we still have several weeks to wait. It’s nice to see T-Mobile update their apps to work with the latest update, but many developers have not tested their apps and there are compatibility issues. Android Market Support typically sends an email out to developers before any rollouts occur and they have not done so for Android 1.6.
T-Mobile could surprise everyone and push the update out tonight, but I’m not holding my breath.
For those of you wondering about the article we wrote claiming the G1 might not get future updates, we have good news. As I explained in my G1 storage problem article, the Android 1.5 (Cupcake) update consumed 99.5% of the space available for the operating system. The system partition of the G1 is about 70 MB and Android 1.5 used around 69 MB.
I’ve had the chance to install and play with developers version of Android 1.6 and it only uses 60 MB. This means the Google engineers were able to shave off around 10 MB of code with new optimizations. The final T-Mobile version of Android 1.6 will be slightly larger when they add their MyFaves and IM apps, but it should have no problem fitting on the G1.
And now the wait begins.
T-Mobile prepares for Donut.
