CupCake ( Android V 1.5 )

Last night I was greeted by a very friendly message on my HTC Dream informing me cupcake ( android V 1.5 ) was available for download. All i can say is - it's about time, Optus! It only took three months but optus has finally released cupcake over the air!

I decided to wait until I got home to download the update, it was just going to take too long over the 3g network. 44mb on my wireless connection took about 2 minutes to download and about 5 minutes to install. The update was easy and impressingly fast.

I haven't had a great play with my phone since I updated it but, here's my initial thoughts:

• The whole OS seems to run just a little sluggish but that's of no great concern to me, things still open and operate fast enough to not be annoying

• Boot time has been improved greatly, in my opinion

• The onscreen keyboard is fantastic, I now no longer need to flip the hardware keyboard out to send an SMS

• Animations are a nice little add on when opening and closing windows/applications

• The automatic screen re-orientation when rotating the phone isn't perfect but I find it quite handy, especially in the browser and email

Bugs:

Well, unfortunately some little bugs are still there and I'm starting to wonder whether it's a fault of HTC, not Google.

• My GSM service is still dying silently. By this I mean, it looks like I have signal but I really don't and all outgoing and incoming calls and messages fail until I reboot. Strange thing is, sometimes I can do a GSM network search and force it to use Optus ( which it should already be using ) and that fixes it but, this doesn't always work.

• The GUI still crashes on the odd occasion when exiting applications. Again, this is another problem I don't really care about, the GUI restarts if it crashes so it doesn't really affect performance.