As you can see, it's not final final yet, as the video recording is still a bit buggy, but overall the improvements look nice.

This is an official development build issued by HTC yesterday we're seeing. It's for dev phones only, technically, but if you have a rooted G1 you can install this just like any other "update.zip" recovery image. See our how-to guide as well as this XDA developers thread for more guidance on upgrading your G1 if you so dare. We're still looking at a non-specific May release date for the official OTA update.

There are a lot of new toys for developers, including some kind of emulator configuration thing called Android Virtual Devices, or AVDs, that apparently will make developers' lives way easier. That's cool for them, but what do we get?

April 2009

The Android 1.5 platform introduces many new features for users and developers. The list below provides an overview of the changes.
User interface refinements

* System-wide:
o Refinement of all core UI elements
o Animated window transitions (off by default)
o Accelerometer-based application rotations
* UI polish for:
o In-call experience
o Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
o SMS & MMS
o Browser
o Gmail
o Calendar
o Email
o Camera & Gallery
o Application management

Performance improvements

* Faster Camera start-up and image capture
* Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
* Smoother page scrolling in Browser
* Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

New features

* On-screen soft keyboard
o Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
o Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
o User dictionary for custom words
* Home screen
o Widgets
+ Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
o Live folders
* Camera & Gallery
o Video recording
o Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
* Bluetooth
o Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
o Auto-pairing
o Improved handsfree experience
* Browser
o Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
o Copy 'n paste in browser
o Search within a page
o User-selectable text-encoding
o UI changes include:
+ Unified Go and Search box
+ Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
* Contacts
o Shows user picture for Favorites
o Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
o One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
* System
o New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
o SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
o SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
* Google applications
o View Google Talk friends' status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
o Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
o Upload videos to Youtube
o Upload photos on Picasa

Whoa. Soft keyboard, widgets, video recording (with YouTube uploading capabilities!), updated browser features like tabs, system-wide UI polishing... This is a killer upgrade. So, uh, thanks, Google! [Phandroid, thanks trigatch!]

To create his deformed battery contraption, he got the Lithium Ion cells from his old laptop, sticking them together with wire and electrical tape, and then dispossessed himself from any sense of aesthetics or shame. [Eee User via Portable Monkey]

It's not every day that you get to check out the world's thinnest LCD HDTV, let alone all three "ultrathins" currently in production, but that's what's going down. Sharp's super insane new flagship, the Limited Edition Aquos LC-65XS1U-S, arrived at my door in a bulletproof shipping container, 138 pounds of metal and glass measuring 65 inches diagonal that you can barely see from the side. Yes, in spite of its full-frontal gravitas, it measures only an inch thick at its edge, and a slightly more flexed 2 inches in the middle. It's gorgeous and ridiculous and designed to hang on a wall with no more protrusion than a dainty sketch in a frame—only it can blast Casino Royale at 1080p, 24 frames per second, while your face melts, and I'd have to sell my car twice over to buy it.

I love you Giz readers too much to stop with something that none of us can actually afford—and if you can afford it, you'll be decent enough to not let us know—so I called in the new slender 1080p models from Hitachi and JVC, too. As much lower-priced sets, I thought they'd just be the icing on Sharp's Limited Edition cake, but they turned out to be, in their own right, fine specimens. Let's review, shall we?

Who Thin?
"Ultrathin" is best defined, at this moment, as a TV that is mostly thinner than 2 inches.

Hitachi's Director's Series 1.5 UltraThin UT37X902 (37 inches listing for $1,900) got its name because it's an inch and a half thick across its entire panel. It is a monitor with speakers, but no tuner and the barest of inputs—one HDMI and one VGA—to help it keep trim. JVC's LT-46SL89 (46 inches for $2,400) on the other hand is a true TV, with digital HD tuner, 3 HDMI ports, 2 analog inputs with option of component, composite or S-Video, and a PC VGA input. That adds a bit to the girth—while most of its main panel is one-and-three-quarter-inches thick, there's a middle section that is a fat three inches.

To give you a sense of comparison, Pioneer's fairly slim and lightweight first-gen Kuro plasma is nearly 4 inches thick, with a slimming bezel that measures about half that. Pioneer isn't content there, though—its newest Kuro Elite monitors are quite trim, and you'll recall last CES the company showed off an unbelievably thin half-inch plasma screen that's presumably nowhere near production.

WTF Thin?
When I asked Sharp Aquos product manager Tony Favia what the fuss was about all of these new super thin TVs, he said that customers, particularly high-end ones, wanted a TV that could hang on a wall as flush as art, and even fill in for art as needed. That's why Sharp loaded the XS1 with paintings: When you push "Image" on the remote, up pop masterworks by Hokusai, Renoir, Seurat and Van Gogh, about 10 or 12 total. You can't leave the TV set on a particular image, though, despite the remote's discreetly stashed Play/Pause/Fwd/Rew transport buttons.

The XS1 achieves its thinness in part by farming out its functionality: An accompanying AV box, tethered by a single long HDMI cable, doesn't just handle all of the inputs, but the digital tuner and AquosNet internet access as well. It's so integrated into the TV's life that without it that, though I was able to run a video source directly, I couldn't even touch picture settings.

The thing about thin is that it's not cheap, and as such, manufacturers aren't at liberty to cut out performance to slim down the screen. This is probably why the biggest successes in TV sales—Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and LG—haven't expressed outright interest in marketing slim product. In fact, Sharp is smarter than JVC and Hitachi, aiming the thin concept at particularly spendy customers (Russian oil barons, professional golfers, Alaskan governors who may soon sign book and/or TV deals), rather than just going thin to differentiate itself at the Best Buy.

You Can't Afford It
The sleek all-metal Sharp 65-inch XS1 Limited Edition costs $16,000. The 52 incher costs $11,000. The build materials have a lot to do with the cost. A critically acclaimed, plastic-encased 3.7-inch thick Pioneer 50-inch plasma (that weighs 13 fewer pounds) lists for around $4,000, and sells for as little as $2,500. So you're not a sheikh, I'm not a sheikh, why are we talking about a sheikh's TV? Favia said the company went for a "no compromise" approach, and as hard as I looked, I found just one technical compromise, one most (sheikhs) could live with. If the damn thing didn't cost so much, the XS1 would be one of my favorite TVs ever.

Speaking of the Kuro, I placed a first-gen model side-by-side to calibrate and compare, and though the Sharp LCD wasn't always as perfect as the Pioneer plasma, I was surprised to see how well it kept up. Even though the LCD is equipped with 120Hz Fine Motion Enhanced blur reduction, I realized that during the action sequences in Casino Royale it went with native 24p (24-frames-per-second) movie playback. There wasn't any noticeable blur. In fact, thanks to the massive LCD's dazzlingly snappy 4-millisecond response time, I found that you really didn't need 120Hz at all.

Contrast Is King
In the all-important land of contrast, this Sharp scores big. Sharp has, in the past, been criticized for confusing contrast with an overuse of darkness. The XS1 is obviously a ground-up redesign, but in that arena in particular, I found I could tweak settings to walk the line between crushed and bleached blacks. You don't see charcoal gray when you're supposed to see pitch black, and yet dark textures are plainly visible.

This has much to do with the tight grid of RGB LEDs behind the main panel that light only what's needed. This technique has recently earned Sony and Samsung high praise for contrast and color reproduction, but it has a third crazy attribute: The 65-inch Sharp is capable of using less energy than the 46-inch JVC and even the 37-inch Hitachi, because it lights only what it needs and doesn't require the constant glare of a fluorescent light source.

When it comes to specific wattage demands, the Sharp hovered in the low to mid 100s with peaks upwards of 200W. The plasma was averaging 250 or higher, maxing out during the brightest scenes at 400W. The JVC's 46 incher could be set, using the backlight slider, anywhere from 98W to 200W, and the Hitachi similarly ranged from 83W to 171W. Though nice and slim, both of these sets use constantly lit fluorescent lamps.

While contrast on these smaller TVs didn't immediately seem as good, I got a sneaking suspicion that LED backlighting is, at least in part, a psychological trick. See, constant FL light means that, when watching 2.35:1 widescreen movies, you get a touch of gray in the bars at top and bottom, at least you do unless you dial down the backlight and sacrifice some whiteness. With LED backlighting, the LEDs behind the letterbox's black bars are simply turned off. You perceive that contrast to be better since there are fewer dead giveaways of less-than-perfect contrast.

I'm not trying to uncover a mystery here; I'm just saying that once I ignored the light shining through the black bars, I was happy enough with the contrast and color—demonstrated below by Disney's new Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray, our friend HD Guru Gary Merson's favorite color-gamut test source along with, naturally, Southland Tales—on both the JVC and Hitachi. Sometimes "good enough" is actually "good."

The Last LCD Issue
The funny thing is that two of the three test TVs suffered from an annoying LCD-related problem, and it wasn't the cheaper two. Both the Sharp and the JVC, which in many ways could not be more different as TVs, lost color saturation and even shifted in tint when viewed from the most peripheral angles.

Viewing angle issues are far from new: Projection TVs and LCDs have continued to suffer from them for years and years (in some cases decades). And maybe you think that it's no big deal, since most people watch a TV sitting head on. But I think that ultrathin TVs—intended to hang flush on walls, and without a pivoting mount—should be especially good looking at every angle where the picture is remotely visible. The Hitachi alone managed to hold its colors to the very edge, losing only brightness, as you'd expect.

New Hope
In the end, I think this review session did more to renew my faith in LCD technology than it did to sell me on the whole ultrathin thing. I spent years at line shows wondering why anyone would buy an LCD when plasma was an alternative, and even the amazing rise of Sony and Samsung in the LCD space was clouded by the simultaneous rise of all those extra-crappy savings-club TVs.

It's worth noticing that these ultrathin sets don't hail from the current Korean, Japanese or Chinese TV powerhouses. But as flagships from their companies, they do an even better job boding well for the whole industry, at least from a technical perspective. Plasma can still enjoy its high noon, but at a cost—nothing here looked better than the Kuro, but it took twice the energy to deliver that marginally better picture. And when it comes to hanging these bastards on the wall, well, let's see if Pioneer's still going to make good on that ultra-ultrathin promise from last CES. If not, these LCDs are going to be the slim-o-cizers to beat. That is, until the first 40-inch OLEDs hit the market. [Sharp Aquos Limited Edition XS1; Hitachi 1.5; JVC SuperSlim]

Hitachi to Showcase the World's First UltraThin Line of Displays at Annual Dealer Show This Week

The Much Anticipated and Only "1.5" Displays Are Now Available to Consumers
CHULA VISTA, Calif. —(Business Wire)— May. 1, 2008 At its Annual Dealer Show this week, Hitachi Home Electronics (America), Inc. will showcase its "1.5" family of UltraThin Displays, which, for the first time, are now available for purchase by U.S. consumers.

Unveiled to rave reviews at the Intl. CES in Las Vegas in January of this year, the 1.5 displays — so named due to their sleek 1.5-inch depth — continue to generate excitement and momentum, particularly now as consumers are able to purchase these slim, stylish displays through retail and specialty AV dealers nationwide for the first time.

Available in four screen sizes (32-inch, 37-inch, 42-inch and 47-inch), the 1.5 displays embody an array of Hitachi's engineering breakthroughs which have resulted in an award winning design, unrivaled thinness and outstanding picture quality. From the patented ventilation technology to the backlight, power supply and unique crystal frame, the innovations found in the 1.5 line represent Hitachi's achievements in areas as diverse as automotive design, server systems and optical R&D.

The new 1.5 line is further differentiated by its appealing design that, importantly, extends a complete 360 degrees around. So whether the displays are seen from the front, a side angle or from the back, the elegant lines and distinctive aesthetics demonstrate an attention to detail that make the displays the ideal complement to a luxury lifestyle.

Another important first: Hitachi has now outlined the pricing structure for the new 1.5 line, which will be offered in Director's Series (X) and Ultra Vision (V) models. Pricing and availability for each model is as follows:

HITACHI SHOWS OFF NEW ULTRA THIN PLASMA DISPLAY AT CES

— Just 1.5-inches Thin, Hitachi's New Plasma Display is Centerpiece of "Innovations Showcase" at its CES Booth —

LAS VEGAS, INTL. CES (Booth: Central 11906) - Jan. 4, 2008 - Hitachi has developed an Ultra Thin plasma display panel (PDP) that is a mere 1.5-inches in depth. Having shaved more than one third of the thickness off of today's comparable plasma displays, this new product represents an engineering achievement of significant importance from Hitachi.

This new Ultra Thin plasma display will be the centerpiece of Hitachi's Innovations Showcase here at CES, which also features:
• A "super" Ultra Thin LCD at just .75 inches in depth
• An advanced search technology that can be applied to visual images
• A system that allows video to be shared between homes and then viewed on a TV, not a PC
• A wireless video gateway for sharing content among several displays in the home
• An IPTV user interface for accessing, managing and sharing content at home or on the go

Complete Family of Ultra Thin Displays
While a handful of companies, including Hitachi, have already developed Ultra Thin LCD models, Hitachi is among the first vendors to demonstrate an Ultra Thin plasma display. For various technical reasons, the challenges in producing a thin plasma display greatly exceed those associated with developing a thin LCD, making Hitachi's achievements - 1.5-inch Ultra Thin models in both LCD and PDP - even more impressive. As a result, Hitachi expects to seize an early lead in the rapidly emerging and commercially attractive new category of Ultra Thin Displays.
- more -
"Hitachi has a long history of innovation and a proven track record of making breakthroughs that advance the consumer electronics industry," said Daniel Lee, vice president of marketing for Hitachi America, Ltd., Ubiquitous Platform Systems Division. "But what is even more important than being first with a prototype or concept is being first to deliver the end product to consumers. Especially for our complete new line of Ultra Thin displays, we already have the manufacturing processes, sales and marketing investment and overall corporate commitment in place to put these products into consumers' hands months, if not years, ahead of other suppliers. From our perspective, and that of our distribution partners, being first with a product in the sales channel is ultimately what is most important."

Developed using highly proprietary and innovative technology from Hitachi, which is so secretive and highly competitive it cannot be revealed, the new plasma display sample is 50 inches in screen size. Hitachi expects
to commercialize the product by late 2009 and other sizes may be available at that time.

Alongside its 1.5-inch Ultra Thin PDP, Hitachi is also showing off its "super" Ultra Thin LCD which measures an incredible .75 (19mm) in depth. First seen at CEATEC in Japan last Fall, this 32-inch wonder offers another proof point for Hitachi's engineering prowess. The other breakthrough technologies Hitachi will feature in its Innovations Showcase include:

Similarity Based Image Retrieval System - With the volume of data already at unprecedented levels and expected to continue to increase rampantly, technology enabling quick searches of still and video images is much in demand. In response, Hitachi has developed a Similarity-Based Image Retrieval technology, a search engine for just such large-scale image and video archives. Similarity-Based Image Retrieval technology automatically extracts quantified information intrinsic to the image — such as color, shapes and forms — and runs searches to locate a match. This innovative search technique can be used for something as basic as searching for a movie scene or image on a camcorder to something as complex as searching for facial imagery in security, video surveillance or law enforcement applications.

Personal Video Sharing - Throughout CES, Hitachi will conduct ongoing demonstrations of its Personal Video Sharing System, which allows users to easily share and play content recorded for personal use, both inside and outside the home, via a home data center. The demonstration goes through a sample application in which content recorded on a video camera can be shared between two homes - for example, a consumer's home and that of their parents - simply by using the first home's central server. The parents can then easily view the latest videos of their grandchildren simply by using their television to access the network - there is no need to hassle with a PC.
- more -
Wireless HDTV System - This demonstration will show how high-definition video content is distributed over WiFi from a Hitachi wireless video gateway device to two Hitachi LCD HDTVs. The content is stored locally on a hard disk drive, but the server can also connect to a local PC or IPTV for HD content. Each TV has a remote control to select different content via a user-friendly menu. This form of wireless HDTV content distribution enables consumers to be located anywhere in the home where a power supply is available. Complicated and troublesome management of unsightly cable, satellite or other wiring is no longer needed. Easy access to stored video and Internet content provides an added advantage.

IPTV User Interface - Hitachi will also demonstrate its new IPTV User Interface. This innovative GUI features a set of intuitive controls for selecting and enjoying content from various sources (home
server/network, broadcast, Internet, handheld devices, etc.); a customizable menu with the ability to set user-specific preferences to enhance personalization and control; and multi-device support, which allows users to store and access content using multiple devices both inside the home and on the go.

Hybrid Monitor - Hitachi will show its one-of-a-kind Hybrid Monitor that uses an advanced Light Source System capable of generating an eight million to one (8M: 1) "mega contrast" ratio and optimum light efficiency. Through the ingenious combination of Hitachi's proprietary Micro Display system, a Sole Polarized Light Source a magnifying lens and an LCD panel, the Hybrid Monitor perfectly controls color gradation, allowing the viewer to see pure black and natural images in a more true-to-life way than ever before possible.

For more information about Hitachi's activities at the 2008 International CES, please visit http://av.hitachi.com/