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Note: Headnote: The latest release of the software platform for Google's Android phone supports a software keyboard, YouTube uploader, and voice search.
Video Capture And YouTube
Video capture is a huge new capability for the G1. A camcorder icon has been placed into the main menu. Click it to open the application. It couldn't be more basic -- which is both good and bad.
There's only one button to push. The only adjustments you can make to the video recorder's settings are to set the video quality at low (optimized for MMS) or high (for storage to a memory card). There's no way to change the focus, metering, white balance, color effects, or other features. Many low-end feature phones have these options.
Press the record button to begin capturing video, and push it again to stop the recording. Once you've captured a video, it will place a thumbnail of that video in the upper left corner. Press that, and it will show you a list of options. Three are fairly boring links that take you to the video gallery, play the current video, or let you trash the video. The "share" button, on the other hand is much more interesting.
Pressing the share button opens a drop-down menu with three options. Videos can be attached to an e-mail message, attached to an MMS message, or uploaded directly to YouTube. All three are fairly painless, but the YouTube uploader is excellent.
It lets you give the video a title, description, and tags before you upload, and you can set the video to public or private. (You'll need to sign in to your YouTube account first, though I only had to do that once and it kept me signed in.)
The 30-second videos that I shot took about one minute to upload to YouTube via T-Mobile's 3G network. If you have Wi-Fi turned on and a wireless network is available, the G1 will upload via Wi-Fi instead.
Being able to post videos directly to YouTube from the phone itself is flat-out awesome. Let's face it, a huge percentage of the videos shot today are shared via YouTube. This is a feature I wish all phones had.
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