A replacement extended life battery may be a late Christmas Present to frustrated G1 owners from T-Mobile.
As polled here and elsewhere, the main concern with the G1 is the short battery life as with only moderate use it would be lucky to last a day with only one charge.
The other concerns such as video recording, on screen keyboard, and stereo Bluetooth should be addressed when T-Mobile sends the OTA update in January 2009 with the Android CupCake branch improvements.
T-Mobile is reported to be sending a new extended life battery plus the compatible back cover within a month to all T-Mobile G1 owners.
I am curious if this leaves out those who purchased the unlocked And Dev 1 phones as well those that the approximately 18,000 Google employees are receiving as a Christmas bonus.
Currently the G1 has a 1150mAh battery so I am assuming the replacement will be 1400mAh which is about 20% more battery life.
*** A commenter to this post, Eric, brought out the excellent point that the 1400mAh battery would not need a new back cover. Since the reported T-Mobile plan included a back cover then perhaps its the 2400mAh battery providing over twice the current battery life and needing a seperate back cover as sold here ***
A notice will be sent out to G1 owners either via mail or email about this in the coming weeks.
There has been no formal announcement within T-Mobile, but thier PDA support is aware of this.
A T-Mobile representative states, “After everything they did, and the amount of time put into this (extended battery) project, I doubt they would scrap it now.”
Now we just need to know when FLASH will be provided for Android and the G1 as its already been demoed by Adobe to work back in November as seen here:
