Must be time to upgrade my Android phone.

It's been nearly 2 years and 9 months since I bought my G1 on T-Mobile and I won't lie: it's a bit beat up.  Stuck in Android 1.6, I saw no point in rooting the phone to CyanogenMod and installing 2.1 Eclair or higher, given the slowness of the CPU.  I know others have successfully rooted and updated the OS, though not to Gingerbread, but again, slowness.

So this weekend, the phone started to do a soft reboot on certain actions, which was quite disturbing.  I decided to do a factory reset.  While that did the trick, giving me a much more responsive, faster and more stable phone, I learned the hard way that I lost access to Google Maps with Navigation and Google Goggles.  Because the new updates allow for only 2.2 or higher, I'm out of luck and have no choice but to upgrade.

Now, I'm not pointing finger or anything, but I can't help but suspect that there was a "bug" in a certain "weather" app, that seemed to make my phone less stable.  I ended up not downloading any weather app - since they take up so damned much space on the phone anyway - and split the two functions that I cared the most about: temperature and radar.  The radar app is nothing but pure awesome, but the temperature one is a tad lame, as it has automatically stuck itself to a weather station 10 miles away, when I know there's two located within 2000 feet from me.  At least the two add up to less than 1/4 the amount of memory that "weather" app with a "bug" in it, took up.

I was also having problems with a certain colorful alarm clock that was laggy and doing all sorts of stuff to my phone, that I had to close it when not in use, with taskiller.  So I skipped on that alarm clock app, and went with Alarm Clock Xtreme, free.  Seems to work fine.  No sudden reboots and no laggy either.

And by the way, it's a heck of a lot easier to download a bunch of apps via my computer (since they made changes prior to Honeycomb's release), where I link up my phone / device to the android market webpage, then I can filter and easily search and schedule apps to download to my phone.

Of course, without Navigation, I feel weird...so I'm on the prowl for a new phone, and I think, for the time being, I'll stick with T-Mobile and get the soon-to-be-released myTouch 4G Slide that has the first camera phone without shutter lag -- if you have a smart phone, you know exactly what I mean.

My next phone?