T-Mobile USA has issued a press release stating that T-Mobile G1 owners will start receiving over the air firmware updates for Android 1.5, the “Cupcake” release, starting at the end of next week.

Of course it was widely reported that some users had already received the update, though it was obvious that the roll out was very slow.

It also appears that the T-Mobile UK Android 1.5 update for the G1 is already on its way out.  Somebody grabbed the new firmware and has made it available, so that users can do a manual update to the official T-Mobile UK firmware without the wait.

One of the admins at T-Mobile USA’s forums has posted an official list of the updated and new features offered by the new Android 1.5 system.  You can see the full list after the jump.

Android 1.5 Feature List:

User interface refinements

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