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24 Sep 2008 07:16
Since I am a bit geek- and gadget-guy, I have been trying to follow the development of Android (the mobile platform by Google) since its announcement. Yesterday the first commercial phone, G1 by HTC, has been announced at a press conference by T-Mobile.
I did watch it live. But right after that I felt simply disappointed. You can watch it yourself. If you do not bother watching the whole video, a nice live blog is available by Gizmodo.
I do not want to summarize all what is known about G1 nor give a detailed description. You can read heads-on impressions and a "sneak peak" look at App Market by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch. Just a few points that I myself find curious:
- It looks like the bare-bone G1 is just OS + a few applications, they want to move the weight to 3rd party developers to create things like
- Exchange support,
- synchronization with desktop application (no, there is no desktop app like iTunes for iPhone to manage the phone),
- they did not present any really useful 3rd party applications yet
- No multitouch, we love iPhone for it. Moreover it is not required for Android phones, so the interface for applications could not be that consistent.
- To input anything from the keyboard you need to rotate the phone to slide the keyboard out (is there a virtual keyboard?)
- Gmail is PUSH. Will they make it PUSH for iPhone and other devices?
- It is confirmed that it has no 3.5mm headphone jack.
- Data is capped at 1GB (per month) by T-Mobile.
- 1GB storage on-board?
- No tethering, simlocked. It is not THAT open after all. It still runs on a proprietary network and it is not 100% open source.
- Availability of the device will be very limited.
Generally I had mixed feelings. Well, for now I guess I will just forget about Android and concentrate on my other work. IMHO it will take a lot of time to make G1 a good productivity tool. I guess we will find out in 2009.
There is also one more thing I really really care about in context of mobile internet: mobile access to Wikidot. There are several issues with it, from time to time I have a few ideas how it should look like and the picture is getting more and more complete. At some point we will probably start writing a web application or a dedicated application for mobile devices (most probably iPhone and/or Android). Although I managed to edit wiki pages with my iPhone, it was quite painful because the touch interface and mobile Safari gives you a pretty different experience from desktop. But an easy application that lets you view, edit pages, upload photos, write posts — it should not be that far away.
rating: 0, tags: android gadget iphone phone t-mobile
