Similar look but with Some Unique New Features
Move Over iPhone Make Room For ANDROID
The Google Android G1 is going to change the way cell phone users interact with Google's client advertisers. But are serious consumers and business people going to embrace it? One Blogger says NO!
Canada Is On Hold
This first generation Google phone certainly seems rushed to market. Perhaps following Google’s philosophy of perpetual beta or ‘launch early and iterate’. This philosophy seems to serve them well when the product is free. We don’t think it plays well when the product costs $179 plus a two year service contract commitment.
Some of the more material deficiencies:
- Visually the G1 hardware is very 2006. HTC are masters of ugly utilitarian sliders. It may be superficial to some, but design is important.
- Non-standard headphone jack. Add the extra 3.5mm headphone HTC, LG, and you other cell phone manufacturers! Wake up! People like to use their existing headphones or purchase better headphones. All headphones have standard jacks. The cheap crappy non standard jack headphones you ship with phones do not cut it. Carrying an extra mini-USB adaptor with your mobile is a pain.
- Only one Google account per phone. Breaking news for you folks at Google - most people have multiple email accounts. Even multiple Gmail accounts. With the one Google account per G1 phone lock, you have handicapped your phone with your own applications relative to other smartphones.
- Contacts and Syncing. Nice attempt at trying to get us to move all of our contacts over to the Google cloud. See the previous note regarding multiple email accounts. Similarly, our contacts exist in several places for multiple reasons. Now as our contacts change on our other platforms, perhaps Outlook/Exchange at work, we need to regularly upload them to Gmail Contacts just to access them from the G-Phone. Nice and convenient not.
- No video playback except for YouTube. Not as important to us but people out there do seem to care.
- No multi-touch. The trackball and browser controls are okay but multi-touch has been public now for almost two years and it’s great.
We don’t think that Apple or RIM have to worry at this point but Android is certainly a direct threat to the Linux Mobile and Windows Mobile operating systems. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds. The Mobile OS space is long overdue for a shakeout.
The new G1 has a few enhancements which the iPhone does not presently have including a slide out keyboard and a Trackball.