After all the G1’s hype, it’s just like every other phone
I have to admit that I was looking forward to the G1. The idea of an open source phone that allowed you to write any app you wanted really appealed to me. As time went on, many people speculated about what carrier would get the phone, and what features the phone would have.
Today, Google and T-Mobile unveiled the G1 running Andriod, Google’s open source operating system for the G1. Did they score a home run with the G1? Maybe the ‘G1′ stands for ‘got to first base’.
The first order of selling something is that you need someone with just a touch of charisma to be on stage. You want people to be pumped for this device. If you’re going up against Apple, you need something more than a bunch of suits to sell it. I’m sure everone that gets up on stage reads from a script, but these guys looked way too stiff and I was not inspired enough to listen to what they had to say, but I really had no choice but to get through it.
The demo video for the G1 wasn’t very good at all. It showed zero innovation. Apple has done amazing things with the iPhone and the G1 looks like nothing more than a bad copycat. It has a desktop and a drawer for your apps. You can drag apps to the desktop so that the desktop looks like the drawer you just opened. I really don’t see the point there. The video also showed a version of Pac-Man running. Anyone who’s ever played Pac-Man knows that once you get to the Peach level, all hell breaks loose and I’d be surprised if someone can get to the Key level on this thing.
They showed a video of developers talking about how awesome open source is, that your unbound by its freedom, and you can download whatever you want without having to “fill out paperwork”. PAPERWORK? What is this guy talking about? With all the malware and viruses out now, I’m very curious as to what restrictions will be placed on the apps written for this device. Will they require the source code to all apps to be available? Will they restrict apps like Apple does with the iPhone Store? If so, what is this “freedom” these open source developers are talking about?
Taking questions from the audience showed how many more flaws the G1 has. First off, the device will be SIMlocked to T-Mobile. This is an open source device that will be SIMlocked. It seems like a contradiction to call a device open source while locking it to a certain network. Apple took a lot of heat for doing this with AT&T, and now it’s happening with the G1. Apparently, business is more important than the open source community. The G1 should be able to work on any network in the United States and abroad, or it’s simply another generic cell phone device.
When asked if there is Exchange support, the answer was no. This is a serious problem for the device when other devices like the Blackberry and iPhone already have Exchange support built-in. The lack of Exchange support automatically kills any hope of wooing Blackberry and iPhone users that depend on Exchange.
Not surprisingly, there’s support for Gmail and all other Google technologies. While I have nothing against Google and their technologies, I think it’s rather arrogant of them to not support other technolgies that people depend on like Outlook. When asked, there’s no desktop application to sync the G1 with, but you can do it over the internet to sync with Google’s technologies. To me this is a blind decision in which the Google people don’t seem to understand that there’s an entire market of people out there that don’t use Google technologies, and won’t either. Let’s try and remember that it’s almost impossible nowadays to get the name you want for Gmail after the scramble for invites a few years back. By the time I got my invite, every single iteration of my real name was taken. New users will probably face the same situation and instead of getting “John Doe”, they’ll probably have to get “johndoe98904594″. That’s not a very appealing situation to be in.
So if you look at the mobile market as a whole, and what other competing devices are out there have to offer, does the G1 really matter? Right now, I don’t see a single thing that appeals to me except perhaps the ability to write apps for the phone. However, writing apps for a phone isn’t new, you could do that for years on Symbian and other platforms. You can write apps for the iPhone as well, so until we find out what kind of restrictions there will be in getting apps to the phone, I’m not going to drop what I’m doing and write apps for a device that doesn’t show a scrap of innovation.
The addition of a keyboard that slides out is appealing, but I’m not going to ditch my iPhone which I’ve loved using for the last 15 months for this device. It’s not sexy, it’s not innovative, and I’m not convinced it will live up to its promise of being the awesome open source device Google said it would.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
-
Bloodwin
