T-Mobile announced the first Android base phone today in New York. The net result is "meh". It’s clearly an attempt to compete with the iPhone but is still falling short of the goalpost in many areas. Mostly in terms of flexibility and usability. They even repeated the first gen iPhone mistake of having an exclusive headphone jack. Long story short, much like the iPhone, wait until the second generation when they hopefully learn things the hard way by then.G1 Specs
Price: $179 (with two year contract), $399 (without contract)
Launch date: October 22nd
World coverage: UK in November, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, and Netherlands early 2009
- Phone is locked to T-Mobile (expect unlockers on day or later of release)
- Antennas: Wi-Fi, 3G, HSDPA 1700/2100, quadband Edge, bluetooth
- 3-megapixel camera
- 1gb integrated storage plus microSD expansion
- Android Market, Amazon mp3 store, Push GMail, Google Maps
- No Microsoft exchange support
- Feature comparison chart- size comparison: 116.84x54.864x15.748mm
- Hands-on video - Bit of learning curve, multiple input options, keys hard to use, scrolling smoothness varies by app, lots of UI makes browsing clunky, liked maps, liked the background apps and how multitasking is handled, doesn't like the lack of a headphone jack, music app is ok but speaker is loud and nice.
- "Five flaws" - I am rough on this thing because they have had time to improve on the iPhone and so far the result is a step back. Flaws include no desktop synching of Google contacts etc, no exchange support, no video playback (only YouTube) but theoretically devs can add it later, no multi-touch maybe in a later model, no headphone jack, limited memory (a problem once video is added).
- Liveblog of event - Just a walk through of what was discussed during the press conference.
Android Market- No approval process for software, open content distribution model
- No talk of what prices, content creators money model is
- It appears that software will have greater access to the OS operating system
- Does allow for background apps (iPhone doesn't).
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