Back and Forth Forever

Google has officially announced the first Android phone, G1, which will be released on T-Mobile some time in early October.  I remember when Google first made their announcement that they’d be entering the cell phone marketplace and I was ecstatic.  At the time I was fluctuating between the first gen iPhone and HTC’s 8925, more commonly known as the AT&T Tilt.  Both phones were great in their own right.  The iPhone had a great web browser, was sleek and shiny albeit slow (EDGE) whereas the Tilt was slow overall but had a good deal more features and worked on AT&Ts 3G network.

Overall, the iPhone lacked a ton of features (and still does) that it should have had out of the box.  Thankfully people much smarter then myself did some voodoo magic and opened up the phone to third party applications which were unsanctioned by AT&T or Apple.  The Jailbreak community took off in storm from re-engineering the main screen interface, Springboard, and adding all sorts of useful applications.  Unfortunately Apple would break the Jailbreak applications almost monthly with their upgrades.

Fast forward to July ’08 and the iPhone 3G and we’re more or less in the same place we were last year, and maybe not a lot better off.  The iPhone 3G added aGPS and connectivity to 3G networks around the world, and most of all they saw the value of releasing a developer API to create and distribute native applications via the Application Store.  At first everything seemed great, a lot of people made a lot of money and if you want to use your phone as a flashlight or play sudoku you have about 100 different applications that will help you reach that goal; and that’s where things get sticky, and the Android phones seem more and more viable.

There’s been a bit of nastiness surrounding the Application Store in the past few weeks, which should be good news for Android phones.  There have been two stories that have gotten pretty good press lately.  The first is a guy who created a Podcast program that will download new podcast shows over the air directly to your phone.  The second application, MailWrangler, brings the enhanced functionality of Google Mail to a native application on the iPhone.  Both applications were rejected from the application store because they rivaled functionality in Apple’s products.  The moral of the story is, make whatever you want for the application store as long as it’s a flashlight application or some variant of Sudoku.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch but however great Apple’s applications are an outright rejection based on competition is a poor move.

A few days after these incidents caught the attention of bloggers around the world Apple revised their strict NDA to restrict App Store rejections to be made public knowledge.  Alex Sokirynsky, creator of Podcaster has stated that he “will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.”  I’d wager a guess that he’s not alone.  Perhaps this will turn more people to release these apps via Cydia, the premier distribution application for the Jailbreak community.  Perhaps it will turn more people to Android.

Apple and Google are very different companies, at least from a third party perspective.  Apple is about making money and apparently stamping out competition, whereas Google seems to welcome competition and rewards worthy competitors.  Not only will the Android application store be unrestricted but they’ll also have a variation of the iTunes mobile store which connects to Amazon’s MP3 store which provides very reasonably priced music free from DRM.

From videos around the web and reading many tech blogs posting about the Android phone I can deduce that the G1 is very first gen.  The interface seems very inconsistent across the board and a bit clunky at times.  It definitely doesn’t have the polished look and feel that you get from the iPhone.  The interface seems a bit less then smooth and doesn’t feel as usable in comparison to the obvious rival.  However, Google long since embraced the Open Source community and their platform will be free to modify by anyone that chooses to do so.  My gut is telling me to hold off on the first round of Google Android phones and wait for things to get cleaned up considerably before jumping on the bandwagon.

Apple seems to be toeing in shark infested waters by restricting the platform that has made them boatloads of money, Google on the other hand is jumping in head first and the water looks mighty nice… maybe a bit cold right now though.