Today, the alliance announced that 14 more companies had joined its membership rolls, and that those companies would either be manufacturing compatible devices, introducing complementary products and services, or contributing code to the Android open source Project. Google was the founding member of the alliance, and is the primary contributor to Android.

The new members include AKM Semiconductor, ARM, ASUSTek Computer, Atheros Communications, Borqs, Ericsson, Garmin International, Huawei Technologies, Omron Software, Softbank Mobile, Sony Ericsson, Teleca AB, Toshiba and Vodafone. They join a conglomeration of nearly 50 other companies, including carriiers, device manufacturers, and chip makers’s G1, the first phone powered by Android, stacks up well against comparable smart phones and has received reasonably favorable reviews.

More importantly, the G1 is partly credited for driving device maker HTC’s record profits last month. With proven sales appeal and its royalty-free license, other device makers are likely to follow HTC’s lead and adopt Android.

After the jump, highly-compressed summaries of three of the reviews I’ve checked out so far.

Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: Keyboard just fair; T-Mobile data plan is cheaper than AT&T; smooth touch interface; flexible and customizable desktop; much easier to place a call than with iPhone; browser is good; has MMS and cut and paste; battery life about the same as iPhone; Android Market app store is good; it’s a brick of a device; skimps on memory; very tied to Google services and doesn’t support Microsoft Exchange; T-Mobile 3G network only available in 20 cities; iPhone 3G on AT&T consistently faster for data. Overall, a good first try.

Joshua Topolsky, Engadget: Charmingly retro-looking hardware; trackball better than expected; keyboard not bad but it’s a pain it’s the only way to enter text; proprietary headphone jack stinks; outstanding screen with responsive touch interface; sound quality is ho-hum; voice quality and 3G data spotty, possibly due to T-Mobile network; GPS not ready for prime time; camera disappointing overall; battery life as a media player not impressive; setup is amazingly easy; interface good if somewhat inconsistent; cut and paste is wonderful;  notification system is great; display moves from portrait to landscape mode smoothly; home screen is well done; use of your Google Account throught software is a big plus; calendar is good but not great; contacts work well; Gmail is “amazing” as long as you can use Gmail; file attachment viewing is disappointing because it’s done by turning attachments into HTML; IM is good; no Flash; browser good overall with some usability issues; media player OK; YouTube fine; Android Market app store early but promising. Overall, not particularly impressive hardware, but Android is extremely promising.

David Pogue, The New York Times: Software isn’t as pretty or consistent as iPhone, but good overall; Android Market very promising; physical Menu button a big plus; zooming around in browser without multi-touch is a chore; two email apps (one for Gmail, one for everything else) is a hassle; no visual voicemail or Exchange compatability; can buy music from Amazon only over Wi-Fi and there’s no video player at all; heavily reliant on Google services and a Google Account; keyboard is so-so; camera is mediocre; battery drains quickly; device is homely looking; screen orientation doesn’t adjust automatically even though device has an accelerometer; skimpy storage; T-Mobile network is limited. Overall, an okay device but Android is good and very promising.

Lots of little differences in what those three guys liked and disliked, but lots of consensus, too. And their overall take is very consistent: The G1 is merely adequate as a piece of hardware, but Android is quite good out of the gate and there’s lots of reason to be excited about its future…

Like the T-List? Read it as a feed.

In a response to questions by the New York Times’ Saul Hansell, T-Mobile said Wednesday night that it had decided to remove the cap. Courtesy of the Bits blog, here is a portion of their statement:

We removed the 1GB soft limit from our policy statement, and we are confident that T-Mobile G1 customers will enjoy the high speed of data access over our 3G network. The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with current customers and potential new customers.

Like I had said in our initial post on the subject, T-Mobile does have a right to ensure that all users get a satisfactory level of service, which the carrier argued as well. But at the same time, bandwidth caps have been almost universally criticized, and would have done more harm to T-Mobile than good.

The removal of the cap isn’t the end of the road, however. T-Mobile is looking into other ways to protect its network from high-bandwidth users, it said.

Google is pursuing a decidedly different market strategy with Android. The brilliance of Apple’s iPhone strategy–besides the fact that the phone itself is so compelling–was in the sequence of announcements. You can bet your last share of Lehman stock that Steve Jobs had the App Store and iPhone SDK planned from the start, but did not release them initially on purpose. Apple first announced the iPhone in January of 2007, wowed the tech community, built up six months of hot anticipation, and released it in June of the same year. Its market share immediately exploded, well beyond initial predictions, grabbing percentage points in the double digits within months.

Eight months after the iPhone’s launch, we received word from Steve that there would be an iPhone SDK, developer tools, impressive built-in hardware capabilities, and an App Store to buy and sell software, all confirming the suspicion that the iPhone was not just a phone, but a software platform. Since the App Store’s release, Apple and its newfound army of iPhone developers have been raking in the cash.

What’s notable here is the sequence of events. Apple announced an exciting new product, built and fed anticipation, grew market share, announced the SDK, and then released the App Store. Each of these steps was dependent on the former. Without iPhone’s market share, the SDK and App Store would not have been nearly such a success. Without the cult of iPhone that Apple grew even before the product was available, the phone’s market share wouldn’t have grown so large so quickly.

Google, unlike Apple, first announced the software, before the hardware. This was a critical mistake in my book, one which may seriously affect the long-term success of Android. While the Android development tools showed an example phone interface for programmers to play with, there was no guarantee of the phone’s capabilities. Apple made the very smart decision to preemptively bring in big-name companies like EA and AOL to develop sample applications at the SDK annoucement, showing off the power of the device. This gave developers a chance to ponder the vast array of possibilities for applications, and four months to develop them. It is only really in the past month that Android developers have gotten any idea of what their prospective platform holds in hardware possibilities. For example, no one wants their application to show sub-par processor performance or leave behind shiny, new features of the phone.

Furthermore, Google and T-Mobile are walking a dangerous line trying to achieve two difficult goals at the same time. Not only will these two companies obviously try to build up a stake for the G1 in the smart phone market, but they must also try to concurrently attract developers to their platform. Right now, Android involves only the promise of an audience, and it’s not asssociated with any game-changing hardware. And that may be a recipe for a tough sell.

Now, this will certainly get easier as more and more consumers adopt the new phones, as they certainly will. But it’s still a very tricky move. To its credit, Google intelligently brought together the members of the Open Handset Alliance, rallying enough allies to attract lots of attention. Not to mention, of course, the fact that we are talking about Google here, a name which carries more weight than Goliath both in the minds of developers and consumers.

Of course, Apple has its advantages, too: Beside the attraction of already-existent hordes of iPhone users, Apple also constructed its SDK to be similar to the OS X development platform, using similar or identical technologies like Core Animation and advanced networking libraries. However, Google does have the upper hand in this arena, at least in theory. Google choose Java as the language for Android and bundled a plug-in for the popular Java IDE, Eclipse. While Apple also bundled a nice suite of tools for its coders, the Java/Eclipse duo has an arguably much wider pool of talent to pick from than coders who have developed for OS X. I can tell you first-hand that there exists almost no recent Comp Sci graduate in the land that has not used Java with Eclipse at least once in college.

In addition, Android carries the label of “open source” to attract free software devotees, and has no cost, cross-platform tools for download on its site. And let us not forget that Android is an operating system, not tied to one device. It will have some appeal that the iPhone won’t as more and more “with Google” devices are released in the upcoming years. Not to mention that Android will be released internationally on a broad scale soon after it hits the United States, a move which Apple waited a year to make.

As different as these two strategies are, however, they’re both completely characteristic of the two companies in question. Google is all about software across many platforms, whether it be programs that run on OS X, Linux, and Windows or Web applications that run in all major browsers. Google puts every ounce of sweat it has into integrating itself further into your online life, and that’s exactly what Android will help them do.

Apple, on the other hand, is all about hardware and software integration. It’s true that Apple designs beautiful hardware, but it’s not a hardware company. It’s also true that Apple designs great software, but it’s not a software company either. The brilliance of Steve Jobs was to tackle both hardware and software design for Apple products. Apple didn’t design a PC and it didn’t design an operating system. Apple orchestrated an experience.

As both companies entice developers with promises of an easy transition to their platforms as well as the promise of profit, the choices that the programming workforce make in this arena will speak volumes about the future of these new mobile platforms.

What the G1 doesn’t seem to be is transcendent–a phone that’s as impressive as the iPhone, but in different ways. And the world could use such a phone. Some stuff about the iPhone is a matter of personal preference: Lots of folks are OK with the onscreen keyboard, but there are at least as many hardcore smartphone users who won’t ever buy a phone that doesn’t have (to quote Steve Jobs) little plastic keys.

Then there are the things about the iPhone that may stress out even Apple’s biggest fans, such as the company’s monopoly on application distribution and its mysterious, troubling policies on what does and doesn’t get in. All in all, I think there’s an opportunity for somebody to build a phone that’s the opposite of an iPhone in some ways, and better than an iPhone in others, and maybe even open in ways that no phone has been to date. And Google’s Android OS seems like the best platform to build it on.

So what would such an Anti-iPhone (AntiPhone?) look like?

It would have a keyboard. A terrific one. One significantly better than any phone, ever. (The G1 appears to have a keyboard that’s typical of manufacturer HTC–better than that of most phones, but not as good as you could do in that amount of space.) RIM and Palm pretty much have itty-bitty keyboards nailed, so let’s give the Anti-iPhone a clamshell case that holds a larger, wider keyboard that aims to feel like that of a notebook, only in Lilliputian form. I know I’m repeating myself, but all you really have to do is imitate the keyboard the Psion Series 5 PDA had in 1997. Yes, it would make the phone chunkier than an iPhone, but for plenty of folks the tradeoff would be well worth it.

It would have a big multi-touch screen. Let’s not tamper with the iPhone’s recipe here. Actually, let’s improve it by giving the screen even more resolution than the iPhone’s 320-by-480 display. This Toshiba phone has a 400-by-800 screen, so it’s doable.

It would offer 16GB of internal memory, like an iPhone–and a MicroSD slot, like a G1. Assuming it’s possible to cram both in.

It would use its built-in GPS for step-by-step driving instructions. Neither the iPhone nor the G1 do this; a phone that did would eliminate the need for a standalone navigation device.

It would have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Like the iPhone 3G and unlike the G1.

It would have a removable battery. Probably. Actually, scratch that–I’m willing to deal with a sealed one if it helps keep the phone relatively thin.

It would have at least some of the polish of the iPhone UI, but with more depth. Let’s face it–nobody other than Apple is going to anything as slick as the iPhone. But other companies should try, at least–and I’m still curious whether Android offers more options to users for customizing the user interface than the iPhone does. (Shouldn’t be hard–the iPhone offers almost nothing.)

It would have an accelerometer and use it better than the iPhone does. The iPhone apps that auto-rotate the screen rock, but most don’t do it. My Windows Mobile-powered AT&T Tilt can rotate any app, so we know it’s possible to build it into the OS. (I’m not sure how Android in general or the G1 in specific handles this.)

It could be used as a tethered modem for a laptop. No third-party app needed–it would just be built in. I’d even be happy to pay extra.

It would have synching with online mail, calendar, etc. that really worked, all the time. Ideally, it would sync with multiple services from multiple companies–Gmail and Google Calendar, Exchange, you name it.

It would have excellent, Office-compatible productivity apps built in. With, of course, editing capability and effortless syncing with desktop documents. (I wonder if DataViz is giving any thoughts to a Documents to Go for Android?)

It would have an easy-to-understand and truly unlimited data plan. No chintzing on SMS or caps on bandwidth.

It would be really and truly open. Developers would be able to write applications of all sorts; consumers would be able to buy them from multiple online stores. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

It would be available unlocked. Again, I’m perfectly happy to pay extra; I don’t like contracts and phones that only work on one network, but understand that they’re what make $179 and $199 smartphones possible. I want the option of paying full price with no comitment–that’s what I did with my Tilt.

It would be available on multiple carriers. Both AT&T and Verizon, at least, so you could choose between international coverage and widespread 3G at home. Altrernative: Give it the ability to do both GSM and CDMA, like a BlackBerry World Edition phone.

If this phone existed, I’d weep with joy, pay a pretty penny for it, and switch carriers if necessary. Would you? And if not, what would your own personal Anti iPhone consist of?

]]> http://technologizer.com/2008/09/24/android-anti-iphone/feed/ 7 Harry McCracken android1 http://technologizer.com/2008/09/23/t-mobile-g1-android-question/ http://technologizer.com/2008/09/23/t-mobile-g1-android-question/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:32:41 +0000 Harry McCracken http://technologizer.wordpress.com/?p=2312 ]]> We now know a heck of a lot more about T-Mobile’s G1–the first “Googlephone”–than we did last night. But the phone won’t show up for almost another month. So unless you’re lucky enough to be one of the few folks who has one now–such as Walt Mossberg–it’s impossible to answer the most important question about the phone. Which is, of course, “Is it any good?” (Actually even Walt is reserving judgement, although he’s pretty positive overall.)

That leaves plenty of time to ask questions about the phone and the Android OS it’s based on. Such as…

1. How’s the touch interface? The implementation of touch on the iPhone is…well, it’s perfect. It requires no learning, works exactly how you expect it to at all times, and is so generally delightful that you forgive the iPhone for a fair share of shortcomings. I’ve never seen another phone with a touchscreen that comes close–and in particular, I’ve even seen executives from HTC, the G1′s manufacturer, fumble with earlier touch-driven HTC phones such as the Touch. That can’t be a good sign.

The success of the iPhone’s touch UI is due to multiple factors: The hardware is good, the software is great, and Apple did a bang-up job of making them work together. You get the feeling that it was willing to go to any lengths to make the experience flawless. With the G1, however, you have a relatively inexperienced software company (Google) partnering with a hardware company (HTC) that’s never done great touch before. The results seemed to work pretty well in the videos shown during this morning’s launch Webcast, but I was struck by the fact that all the G1 touch examples during the launch were canned–nobody involved in the G1 just used it. By contrast, all of the launches involving the iPhone have involved Steve Jobs and other Apple execs showing off touch in live demos.

2. Does the browser rival Mobile Safari? It’s based on the same Webkit rendering engine, so pages should look similar. But it’s not clear how usable the Android browser is. It does look like zooming in and out, which involves moving a lens around on the page, isn’t as wonderfully intuitive as the iPhone’s pinching and pulling gestures.

3. Will Google avoid a MobileMe-like mess? Its integration of Android with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk sounds a lot like the ambitious things that Apple is doing with MobileMe–and which failed miserably at first. You gotta think that rolling out Web services to vast numbers of people all at once plays more to Google’s strengths than Apple’s, but I want confirmation that all the Google services are running smoothly before I come to any conclusions.

4. Will the G1 feel like a more open device than the iPhone? The Webcast today touted the Android platform’s openness as a defining characteristic. But when two things that help make a phone feel open to consumers came up–the ability to tether it as a laptop modem and to unlock it for use with other carriers–the T-Mobile exec onstage shot ‘em down without blinking. Also unknown to me: Whether the App Market software store provided to G1 users will be a true bazaar or a boutique where a number of applications consumers might very well want to buy aren’t allowed. Could someone put a tethering app on the Market? A VoIP one? One that competes with something that T-Mobile would like to sell you?

5. Will Android’s openness be a disaster? Apple keeps saying that the variou ways in which it’s locked down the iPhone are, in part, to prevent flaky applications from screwing up the AT&T network, creating security vulnerabilities, etc., etc. That’s a defensible position. But it’s very different from the one taken by Google and its Open Handset Alliance partners. My sense, though, is that it’s possible to build a locked-down phone based on the open Android platform: The fact that Android is open doesn’t mean that G1 owners will be able to install apps willy nilly (or, if you prefer to look at it this way, to be the victims of dangerous, poorly written software).

6.. How’s the keyboard? It sits in a recessed area with a chunk of phone directly to the right that looks like it would interfere with typing. Walt found it to be “OK, but not great.” I still think that it’s possible to build a phone with a better keyboard than any phone has had to date–if all a manufacturer did was rip off the keyboard from the Psion 5 palmtop I bought eleven years ago, it would be a great leap forward. But the G1 doesn’t seem to be it.

7. What’s with the headphone jack? I can’t fathom how anyone could release a smartphone in 2008 that won’t work with standard headphones, no adapter required. (Then again, I was startled when Apple released the first-generation iPhone a year ago with the same issue.) Headphone jack standardization doesn’t seem to be a high priority with HTC: They made my AT&T Tilt, which, while a fine phone in multiple ways, sports a bizarre USB headphone jack. (Update: According to Ryan Block, the G1 has the same oddball jack.)

8. Are Google and T-Mobile ceding multimedia to Apple? The G1′s inclusion of an Amazon-powered MP3 store sounds neat, but it sounds like the G1 doesn’t attempt to be the entertainment powerhouse that the iPhone is. It comes with a skimpy 1GB of RAM and there’s no way to match the iPhone 3G’s 16GB maximum; it apparently doesn’t include a general-purpose video player or any way to buy movies and TV shows; you can only download music over Wi-Fi, and it’s unclear whether there’s any mechanism for synching the phone’s music library with tunes you’ve stored on a PC. I can understand why Apple would go all out to make the iPhone a great entertainment device–if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be an iPod–and why Google might not be so aggressive. But I’m still curious to see whether the G1 and future Android devices go further with audio and video. Presumably they’ll have to, or folks will stop talking about the phone and the platform as the iPhone’s principal rival.

9. How about gaming? Among the many things that Apple wants the iPhone to be is a serious gaming handheld. I haven’t heard too much about T-Mobile and Google’s plans here. It may not be a great sign that the Webcast this morning spotlighted Pac-Man.

10. Is the T-Mobile network going to be a bummer? During the Webcast, the company laid out its plans for pervasive 3G. At the moment, though, it’s a laggard that’s just now deploying a fast wireless network. We know that the iPhone is a dramatically more pleasing phone when it’s whipping along at true 3G speeds than when it’s bogged down by EDGE. How will the G1 fare? T-Mobile is being careful about selling the phone in areas without 3G–that’s probably a responsible move, but it isn’t a good omen.

11. What’s next after the G1? We’ll never see an iPhone that doesn’t represent Apple’s view–as sound as it is in most respects–of what a phone should be. LG, Motorola, and Samsung are all Open Handset Alliance members, and Sprint and a bunch of international carriers are, too. Android will be far more interesting if it spawns a bunch of radically different devices than if it simply powers a bunch that are kinda sorta like the G1.

12. Is Google in this for the long haul? Apple is clearly putting its all into the iPhone–it seems entirely plausible that the platform, like the Mac, will be around a quarter century after its origin. Google will certainly be around 25 years from now, but I wouldn’t hazard a guess about Android’s longevity at this point. On one hand, Google circa 2008 is serious about mobile software and services and is doing some cool stuff on multiple fronts; on the other, the company has a famously short attention span in some cases.

Fine print on the carrier’s page for the device may give some pause, especially for the heavy data users among us.

“If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less. Your data session, plan, or service may be suspended, terminated, or restricted for significant roaming or if you use your service in a way that interferes with our network or ability to provide quality service to other users.”

While of course the company is well within its rights to attempt to keep service available for all of its users, the data limits stink. A majority of users will probably never make it to 1GB of data, I’ve been able to use 600MB easy in a month on my iPhone, and I know others who’ve used far more. Getting throttled, especially after I am paying a premium for faster data, would anger me quite a bit.

I’ve done a search through AT&T’s policies for the iPhone and cannot find a similar policy for the iPhone. When Canada’s Rogers came out in July with its meager data plans which capped data at 1GB (that is for data included in the plan), they were rightly criticized for it.

One thing is for sure — T-Mobile shouldn’t be advertising this as an “unlimited 3G data,” because technically that  isn’t true true. I guess it remains to be seen how aggressively they’ll police this. Don’t be surprised if users begin to complain quite vocally if the carrier has a heavy hand.

We’ve got a request in for official comment, and we’ll update this post if and when we hear back.

Still, there’s some value in a simple features comparison. Here’s my first stab at one, with data from sources such as Gizmodo’s writeup of the G1. (What’s a T-Grid? It’s an at-a-glance comparison in this format, and we’ll be doing them on other topics as appropriate.)

Want to avoid reading the chart? The bottom line is that the phones share lots and lots of features. But the G1 is chunkier but has a real keyboard; it has a little memory (1GB) in the form of a replaceable MicroSD card rather than the iPhone’s generous fixed memory; and it’s much less evolved from a multimedia standpoint but does offer the Amazon MP3 store, which sounds good. Oh, and it’s based on Google’s open Android operating system rather than Apple’s decidedly non-open OS X–a fact that’s likely to be a defining characteristic, but it’s hard to say exactly how until third-party apps start to appear. And it’s clear that the iPhone 3G benefits from being a second-generation product–the Exchange support, for instance, only arrived with the iPhone 2.0 software.

[UPDATE! This chart is, I hope, full of answers; this post is full of G1 and Android questions I still have--and which might be on your mind, too.]

Without any further ado…

The phones	T-Mobile G1	Apple iPhone 3G
Platform	Google’s open Android OS	Apple’s proprietary OS X
Availability	October 22	Now, although supply is occasionally spotty
Price	$179 with 2-year contract	$199 for 8GB model or $299 for 16GB model with two-year contract
Data plan	$25 a month for unlimited data and “some” messaging; $35 for unlimited data and messaging	$30 a month for unlimited data; $5 a month extra for 200 text messages
Locked?	Yup, to T-Mobile	Yup, to AT&T
Colors	Brown, black, and white	Black (8GB and 16GB); white (16GB only)
Size and weight	4.60” by 2.16” by 0.62”; 5.6 oz.	4.5″ by 2.4″by 0.48″; 4.7 oz.
Screen size and resolution	3.17″; 480 by 320	3.5″; 480 by 320
Input	Touchscreen and QWERTY under slide-out screen	Touchscreen with on-screen keyboard
Accelerometer	Yes	Yes
Headphone jack	Proprietary (ack!)	Standard 3.5mm
Memory	MicroSD slot accepts up to 8GB cards; bundled with 1GB card	8GB and 16GB models available; no memory expansion
Camera	3.1 megapixels; no video	2 megapixels; no video
Voice	Quad-band GSM	Quad-band GSM
Data	3G (UMTS with HSDPA, if you want to get technical) over T-Mobile’s 3G network, which is just rolling out	3G (UMTS with HSDPA, if you want to get technical) over AT&T’s less spotty but still limited network
Use as tethered modem?	T-Mobile sez no	Violates AT&T’s terms of service; tethering plan is rumored
Wi-Fi and GPS	Done and done	Ditto and ditto
Battery	5 hours talk time; 130 hours standby; removable	5 hours talk time; 300 hours standby; not removable
Web browser	Web-kit based browser	Webkit-based Safari
Web searching	Yes, via Google with dedicated button	Yes, via Google or Yahoo
E-Mail	GMail; other services supported through IMAP	MobileMe, GMail, Yahoo Mail, AOL; other services supported through IMAP
Microsoft Exchange support	Not yet	Yes
Instant messaging	Yes, Google Talk	Only through third-party apps
Maps	Yes, with Google Street View “compass mode” that shows street images that follow your movements	Yes
Turn-by-turn navigation	Apparently not	No, but may be coming from third party developer(s)
Music	Music player and Amazon MP3 Store	iPod player and iTunes Store
Video	YouTube; other options unknown	iPod player, YouTube; movies through iTunes Store
Calendar	Yes, synching with Google Calendar	Yes, synching with MobileMe
Photos	Yes	Yes
Desktop synching	No	Yes, through iTunes
Application store	Yes, the App Market	Yes, the iTunes App Store