Android officially announced!

As previously thought, T-Mobile will be the first carrier, and HTC will be the first Handset maker.

Compare the above photo to the prototype (which I guessed would be pretty close to final.

Since they weren’t allowed to name the phone the ‘googlephone’ they went for the very sly ‘T-Mobile G1’ (G2-10 are likely followups).

So, does the phone have any real surprises?

A few.

For starters, the phone has 192MB RAM and 256MB ROM.

Anyone with common sense would have known it would at least have 128MB RAM.

Surprisingly, some amateurs at androidguys.com (and several other sites) seemed to think that due to the nature of linux, and how optimised Android is, the HTC G1 would only have (need) 64MB RAM.

What can I say. Clearly those thinking/writing that information were not techy people. not engineers, and not programmers, but journalists

Optimisation is one thing. But browsing the web with dozens of pictures is another.

You cannot optimise a picture. Sure, you can compress it, but you’d need the original first, or, in the case of Opera Mini, a server in between you and the website to do it for you. Android (and webkit for that matter) are about viewing the REAL web, not some mobile crippled version

I was 100% sure it would have at least 128MB (even the prototype had 128MB), and frankly I’m shocked that others didn’t. There were articles claiming Google had gone mad, and worse still, articles defending Google/HTC’s decision to have just 64MB RAM claiming ‘They know what they’re doing.’

YES! they do, and that' why it’s got triple that amount of RAM.

haha

On Windows mobile, a typical device with 64MB of RAM boots up and leaves you with about 20MB. Yes, unbelievably WM 6.1 uses up over 40MB (must be one high resolution start menu!)

Now, android definitely won’t have that much bloat, but you can bet the O.S. is going to need at least 15-20MB, which would leave you with 40MB to share between all your apps, and possibly several tabs in your browser.

Can anyone else see why this type of device certainly wouldn’t have appealed to ex iphone users?

As my Japanese friend would say, BAKA!

It’s available to T-Mobile customers starting the 22nd of October.

I would like to switch, but T-Mobile isn’t the best network, and I’d have to pay significantly more a month.

Sprint is rumoured to release an Android device fairly soon. Hopefully it’s at least as good as this.

Of course the best thing about this device is that it has nothing to do with Apple/iTunes 🙂

In all truth, that sort of is the reason.

Apple is great at being flash, and they genuinely do make good products, but they like to lock down their customers.

Just look at any of you that bought an iPod. If you downloaded songs on iTunes, they’re locked in a stupid M4a DRM junk. You can’t play (without hacking) those songs on anything that isn’t either iTunes or an iPod. This makes it very difficult to switch to a different brand of MP3 player.

Trust me. They’ll do the same with the iPhone, and they’re trying to do the same thing with their laptop/desktop line.

The Google belief is that you should make your customers want to keep using your product, not force them to. It’s then Google’s responsibility to be the best and earn your ‘business.’

They’re the best search engine (which everyone but Internet Exploder decided to make default in their web browser), the best email, best online calendar, best IM etc.. BUT, most importantly, they offer a good API (a way of accessing and manipulating the data, so, you could easily pull your email/calendar from Google’s servers and switch over to a new service.

Do you really think microsoft would let you do that with Hotmail ?

ya right.

So, make a smart decision. Leave your options open, don’t be forced in to sticking with any device/service. That way, if someone better than Google comes along, you can switch.

And, Google will have to improve. Unlike the microsoft mentality which is:

We have the market share, people couldn’t switch even if they wanted to, so why make an effort to compete.

It may be disappointing for consumers, but if you’re going to dominate the market with or without spending money on R&D (Research and Development), it would make a lot of business sense not to. (Internet Explorer 6 is proof of that).