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Google Unveils First Android Phone
danieltdp writes "Google finally officially launched the first Android-enabled mobile device to hit the market. As expected, the first Android phone will be the HTC Dream (also known as the T-Mobile G1), a device with a large touchscreen and a slide-out physical keypad that will run Google's new mobile platform." You might also not be at all surprised to know that Google is working on an Android competitor to the Apple App store.
I have AT&T, and don't want an iPhone (well I do, but it doesn't really do what I need). No soup for me!
12:50 - press return.
I heard that it doesn't support A2DP so no bluetooth stereo headsets.
And I can not find out if it has voice dialing. My old Samsung had great Voice dialing.
My current Sanyo's is just okay and my wife's Razor really doesn't work all that well.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I agree with your disappointment in this phone. Personally, this sounds like a big mistake on Google's part. I haven't followed the phone market actively, but I am aware of the general goings on. Android has the potential to make a big splash, but being tied to this handset wastes that initial release PR boost. When you are fighting the gods of marketing and "hip" over at Apple, you gotta play the game right. I still have faith that Android will provide a good alternative for mobile platforms, but I think this release will take a toll. It may be more of an uphill battle than it had to be.
I got a catholic block.
There's also an announcement from the Android Community (and confirmed by Qualcomm) that the device will be running off of a new Linux-based and Linux-optimized Qualcomm chipset.
What I find most interesting, however, is their mention of an asymmetric dual-core processor, with one core optimized for specific phone functionality and the other designed as a general-purpose processor. If this works, it will be an interesting new trend and a big step forwards for phones, Linux, and Qualcomm, I believe. (Apparently, though, it still has a few issues... I wish luck to those design teams!)
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Could this possibly lead to my dream mobile phone? Could it? With the Android platform being open-source, I think it is just possible.
What is my dream mobile phone? It is JUST A FREAKIN' PHONE. No touch screen. No web browsing. Just a single line B&W LCD, maybe two lines for easier caller ID printing. And with big buttons.
Without a big fancy screen, the phone would cost less to make. That extra space could have a bigger fractal antenna pattern board or something for even better reception. And without all of those useless extra features, a battery life exceeding any phone made today.
Bearded Dragon
Per the official announcement webcast, there's no A2DP profile support at launch, which makes this unfeasible.
The problem is that in order to get the phone, you need to sign a 2 year contract. As part of the contract, you have to agree to a credit check.
The bottom line that it will be quite easy for T-Mobile and/or Google to associate all of your most personal information (real name, address, SSN, credit history) with all of the information that Google already collects (your search history, email/IM contacts, location).
A paranoid person might think that the whole reason for Google releasing Android is so that it can get a bullet-proof correlation between a person's online and real life identities...
I'd get over it dude. Even if you could put a VoIP app on your phone, the latency is horrible. I have both a T-Mobile data card and a Blackberry I can tether, and using EDGE, I get around 1000-1300ms latency. Even with 3G, my understanding is that latency is over 100-200ms, and VoIP ain't workin' with that.
On AT&T my voice call latency to another cell phone on AT&T held up to my other ear is about 300-500 ms. You'd be surprised what's acceptable. 1 second of lag is sort of painful (use an international calling card if you want a preview of that), but 300-500 ms is pretty much normal feeling in most conversations.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
GPS is there, and tied into Google Maps. And Google already has a sync plugin for Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning has an extension, and it's built into Evolution.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Our small startup was going to do iPhone apps with a nice chunk of funding from some venture capital types.
Android was a bit under the radar for awhile and the other people I am working with were caught up in the Apple marketing hype. But then more and more developer nightmare stories about dealing with Apple kept coming up. And these were above and beyond the absurd NDA crap and other secrecy Apple holds to with their product plans raised all sorts of alarms. Even the money guys were getting worried that they were going to dump all this cash into projects that were completely at the mercy and whim of Apple.
We were about to go out and waste money on expensive Macs for everyone - one of our guys was insisting on some 4 grand Mac laptop.
All those plans are now scrapped. We are all working on Android by simply downloading the free SDK and eclipse IDE and up and running on our own PCs. We don't have to waste time learning damn Objective-C that no one outside of the niche Mac dev community has any experience with and instead were able to jump right in with our existing Java skills.
The sky is the limit for Android. Solid technology base that is completely open. All the benefits of open source Linux without all the useless development and API fragmentation. The amount of interest from cellphone makers and people beyond the cellphone market in leveraging Android for their devices makes it clear that the huge amount of developer interest is just going to continue to grow rapidly.
Anything a user wants will be appearing on Android. It's so easy to modify for whatever end users need and desire.
Bye bye Apple and iPhone. Hello Android. Google really came through big time with this platform.
I use skype on WM5 with Sprint's EVDO. Cheap international calls anywhere. Works fine with the occasional nuttiness and dropouts.
I love how people defend the abusive practices of google, apple, tmobile, etc. "But, but, theyre watching out for us. Clearly you cant have VoIP over a cell data network!"
Fuck yeah you can.
we're already working on gplv3'ed ssh :) and its got some kick-butt features for terminal switching. check out the code and vids:
http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/
The G1 is so full of dealbreakers, it's simply sad.
Instead of an open platform, this is just another locked-down money-sink.
No tethering? Even my Samsung Blackjack does it... running WM 5.0.
No video? Every other handset can record video.
No exchange support? Why in the world not?
But to me, it's the tethering issue that really breaks the bank. Does T-mobile really think that consumers will pay upwards of $50/month for each internet-capable device they own?
Look at the laptop broadband market - it's almost strictly businessmen who both need dedicated access, and can write it off as an expense. What makes T-mobile think that all these people will suddently jump up and hand several hundred dollars per year to T-mobile. People adapt... people realize that they could live without such broad internet mobility, and they stop buying thigs... which is exactly the opposite of what T-mobile needs.
This is yet another example of unadulterated and shortsighted greed and the willingness to shoot yourself in the foot.
As you've noticed, hardly any phones come with a normal jack, so it's hardly a reason for not using this one.
Lots of phones come with 2.5 mm jacks, including other phones from HTC. It's a pretty standard kind of connector. Actually, I think there are fewer phones now with this jack than there used to be. I think the change happened because simple cell phones have mostly been displaced by fancy PDAish things that need a data connector. Having two connectors costs, so they combine data and voice in a proprietary connector.
There's a small inconvenience factor in having a proprietary headphone connector(you can usually find an adapter, and most of us use Bluetooth anyway). But I find the way manufacturers resist standardization (even within their own product lines) to be irksome. It would be lot easier for consumers if everybody used a USB-compatible connector for data and recharging, and a 2.5 mm jack for voice. It would raise costs slightly, but given the $400 typically charged for a smart phone (either directly or through a provider's loyalty plan), that's not really too much to ask. I believe it's actually required for phones sold in some countries.
OK, lack of standardization is par for gadget manufacturers. (How many different wall warts do you own? And how many gadgets have you fried by connecting the wrong one?) But one would hope that Do-No-Wrong Google would persuade its hardware partners to do better.
> As expected, it's Tivoised...
Yup. If it gets totally pwned I'll look again at it, till then I keep my Visor and basic cell phone.
If I'm going to buy a computer I want to own it. They can keep control over the processor that does the cell phone modulation and network connectivity only because I realize that no carrier will ever allow a rogue firmware near their network because they were never designed to be secure against that sort of thing. But I won't accept SIM locking, if that can't be broken it's no sale. Most importantly the computing core must be 100% mine. I want to be able to entirely replace the kernel and all of userland if I decide the vendor supplied stuff sucks or they abandon my platform and I want newer versions of stuff. I want to be able to build and install ANY application without limit. Basically I want Open Source for ME, not just for the cell companies and handset makers. And not just at the JAVA layer, I want to be able to build and install native apps if I want to.
Democrat delenda est
Seriously. This phone is vendor locked. You can modify the OS code, sure... But you can't install the OS on it without it being signed by T-Mobile in some way so they can enforce their carrier lock. It's the same for apps. You can install anything you want but it has to be signed by Google, 'cause "malicious apps aren't allowed". Yeah. That's what Apple said too.
This is the iPhone. Made by Google.
Remember, the iPhone OS is open source too.
You can't buy an iPhone with cash
May I propose looking into the prepaid phones? They are the perfect hacker phone:
1. Cheap for low-minute users. Save your money for RAM.
2. Little to no personal information. No credit check. You can tell them whatever you want, and they don't care enough to validate. Helps relieve paranoia.
3. No contract, no obligation. Just let the minutes expire and dump the phone. Helps relieve paranoia.
4. Easily switchable. Psycho ex keep calling? Get a new account in a few minutes. With the GSM devices, just swap SIMs and burn the old one. Helps relieve paranoia.
I end up paying about $20/mon to keep my acct active with enough minutes. I pay about a nickel a minute to talk. If I break the phone, I hit wal-mart and get a replacement for $10, which they activate onto my existing account.
And the phone's a basic flip-device. No bells, no whistles. Did I mention the phone was $10 new? $10.
$10.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
But no matter how bad the Google situation is, at least you won't have to jailbreak the damn thing to run non-approved apps.
For specific device at least ? Or it's Android SDK Java only still ? Android will have hard time competing with iPhone application-wise without native code support.
Android can do whatever the phone can do.
This isn't bad for google, and I think it will be good for us.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I want a phone with: /dev/dsp can be the interface to the mic/earpiece, and /dev/ttyS0 should be hooked up to the GPS.
bash, ssh, ping/traceroute/iptables etc, an eth0/ppp0 (for the 3G), wlan0 (for the wifi), and sane amounts of free storage.
Also, a simple version of gcc for my desktop that will allow me to compile apps for the phone.
There are so many phones "based on Linux" that don't let you get at the Linuxy goodness underneath. Personally, I don't care what a phone runs if I can't get at the OS easily.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Apologies, Slashdot is a haven for acronyms that even I don't get so I didn't really think to expand mine.
PHF is Portable Hands-Free. It usually contains a couple of buttons, a microphone and a 3.5mm connector. ID is Industrial Design - the design of the device. Regarding regionalism, I'm British and customers generally call it hands-free kit or even remote control. In the mobile industry it's always called PHF, both here in the UK and the rest of the world.
Regarding the iPod's custom controller, if you look next to the 3.5mm you'll see a small oblong slot, this is their custom controller to allow them to extend the hands-free functionality to more than one button.
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If all the google apps turn out to be open source (which it sounded like they were going to do) then that'd be even easier.
Well, maybe, but maybe not. I've looked at a few small devices like this that had linux internally, and found that they were missing something important: a way to actually talk to the linux hiding inside via the usual CLI interface. If you can't enter things like ls or mv (or scp ;-) commands, you are limited to what the installed tools let you do. If there's no access to any shell, it's fairly easy for them to make it impossible to even find out what's hidden inside, much less diagnose and fix problems by tweaking the software.
So far, I haven't read any useful comments on this. Is the underlying system actually visible and accessible, or is it only accessible by someone with special equipment and knowledge of the backdoor? Or is the "open" nature couched in weasel words that sound nice but hide the gotchas that would block my attempts to use it as a computer with a small screen?
I've been burned by this sort of stuff before, and I don't think I'll be giving them any money until they convince me that I'll really be allowed the access that they seem to be saying I'll have. And yes, I have been using linux for 15 years, and unix for 30 years, since the days of 24x80 dumb terminals. Telling me that something isn't allowed because most users wouldn't know how to use it is not at all convincing to me; it just says that you don't want people like me developing software for your system.
And I do have some apps that I've tried to get working on several other smartphones (and failed due to blocking of access to the internal system). If I can be convinced that this gadget will actually allow me to develop my stuff reasonably, I'll be very interested. But my default assumption now is that google and T-Mobile will team up to take my money and then block my access to internals somehow. I'm not too interested in playing time-wasting games with "jailbreak" tools and the inevitable constant reinstalls that this usually entails. I'm interested in a real pocket-sized computer with network access that I can program like my other linux/unix systems. So far, the coverage doesn't convince me that this gadget supplies that.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.