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The Reviews of the Android G1 Phone on T-Mobile are out and the verdicts are generally as follows: Partly Cloudy1, but forecasting big things to come. We’re not going to try to hit every point just yet, but there’s one point where this “Sidekick for Grownups” has what appears to be a real advantage over everybody else: dead-simple cloud setup.
So compared to the iPhone, just how good is the setup on the G1? The answer is: Depends on whether or not you’re a Gmail type of person.
Yeah, “depends” isn’t exactly a clear answer, so follow us after the break for a bit more on whether the G1 is PIM Push Paradise compared to MobileMe’s Mechanized Movement of information.
(1Sorry, could help myself with that pun)
Sure, on the surface Google’s Android seems more like a shot through the heart of Windows Mobile — or the head of Palm’s Linux-based OS 2.0 aspirations — but while those platforms enjoy their own historical and market share, it’s Apple’s iPhone that has all the mind share of late. That means, despite Google’s CEO being on the Apple Board of Directors, Google’s Maps, Search, and other services having a prominent place on both devices, and — let’s face it — Google’s full on tech-crush for the iPhone — no one is going to hesitate to pit the two systems head-to-head. Including us!
So, what advantages does each one have? What drawbacks? Here they are, in our opinion: the top five iPhone vs. Android Wins and Losses… after the break!
Sorry PC Users. And non-iPhone users. And we’re not sorry for you having to think about an upgrade to Vista or Windows Mobile 6.1 either. No, we’re sorry because Google loves us iPhone users more than you. Google has an iPhone Fixation. The newest evidence? The latest and greatest update to the Mac OS, 10.5.3, just came out today and it has a new feature: syncing of contacts with Google. Gmail already works better with the iPhone than it does with any other mail app, now it works better with the iPhone when plugged into a Mac, too.
Odd that it would only work if you have an iPhone, though, innit? If you’re not “one of us” (Google! Goggle!), you can still sync your contacts up with Yahoo, who still is also the only way to get Push email pre-iPhone-2.0.
Update: Ars Technica chimes in with a hack for your forlorn non-iPhone-owning Mac Users. For my part, I very much want to apply 10.5.3 but I have a policy of waiting at least a week before installing it. Crazy? …Or crazy like a fox?
Here at Smartphone Experts we use gmail for our main email and also use Google Apps Premier for our documents. Looks like we can add to the list of things that the iPhone excels at, business-wise: Google Apps. That list, by the way, is coming up shortly as a Wait-a-Thon post.
Meanwhile, if you, like us, use Google for business, your iPhone is now a great tool for that business:
Google has produced a new, generalized iPhone interface for its Google Apps suite of web applications. [...] To access the new interface, people should visit “http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com” in Safari, where “your-domain.com” is replaced with a user’s actual account domain. The new interface is currently only available for the English-language version of the Apps website. – [ipodnn]
Google’s iPhone fixation continues apace. With any luck at at all, the release of the iPhone 2.0 software will mean that iPhone users will be able to catch up with Windows Mobile users and be able to install and use Google Gears, Google’s offline app platform.
Update: Oh yeah, per the Google Blog, their stuff is now available in 33 countries and Google News’ iPhone interface is now sweetness too.
We’ve heard it before, Google has an iPhone fixation. Well it’s looking like that fixation works both ways – apparently the earlier numbers we saw that said the iPhone was on the web more than any other mobile web browser were, how shall we say it? ….Ridiculously conservative.
Google sees 50 times more web searches from iPhones than they do from any other mobile browser:
Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.
“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. – Financial Times
If you still doubt that the iPhone was the #2 smartphone in the US, you can stop now.
Just. Wow.
The Phone different Podcast is back, baby! We had a long, unplanned hiatus due to technical and spiritual difficulties. Maybe not so much with the spiritual, but you get my point.
In this episode, Mike and I talk about the Macworld experience and the new products that were announced there. We also spend a bit of time on the 1.1.3 iPhone update and some other industry news. Listen in!
I hate to say I told you so… ok, that’s a lie. I love to say I told you so. Google has an iPhone fixation, as Macworld made clear. The latest piece of evidence for their love affair is this NYTimes blog entry, where Google co-president Sergey Brin waxes ecstatic about the Google Maps feature on the iPhone.
Also interesting that that Google CEO Eric Schmidt also chimes in on the potentially awkward fact that Google is developing their own (competing) smartphone operating system. Schmidt’s take – they’ll profit on the iPhone even after Android comes out by way of online ads. They should, too, since the iPhone hits the web more than any other smartphone out there today.
It looks like those crazy analysts who said that Android wasn’t a threat to the iPhone may have been right.
I spend a healthy portion of my time at Macworld doing the following:
- Thinking about Google’s fixation on the iPhone and
- Looking for a really good iPhone dock / Alarm clock.
…Keeping the iPhone in a dock by your bed seems like a no-brainer – charges it up, lets you play a song from your library to wake you up, maybe even lets you catch a quick movie before you fall asleep. Right? Apparently it does all of those things except the last part – the falling asleep part:
A study in Sweden and the United States finds that using a cell phone just before bedtime interferes with sleep patterns. – study
The deal is that the radiation from cell phone radios gets into your head and prevents you from getting into a deep sleep pattern. If it ain’t deep sleep, it don’t count. So maybe leaving that dock on the desk, next to your computer, and far from your sensitive squishy brain is the right idea after all.
One of the most interesting stories at Macworld hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in the larger press – namely that Google was around at Macworld a lot more than most people realize. It’s not just that they have a medium-sized booth featuring both their Mac products and new iPhone-compatible web offerings. No, the real story about Google at Macworld is that it’s very clear that Google has the iPhone on their collective mind in a big, big way.
Google’s services will continue to be great on the iPhone even after their Android OS hits the market. Read on to find out why!
