A-Day just goes on and on. We’re not obsessed, mind you, but for reasons outlined before, from Google’s CEO being on the Apple board, to Google services being inextricably linked into the iPhone, to Location Based (Mobile) Services and the Cloud being the Next Big Thing, this launch matters to iPhone owners almost as much as Windows Mobile (whom they’re gunning to replace) and Palm OS 2.0 (whom they may render obsolete before launch).
Curious to know more? We are! In fact, Dieter’s Meta Live Blogging the even right now over at AndroidCentral.
UPDATED: Our take, post event:
- It’s not white. What’s up with that? Google is the white screen with search box. How could it be so not white?
- Gmail MONSTER! Push, all sorts of management features (finally drop the beta tag??). I’d be severely jealous if, you know, Gmail weren’t so flaky for me
- Complete open source platform. Stallman must be in heaven!
- SIM-locked to T-Mobile. Carriers — again — FTL!
- WebKit browser — not full on Chrome. Wow, if anyone had told me KHTML would become so popular, I’d have thought that about as likely as a Unix box with multi-touch sitting in my pocket right now…
- This is definitely a serious play by Google to take control of the mobile market, and the advertising money that will come with it.
- And most importantly, it’s a great day to be a gadget lover!
Go check it out!
A-Day continues! AndroidCentral will have continuing coverage of T-Mobile’s new GooglePhone throughout the day, but we here at TiPb are keeping our eyes peeled for those nuggets that collide (or will collide) with the iPhone.
Okay, so Google’s CEO is on Apple’s Board of Directors, but he recuses himself from meetings about the iPhone. Okay, so Android is technically positioned to compete not against the iPhone but against the wide-range of lower end, multi-form-factor Windows Mobile devices. Okay, so the Android Market isn’t a proprietary, walled gardened like the App Store, which may please the FSF but may also turn off some developers who prefer single device targets. But at least Android is leaving the iPhone’s bread and butter alone right, it’s iPod heritage powered by the #1 music store in the US, iTunes?
Eh… Not so much. VentureBeat (via Engadget) is now rumoring that Google may just have lined up cloud-competitor Amazon to provide not only music, but TV and Movies as well. aTunes much?
What’s especially attractive about Amazon MP3 is that, while the 3@$+@29! record labels (other than EMI) deliberately withhold high quality, DRM free music from iTunes in order to give other vendors a competitive advantage, Amazon gets the good stuff from pretty much all of them. (Albeit it only in the US, but that’s the whole world anyway, right Amazon?)
Will this be announced alongside the T-Mobile G1 today? We’ll soon see!
Today is “A Day”, the day T-Mobile announces Google’s Android mobile platform (see our brand new little sibling site, AndroidCentral, for all the details and coverage) to an anxiously anticipating world. Well… mostly anxiously anticipating.
Turns out some people aren’t as interested. Is it because Google’s latest forays into content, including YouTube and Wikipedia rival Knol, and platforms, including Android and Firefox rival Chrome (and gLinux OS on the horizon?), make them think “don’t be evil” is just a sinister plan to catch the world — and our privacy — off guard and unaware? Nope. We tend to like and trust Google. What then?
Same reason some people are less than thrilled with Windows Mobile. See, while supporting multiple hardware and handsets is “choice” for the consumer, that translates into “headache” for the developer. Make a game for the iPhone, and it plays the same on every iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, and iPhone Touch on the planet. Make a game for a multi-device OS, and suddenly you have to worry: some don’t have keyboards, some have full Querty, some have T9, some don’t have touchscreens, some don’t have d-pads, some have 320×240, some have 480×800. Infinite combinations leads to infinite complication, and that’s before you even worry about bug fixing. And for some developers, including Steve Demeter who just cleared $250K from the iTunes App Store for his game, Trism, that’s a deal breaker:
“Do I want to be spending 6 months to write the game, and another 6 months making it compatible? If I had Trism available for Android, and there are 50 Android devices and every time one of them crashes (the users) contact me, do I want that?”
Sure, some developers won’t care. Freedom alone will make the effort worthwhile to them. But these are the developers already coding for Windows Mobile (or LinMo). But for others? The App Store, with all its problems (and they’re still many), maintains a value prop that’s going to be incredibly tough to beat.
Posted on Saturday, Sep 6, 2008 by Rene Ritchie
File Under:Editorial; Tags: android, BlackBerry, Google, motorola, palm, rim, this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude, Treo, Windows, windows mobile
Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!
This week: Zilch again. Nadda. We’re too busy getting ready to cover the no doubt universe denting news Apple will unleash at “Let’s Rock” on Tuesday. And, frankly, so is the competition. Face it, they’ve been quiet as little blue-OLED mice lately.
Blackberryboss Lazeridis is all dressed up like Leo Laporte and is already lining up in San Francisco to find out what Apple’s releasing this year… so he can release it next. Palm-Top Colligan’s not releasing anything new until Nova ships sometime in 2012, and Larry and Sergey have shifted the focus off Android and onto their new Chrome browser, which we just know they’ve been running on gLinux in-house for years but is somehow only released (in what will not doubt be perpetual Beta) for Windows.
And speaking of Windows, Steve Ballmer’s off preparing an extra-special CES-sized Monkey Boy dance (YouTube it) for his first adult Keynote since Bill Gates retired to make $10,000,000 mockumentaries with Jerry Seinfeld (Wikipedia him).
No doubt they’ll return to their usually scheduled schedules next week, and so will we!
Quel surprise: Google’s Android will be delayed. It looks like Google and their hefty consortium of partners are struggling a little with getting a new mobile OS deployed across a wide array of hardware connected to all sorts of different networks. Who coulda predicted it? (Yeah, okay, basic high school chaos theory, given complexity growth and propensity for system break down and all, but other than that…)
Originally slated for second half 2008, its now looking more like fourth quarter, if not 2009. Seems like the T-Mobile launch is so Google-tention intensive, it’s pushing Sprint’s launch further back. Also — wait for it — Sprint doesn’t want to just deploy a clean Android build, they want to wall it off brand it up all personal like (couldn’t see that one coming?). Meanwhile, mega-carrier China Mobile is “running into issues” pushing its launch back as well.
To top it off, Android is more challenging to develop for, which is also a startling revelation, given the alpha/beta status of the SDK. Hitting deadlines is one thing. Hitting them through an asteroid storm of OS changes is another entirely.
Not to beat a dead horse, but all these problems were wicked obvious going back to launch day. In fact, Fake Steve satire’d it up brilliantly from the get go, and Daring Fireball sums it up nicely now.
Keep reading after the break to find out how this effects the iPhone…
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Posted on Saturday, May 31, 2008 by Rene Ritchie
File Under:This Week in Shadenfreude; Tags: android, Google, Microsoft, palm, rim, samsung, this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude, windows 7, windows mobile
Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!
In this week’s edition: Windows Se7en, Great Googley Android, India’s circling the RIM, the Treo 800w guest commentary, and no other news on Safari for Samsung…
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Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the first ever live demo of Google’s new Android platform… and it’s on the iPhone!
[Er... That's the HTC Dream.]
What? Sigh. Okay.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s a proof of concept. Maybe it’s because of the Diamond. Maybe it’s just a hormone thing. But does all the innovation have to lead back to Cupertino these days? Does it?
So, another week, another iClone, and more specifically another HTC iClone. (At least they’re giving RIM a run for their Bold, Thunder, Storm money for the official iClone volume title…)
Still, it’s nice to see Android. As I mentioned in the Top 5 Things the iPhone Could Learn From the Competition, the cloud looks to be the future, and Google currently owns the cloud. Never mind their CEO is on Apple’s board of directors (he reportedly recuses himself from iPhone discussions to avoid a conflict of interest), the industry needs the drive Google can provide, even if they wrap it up in a horribly derivative package for now.
Check out the video after after the break!
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Just when you thought it was safe to switch to WinMob of Misfortune, iPhone JEOPARDY is back with a bonus round!
Joining us via lifeline is Google Android, first among Linux vaporOS’s (sorry Nova, Access, and OpenMoko!) and fresh from CEO Eric Schmidst’s latest iPhone briefing at Apple’s Board of Directors meeting, we give you the suddenly chatty group manager for mobile platforms, Rich Miner:
“There’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment.”
Then, as if catching the Shining-like glare in Daddy Jobs’ eyes, he quickly added:
“[If I were a developer] I’d certainly be looking at the iPhone, and if you believe there will be lots of Android phones out there, as we do, I’d be developing for both platforms.”
Now, for those of you just joining us, remember that Google’s core business is advertising (no, not search, that just pulls the ad revenue), not OS development.Few companies can be good at more than one thing, and Apple is traditionally very good at hardware and software (and wisely leaves Google and Yahoo to do the heavy services lifting on iPhone). Google hasn’t managed to monetize everything in it’s vast repertoire yet, much as Microsoft is struggling to grow outside of Windows and Office.
If Google plans on hitting WinMob standard and Symbian on the low-end and leaving Apple to duke it out with WinMob premium and Blackberry on the high, maybe Miner is making the kind of sense that does. However, if Eric Schmidt is the fox in Apple’s development henhouse and (bigger and), Google can ship a working OS sometime this decade, things could get interesting.
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.
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!
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