The New G1 Google Phone
Google's new phone, called Andriod, G1, or Gphone, has a few reviews out for it, and they've been mixed.
The phone is of course being compared to the iPhone, and so far most of the things I've seen are good, unless the reviewer really likes his iPhone, and then the Gphone just isn't that great. Though I hope you really didn't expect any website with Apple in it's name to tell people to start ditching their iPhones.
Regardless, here's some of the basics of what the Google phone has to offer over the iPhone. First, you can flip up the top to reveal a full physical keyboard, instead of an onscreen one like the iPhone has. The Google phone also comes with a 3.0-megapixel camera with photo-sharing capability, a memory expansion card slot, removable battery and voice dialing. A good comparison between this an the iPhone is that it has everything the iPhone does, plus all of the things that iPhone users had on their wish list.
The biggest difference between the two phones is the new Android operating system. Android is completely open, meaning that anyone can write software for it. This makes it totally different from Apple's approach of only letting you install applications from it's iTunes store that Apple has officially sanctioned. We'll have to see how the open approach works. It will more than likely mean a lot more applications than Apple has, and will add a lot of things that Apple won't allow, but without any controls on what gets onto the phone, it could lead to some bad situations after installing bad apps.
The phone itself has only been seen at trade shows, so no one has got their hands on one for a few days to really see what it's made of. The first Google phone to hit the shelves will be a T-Mobile version, cost $179.99 ($20 cheaper than the iPhone), and reports are that T-Mobile's plans are a lot easier on the wallet than AT&T, but also point out that T-Mobile only has a 3G network in 19 cities so far.
We'll have to wait and see how this plays out in the future. The iPhone may just keep it's dominance in the cell phone market, but remember, this has happened before. Once upon a time Apple computers were the thing to buy, and then someone came along and created an open computer platform (Microsoft) and it went badly for Apple. I doubt that history is going to repeat itself exactly like that, but only time will tell.
Posted by Ghostshark under Electronics |
