Review: Google’s HTC Dream G1 smartphone, a nightmare for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft?
Now available in countries like Australia, following its successful US launch in late 2008, the HTC Dream G1 phone is the first Google phone with Google’s Android mobile phone operating system to hit the market.
Although it will soon be followed by the G2 and a plethora of Android powered smartphones, the G1 gPhone, manufactured by the otherwise Windows Mobile producing HTC of Taiwan, is still a technological triumph all its own.
Android is powered by a Linux base, and is the first truly successful Linux smartphone operating system. Delivering a single touch fingertip controlled user interface, backed up by a physical keyboard (with a software keyboard similar to that of the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices coming for future Android phone models), Google’s first mobile OS is a very solid effort.
Offering an iPhone-esque handheld computing and communications experiencing, while being integrated with Google’s Gmail email service, Google Maps, YouTube, a Chrome-derived Webkit-based browser and an Android “app store” Market, about the only thing that is lacking from the Dream gPhone is the multi-touch capability that Apple wowed the world with.
It also lacks some of the extra pizzazz and smoothness seen on the iPhone, but as a work in constant progress the first version of the Android software has nevertheless been very impressive, right down to a unique “compass” feature in the Google Maps application.
This feature not only allows you to see Street View imagery in the maps application (now offered on Google Maps for the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices), the Dream can also take advantage of the phone’s accelerometer to change the image as you pan the phone around in front of you.
For example, if you’re holding the phone in front of you and are seeing a picture of a street that you are in the middle of, physically moving the phone to your right in an arc motion will show you the shops on either side of the street, as you turn around.
It’s a very cool little visual trick that will no doubt come to Google Maps on other brands of smartphone, but for now it’s a gPhone Android exclusive.
Originally, Google only allowed the Android Marketplace to carry free apps, but with that limitation either set to pass or having recently already done so, a veritable flood of free and paid apps is also expected to flood onto the Android app store, especially as new models appear and Google’s smartphone experiment becomes ever more successful.
The upcoming G2 smartphone, set to be sold exclusively (in Europe at least) by Vodafone, looks far more iPhone-esque, ditching the pull-out physical keyboard for an iPhone-like one instead, although not much is yet known the Android OS improvements to come or the model’s exact launch date.
That said the Android OS has not only shown amazing potential but has already delivered with plenty more still yet to come.
If you’re in the market for a new smartphone, and are going to buy one from today’s choices, then an HTC Dream G1 should be on your shortlist, only to be replaced when future Android gPhone models arrive!
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April 15th, 2009
Apple’s delay in striking a deal with China Telecom will also cause them furter damage and lose market share.
Developers here in China are already developing apps for gphone and will leave iphone behind.
big mistake by apple.
Ivan