I Wanted an iPhone, But I Got a G1

Well, I haven’t got the G1 yet. I ordered it, but it hasn’t arrived. The local T-Mobile store and Walmart don’t have the G1 to sell yet. T-Mobile hasn’t rolled out their 3G network in Kansas City yet.

I’ve been carrying a T-Mobile Dash smartphone for two years. It has been functional, but that’s about it. The hardware is decent enough, but the OS is atrocious. It has all of the worst of the desktop version crammed into a handheld. I still find it difficult to believe that I have to reboot my phone periodically (every few days) to reclaim the memory lost to memory leaks. It wouldn’t be so bad, except to get it to reboot in one try I have to remove the microSD card until it is up and running. Apparently, the 6.0 version of Windows Mobile for Smartphones has a buggy DLL that handles memory cards. So, the phone will go into a reboot loop until the memory card is removed. Nice. Enough about the past.

So, why a G1 and not an iPhone? As an Apple user (a Macbook Pro, and a Mac Mini), I am naturally drawn to the iPhone. It looks nice, the UI is nice, and it just works. But, I didn’t want to change carriers. I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for a long time and the service has been good and the prices are better than the competition. Also, one of the things like I liked about the Dash is the real qwerty keyboard. I just don’t like the touch screen keyboard on the iPhone. It’s too slow to use, and error prone. I guess the last downside of the iPhone for me is that it is an appliance. It’s a closed ecosystem. You must use it as it was intended. Sure, you can jail break it and load apps on it. But, it’s a running battle with Apple over control of your phone.

The G1 and it’s OS, Android, are a wide open frontier. At least compared to the iPhone. And, it has a real keyboard. I’m not crazy about sliders, but it’s an acceptable compromise. I’ve already downloaded the SDK and wrote the ‘Hello, World‘ for Android. It may rekindle my desire to write Java code again. I played around with J2ME in the past, but the phones were too limited and the development environment too compromised to be interesting to me. The G1 is neither.

My friend Kelly has been writing apps for his G1 for a month or two. So, I will have a local support group (of one) to fall back on when I get stuck. I can let him blaze the trail and clear out the brush ahead of me.

It’s all up to the UPS man now.