Writing this story on an iPhone newsite might seem a little strange, however, if any of you have been following me on twitter (TypeZero3), you’ll know that I’ve been really excited about the G1 even though I am a happy iPhone owner.
In any case, last night I had the chance to play with my friends developer G1. Question: Why does he have a developer G1? Well, first off, some background: He used to be a sprint customer and when the G1 was released he found out it was Linux-based and programs were developed with the mobile version of Java. To make a long story short, he signed up for T-mobile, got the G1 and is now a developer. In any case, he published an app called noblefart (basically a simple clone of iFart) and is now in the process of converting his risk-like desktop game to the G1. Pretty neat stuff if you ask me….hehehe
At any rate, I was excited to get an initial impression of the G1, so when my friend started showing me around functions/navigation, I was even more intrigued. It seemed right off the bat, Android as well as the JUST announced Palm Pre are trying to shrink desktop experiences to the handheld level…At this point, I’m not sure that this or Apple’s approach to the iPhone is the better way, they’re just different philosophies…For example, the G1 has a drawer on the bottom where you can pull apps out and place them on your desktop (on 1 of 3 screens). On my friend’s phone, apps were scattered all over the desktop and he showed me that you can even “trash” app (basically placing them back in the drawer). Mac users familiar with drop drawers should get a pretty good understanding how this work.
On the iPhone, Apple took a somewhat different approach…they created a UI specifically for the iPhone form factor and threw the desktop metaphor out the proverbial window. In many ways, this simplistic approach is what makes the iPhone so powerful, you’re never more than one click away from launching the app that you want. I do however realize that there is room for improvement and the G1′s interface does have some elements that I’d like to see in future iPhone OS upgrades. Here’s a list of features I liked about Android:
- Drawer interface for storing of applications
- Pull-down notfication “shade”
- Ability to run third-party applications in the background
At this point, you’ll notice that I’m excluding hardware differences like the keyboard and the auto-focusing camera because I felt that system software differences were more relevant. On a similar note, when we tested the cameras in the same lighting conditions, for some reason, the iPhone picture came out clearer and was a much better picture overall. Maybe i’ll see if I can get my friend to send over his picture and I can write a follow up post later.
Now, here’s what my friends liked about the iPhone…one of my friends was from Japan and the other was from Switzerland, so were were joking about how/if the iPhone could support German and Japanese input. I only tried this once before so I decided to do it again…First I pulled up German and my friend who owned the G1 was impressed because he was able to type in German on the notepad application and the iPhone dictionary worked in German. I mean it was pretty amazing. Next we tried Japanese and my Japanese friend seemed impressed that the iPhone had such good character support. It was pretty cool, at the end of the test, I was able to go between 3 different keyboards/type of input: Japanese, English and German…I’d like to see all you phones with a physical keyboard do that! Actually, I know how they would handle Internationalization and that would be handled by a stylus…For some odd reason we couldn’t get multiple language support to work on the G1…perhaps a sign that these options are buried too deep and hard to find???
After the showing off “Internationalization,” I played with Rolando, Tap Tap Revolution and Touch Physics. As I was demoing the games, it came to me that the iPhone along with the AppStore is truly the key to the iPhone being the killer platform that it is today. I know that we all realize the AppStore is amazing but you only realize how good something is until you see another implementation of mobile software distribution.
In the end, I still have a deep respect for the G1 and I am looking forward to seeing the platform mature. What’s more is that I hope that Apple is taking notes on what people are saying about other platforms (like the G1 and the Palm Pre) and are actively looking for ways to make the iPhone better, because Apple should know more than any other company how easy it is to become irrelevant even if your product is superior to what exists in the market.
I walked away from this comparo with two suggestions, one to each company: to apple: watch your back because everyone has painted a target on it…to google: monetize your app store like yesterday because without the ability to sell their applications, developers are hesitant to publish their applications for Android. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my hands on a Palm Pre in the future…till then, I’ll be posting strictly iPhone related news.
