Posts Tagged ‘t-mobile’
Me and Mobile Phones (and Android)
It may surprise you to know that as a teenager living in England, I do not have a mobile phone. (Well, strictly speaking that’s not true, but that’s mostly irrelevant.) Why? I had to reason to want one. More recently my reason has changed, I’m waiting for the right phone. OpenMoko, Android and Ubuntu Mobile were all about to be released. In other words, FOSS for phones. OpenMoko came, but it was unusable as a phone. Great in principal, but not yet ready. But today the first Android phone was announced, and the system shown off in a very stylish fashion.
You probably know what Android is, if not Wikipedia tells us: “Android is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices, based on the Linux operating system, developed by Google and later the Open Handset Alliance”.
So what do I find exciting about the new T-mobile G1 running Android? Well its open source nature is a good start. And then the videos make it look so polished.
But dig beneath the surface and you’ll also find it seems like Google has built a great infrastructure for developers to expand upon, with easily replaceable components – even core ones like the home screen or the email app. The Androidology series is well worth watching along with A first hand look at building an Android application.
So is the T-mobile G1 likely to be my first mobile? I would suspect the answer is still no. Give it until Christmas and more manufacturers will have brought out Android phones, perhaps ones that are not sim-locked. Subsequent generations will surely be even better?
