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How to acquire a Gphone

I have a serious addiction; i’m Eelco and I am a gadget freak. So when I was in the US a couple of weeks ago I was tempted to buy one of the ‘new’ Gphones (after this I’ll call them G1). At first I was managing my addiction quite well. It also helped that when I was in the T-Mobile store in the Mall at Millenia in Orlando Florida to buy one and one of the T-Mobile sales people started telling me that buying one without a contract was impossible but if I’d pay him $400 cash (according to the signs the G1 would be $299 without a contract) and meet him in the food square at the mall, he would bring me one which would be unlocked. That didn’t gave me a warm and trusting feeling so I declined and went on.

During the second part of my trip I went to the TED conference. This conference is partly held in Palm Springs, CA. At the end of the conference I went to the mall in Palm Desert, found a T-Mobile shop and to my surprise walked out with a locked G1 in a matter of minutes. Total costs: $334 with VAT. Back in my hotel room I started searching online for a method to unlock the G1, which was necessary because my carrier is not T-Mobile and the G1 is locked to the T-Mobile chips and networks. I found this site which at first looked obscure but worked like charm.

The showdown

So which is better? My trusted iPhone or the new fancy freshly unlocked Gphone? Well, let me start by telling that I’ve used the Gphone for about 2 days and am now back to using my iPhone. Why? For a multitude of reasons. First let me explain my primary needs for a phone:

1. It needs to do anything that’s currently – or fast becoming – a market standard (G3, GPS, touch screen, push etc).
2. I don’t want multiple phones, so it will have support my business and personal needs (business being: good e-mail and calendaring support, making notes and a good browser, personal: good SMS interface, games, gadgets etc).
3. CarKit support! I drive a lot and it needs to interface to my car, not only for the actual call but also stuff like sharing the address book with my car.
4. Reactive interface. If I touch an icon, I want it to react.
5. I really want it to be handsome

I like to think that these ‘need to haves’ are not too much to ask for and both phones in some degree comply with this list. But, as I said before, I was back to using my iPhones just after two days. Why? Well I don’t like the way the G1 looks and handles. It has this keyboard that pops out, which might be handy if you’re using your phone to write letters, but for the short messages I use it for it’s a drag. I’m not able to get my phone out of my pocket and respond to a short message without using both hands. Ok, the touch screen solution of the iPhone is not ideal, but easy enough to do most of the tasks I do in an easy and intuitive way. So that’s 1 – 0 for the iPhone. Then comes the camera. The picture quality on the G1 seems inferior to the iPhone. The pictures are darker and therefore less sharp. But a bigger concern is the speed of the camera. When taking a picture the camera takes a couple of seconds before actually taking the picture, resulting in moved or ‘just-after-the-perfect-moment’ pictures. 2-0 for the iPhone of which the camera is far from perfect but at least fast on the shutter.

Next: business use. Like I said before my business usage of a phone is mostly for checking e-mail and calendering. At the office we use the Google Apps infrastructure for our e-mail and calendering. The G1 supports this in a very elegant manner, when setting up the phone it asks for your credentials and everything is setup automatically. Using push technology the G1 is always up-to-date and new appointments or e-mail popup when they’re being set. (Note: The G1 only supports ONE Google account. If you also want to add your private account you’ll have to do that trough a different application. Unfortunately this is against one of my prime directives). Until last week the three infrastructures the iPhone supported with regards to push and sync technology was Apples Mobile Me, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s ActiveSync for syncing to a Microsoft Exchange setup. Last week Google introduced the possibility of syncing your iPhone over the air with Google’s calendar and mail using Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology. However it doesn’t really feel like push to me, drains the battery and feels to much ‘duct taped’ yet to be fully trusted. So 1-2 for the G1. The interfaces of the mail and calendar applications are a completely different story. The Gmail, mail and calendar applications on the G1 won’t win a useful-interface-design price; they’re not intuitive and look dreadful. A big contrast with the iPhone which is very intuitive on these points. 3-1 for the iPhone.

Next: the differences in OS and community. Apple uses a scaled down version of it’s OSX while the G1 is using Andriod, a cutdown version of Linux. Android applications are written in Java (It will probably do more but the API I found is for Java development). The iPhone’s apps are a little more ‘native’; they’re written in Objective-C and use a virtualisation layer which enables all kinds of API methods, but much less than which is available on the G1. Basically the G1 will perform a little slower and will use a little more memory when running apps. Problems on the iPhone can however result in much larger problems, like a complete crash of your phone. Looking at both API’s I think that the learning curve on developing apps for the iPhone is much steeper but will eventually lead to faster application development. However, I’d like to give the G1 a point for the openness of Android, it’s API and – something the iPhone is really lacking – background processes: 2-3 for the G1.

Both systems offer an easy way to download new apps. iPhone uses it’s appstore while the G1 has the Google market. The bad thing about the iPhone’s appstore is that it is highly restricted. Apple uses it’s right extensively to moderate the availability of applications in the appstore. For example applications competitive to Apple’s apps won’t be allowed into the store. Google uses a more open approach; many applications are allowed in the store. That’s another point for the G1 (3-3). However the Appstore has much more applications than the Google Marketplace. One more point for the iPhone (4-3).

4-3 is not a bad score, but I’d like to give the iPhone one more point which the G1 doesn’t deserve and that’s for beauty. So the iPhone wins with a 2 points difference : 5-3.

Future
The 5-3 score for the iPhone can be explained: Android and the G1 are newer products so there’s less customer experience and feedback. Also Apple just has a way of making beautiful intuitive products.
At the end it’s my guess that Google will be dominant on the OS side of the phone market. Apple is not learning from past experience (or might still hang on to the same philosophy). By making Android available as many phones as possible Google will gain more momentum and a much broader platform. Because of the openness of the platform it’s easy to customize it in any way possible. This is also a risk, making a perfectly integrated hardware and software platform is hard to do when making a system for a multitude of hardware platform.
In the future we might end up with Google’s Android based phones that are famous for their blue-screen-of-death lockups.

I used to love playing those old (now retro) style games. You know, those point-and-click adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Larry, Monkey Island, Police Quest, Kings Quest, Loom, Freddie Pharkas, Full Throttle and lots lots more. The graphic quality was good (i really love the cartoonisch style), nice music and excellent gameplay. Next to the adventure games there were really good level based games like The Lost Vikings (this game was really terrific), .. (ok, i was more into the adventures).
Yesterday i was checking the Apple App Store and saw the kind of games that are being sold for the iPhone today. They’re just like (or actually not as good as) the games i mentioned above. Although game engines (like Lucas’s SCUMM) are available for the iPhone (but unfortunatly not in in the App Store) almost all of the above games are still licence restricted so technically you’re not allowed to play them unless you’ve bought an orginal copy back in the early 90’s. This is a request to all the SIERRA and Lucas Art like companies out there, either sell your games online for a dollar so we can play them on our iphone (which is a brilliant platform for these kind of games) OR drop the licence and contribute to the world!
Same goes ofcourse for all the brilliant games (more important, gameplay) created for the C64 and MSX systems in the 80’s.