Google G1 Android

Yesterday Google presented it's iPhone competitor, the G1, which basically is a very ugly HTC phone and is running on shabby T-Mobile network. Nothing spectacular.

The phone features a 480 x 320 HVGA display, sports 3G, GPS, has a (lousy) 3.1-megapixel camera, supports up to 8GB of memory (of unspecified format), and batteries powering 5 hours of talktime with 130 hours of standby. It doesn't do video capture, stereo bluetooth, requires a Gmail account (fortunately I have one since I use blogger) and won't be sold at stores outside of a 2-5 mile radius of T-Mobile's 3G coverage areas (which basically limits the market severely)

And yet we all do believe it will actually be competition for the iPhone and a possible threat to other large phone-factories all because of it's OS. It's operating system is called Android and is Open Source software. It's kind of a revival of the Mac - Windows - Linux battle we had in pc-space. Open Source means it allows you to put new applications into your phone for free, instead of doing some heavy account upgrading.

Google Android has the potential to take on any competition, or rather facilitate competition as it allows anyone to quickly start your own (e.g.) Nokia. The only thing you need to do is to design a slick phone and put the Android in it.