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T-Mobile To Offer Android-Based Phone By Christmas

If thats android, it looks rubbish! Also, they seem to be using some ancient touch screen compared to the iPhone. Did you notice how many times he pressed the same thing to get it to respond? I think the main problem with all the iPhone copies is the crappy touch screens the use. I saw him press 4 times just trying to close a window... pfft
 
irun5k said:
Now, there are some decent apps already for the iPhone. But, a lot of the stuff is pure junk. Flashlights, "eBooks", animated pictures of beer steins, and what have you. So if Apple's attempt was to discourage crap apps and only allow excellent ones, they have failed miserably.
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Imagine how bad the apps they did reject were. :eek:
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5B108 Safari/525.20)

It'll be interesting to see how this compares to the iPhone and everything else on the market. How will they get around Apple's patents to provide a user interface as intuitive or even better than the iPhone? Personally, I will be sticking with the iPhone.

What's also interesting is the amount and extent that a mobile phone operator is getting involved in a platform. I susect this applies particularly o the US where I think t mobile is about the main competition to iPhone and AT&T.
 
Andronicus said:
Well Sprints Instinct didn't do it, so bring on the next "iPhone Killer".
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Except it's not really a competitor to the iPhone. It's Sprint marketing's fault that they framed the Instinct as one. The closest competitors are WinMo, BlackBerry and soon to be Android phones, not something that's emulating the iPhone's interface but isn't actually a smartphone.

I actually can't wait for Android, even if it means I won't be able to switch to T-Mobile for another two years to take advantage (if it doesn't flop). More competition is a good thing. :D
 
milani said:
I'm always interested in a good discussion. I'll try to hit your points in order:

1) It's good to have software specifically developed for the hardware when you're dealing with mobile devices because software has to be as efficient as possible, and it's almost always the case that when software has to bend to meet varying hardware specifications, performance, reliability, usability, or efficiency is almost always sacrificed in some way or another. This is especially bad when you're dealing with devices (like mobile devices) where the UI is critical, the efficiency, reliability and speed must be maximized, and the battery-life preserved (I realize the iPhone has poor battery life, but thankfully the software is highly efficient - refer to keynotes where they compared the iPhone strategy to the task manager on Windows Mobile, for instance).
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The software in the iPhone (OS X) wasn't developed specifically for the iPhone, so that would seem to invalidate most of your point. In fact, one of the major features of an operating system is decoupling of the userspace software from the hardware.

2) Perhaps a good OS can run effectively (as in hit all the above listed criteria) on any platform, but almost all of the iPhone's UI innovations could not exist without its hardware - and probably would not have been developed if it were not developed alongside that hardware. I don't think that the iPhone's touch screen functionality, for instance, could have come to such fruition were it decoupled from the hardware. Yes, Android has the luxury of a pretty solid blueprint to follow, and could probably develop an intuitive UI without being routed on a specific hardware set from the onset, but I don't think that it can match the quality of the iPhone OS because the software is going to have to bend to the needs or limitations of various hardware types.
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Not really. The company creating the phone with the flux capacitor will extend the OS to utilize it. If they want to throw out the GUI and create their own they can do that too, but that will take some effort of course.

In fact, you can do what Apple did with BSD and incorporate Android into your own, specialized, closed-source OS.

Every aspect of the iPhone UI takes full and specific advantage of the hardware. I'm sorry, but I just see something like Windows being the end result - sure it does what you want it to, on whatever hardware you put it on, but that which is, for the most part, bloated, inefficient, buggy and sensitive to certain hardware.
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Windows is a "one size fits all" OS. Developers are restricted to writing drivers to make it work with their hardware and that's it. In this case, the phone manufacturer can mess around with the OS as much as he wants, and he only has to care about his own platform.

3) Yes, I agree it remains to be seen, so I'm not going to condemn Android or anything. I just worry that it's going to end up being too much. An overcomplicated system that just has too much input from too many people with differing visions of the phone's end-game.
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I agree completely. It's much more efficient to have one guy in charge who calls all the shots, as long as he makes a lot of good calls. However, it's also a single point of failure type of situation.
 
I'm looking forward to the Google Android phones being released

Especially when there are Apps for it.

I can see the Android phones beating Windows Mobile, and maybe RIM, but I doubt I will do better than the iPhone, especially in the future, when there are different iPhone models out there.
 
andy721 said:
What a piece of garbage. Looks slow and doesn't seem to react quickly enough with accurately touch precision.

Lame, back to the drawing board.
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I hate the fanboys!!!!!

You want to know what's slow? The contact app on my retail iPhone. You might want to hold off judgement on it until it's released, certainly until something better than a blurry YouTube video surfaces.
 
Competition

I am an iphone fan, and I love apple, but I really hope that this android phone is great. I really feel that these cell phone manufacturers need to be kept on their heels, because the competition keeps us in a better position. Even though I would never own one, some of the iphone competitor phones are still great phones.

Could you just imagine what phones would be currently all the rage if the iphone and the iphones user interface never existed? razr v13, with red UI theme!

I am glad this competition between phones and cell providers exists.
 
Fabiano said:
I think that google will epic fail on this. There is no space for another Smartphone platform in the market, and so far I didn't see any inovation they have to offer. People in general and developers are demonstrating very litlle interest on Android.
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No space for another smart phone, isn't that what everyone said about the iphone? Don't ever underestimate the will of people. I for one hate AT&T and think they suck as a company and as a phone service. I loved my experience with T-Mobile. That phone os looked a lot cooler then the iphone os and once an app store is built for it you can bet your ass it aint going to take a year for you to be able to put a simple program on it. Google has just as much cash laying around as apple does, so be mindful of what you say pal.
 
As it is always said with other products, competition is a great thing. I love my iPhone (really really love), but there are so many shortcomings and bugs. If the Android platform begins to sell really well, it will pressure Apple to fix the bugs and improve the platform. Maybe, just maybe, it will also put pressure on ATT to lower their monthly contracts which are absolutely absurd. While I doubt ATT would ever voluntarily lower their plans, Apple might push them to make it more competitive if Android phones on TMobile begin to sell well. One thing that needs changing? Text messages should be included, or at least be more affordable than they currently are.
 
xenotaku said:
As it is always said with other products, competition is a great thing. I love my iPhone (really really love), but there are so many shortcomings and bugs. If the Android platform begins to sell really well, it will pressure Apple to fix the bugs and improve the platform. Maybe, just maybe, it will also put pressure on ATT to lower their monthly contracts which are absolutely absurd. While I doubt ATT would ever voluntarily lower their plans, Apple might push them to make it more competitive if Android phones on TMobile begin to sell well. One thing that needs changing? Text messages should be included, or at least be more affordable than they currently are.
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Doubtful, on both accounts...

By the time Android comes out, Apple and AT&T will have a strong foothold on Touchscreen Cellphones...
 
kjs862 said:
Competition is good. Maybe once this comes out Apple will work harder to get the software bugs out of the iphone.
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The other good thing is that if this device gets Android going, then the mobile phone market will eventually be dominated by Unix/Linux operating systems and it will be yet another segment of the tech industry that Microsoft will get kicked in the nuts and to the curb after wasting a few billion dollars.

Plus, as more people switch to Macs, it may convince the likes of HP and Dell to invest into Linux development to save themselves from another Windows train wreck following the Vista debacle. They and others could team up with Google to put together their own Linux distro to be bundled standard with their machines and with Windows Whatever as an option.

Sure, that may not directly help Apple's market share, but a duo-opoly of commercial OS X/Linux development is a lot more healthy than the current Windows/OS X environment. Plus, application "ports" would be a whole lot more "native-esque" than now too.
 
plumbingandtech said:
I'm sure the kiddies with the sidekicks will want to upgrade to this sort of thing though.
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...and it also gives T-Mobile leverage to continue the development of the Sidekick without cow towing to Microsoft. After all, now that Microsoft owns Danger (the creators of the Sidekick), you can best bet that they are trying to shoehorn Windows Mobile onto that platform.

Android could also save Motorola's handset division since that company always made great hardware but truly sucks at software development for their phones. And as an owner of two different RAZR generations, I can say that with experience. Their GUI sucks and is counter-intuitive [most unlike SonyEricsson's wares...they have great GUI]. How exactly is the alarm clock a "tool"? And don't get me started about the tooth-pulling efforts it takes to sync my Motorola branded Bluetooth ear piece with my RAZR. Funny how it syncs easily with everything else.
 
Lynxpro said:
...and it also gives T-Mobile leverage to continue the development of the Sidekick without cow towing to Microsoft. After all, now that Microsoft owns Danger (the creators of the Sidekick), you can best bet that they are trying to shoehorn Windows Mobile onto that platform.

Android could also save Motorola's handset division since that company always made great hardware but truly sucks at software development for their phones. And as an owner of two different RAZR generations, I can say that with experience. Their GUI sucks and is counter-intuitive [most unlike SonyEricsson's wares...they have great GUI]. How exactly is the alarm clock a "tool"? And don't get me started about the tooth-pulling efforts it takes to sync my Motorola branded Bluetooth ear piece with my RAZR. Funny how it syncs easily with everything else.
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Android on an MS device? :eek:

LOL....
 
nickspohn said:
It's going to fail. Anyone who wanted an advanced touch screen phone has bought one by now, and i can say that once your an iPhone user, you are going to one for a while. Android will do okay, but it's going to flop compared to what some of the people say and how well it will do.
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They may all seem like "me-too" developments, but there are plenty of people who want touch screens but haven't bought an iPhone for various reasons. Mine would be the fact that I absolutely detest AT&T. Sure, I can go to the trouble of buying a first gen iPhone and hack it to run on T-Mobile (to who I am signed with), or I can wait for this phone to come out. Similarly, there are people who actually like Verizon and Sprint and thus they won't be buying an iPhone either, and definitely not a first-gen model either since even if you hack the thing, its not going to run on those CDMA based carriers.

It would be nice if the iPhone 3G actually supported the 3G band that T-Mobile is going to use in the US...alas, the iPhone does not support it so its EDGE only for the unlockers.
 
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