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Comment by auiya | Hacker News Reader

Was at Google in 2007 when the launch(es) were happening. The commenter at the bottom of the article is correct, the existential threat Google faced wasn't from Apple, it was from US mobile carriers. Google wanted leverage over the carriers to bring Google products to feature phones more easily. They had no intention of actually releasing Android at the time, and it wasn't close to being ready for release anyway. Apple then released iPhone and beat Google to the punch, and I remember us all thinking "oh shit this is WAY better than the janky, blackberry-esque prototypes we have in development"[1]. So everyone at Google scrambled to get something out the door in response, and the compromise was the HTC G1/Dream on the cheapest carrier at the time (T-mobile). I was using a Nokia N95 at the time, and while the Dream was laughably bad, I did appreciate the bits of the Dream which compared favorably, like mobile web browsing and application development. I still feel Android is mostly a reactive product with many clumsy holdovers from v1, but I digress.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/HT...

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I loved G1 for its over-engineered "let's throw everything and see what sticks" approach: touchscreen with soft keyboard; and a slider keyboard too; and hey, let's add a trackball as well!

I switched to it from my Palm Treos and held on it for a long, long time ("root and replace the opening animation with a static image to free up 96k of RAM" kind of long time:-)

It reminded me of my first 286 computer when I was 9 or 10, when you had to know what every file did and mess around with ridiculous extended vs expanded memory constructs, just to get new things working on it. My Samsung Note (and to lesser degree, iPhone XR), mostly "just work" and I enjoy them as such... but I can never love them as much as I did that G1:)

As a physical keyboard fan the Dream was awesome. Sure, the trackball was wonky, the multitouch sensor was limited and the screen resolution and RAM was very low by today's standards but it was a great start. And given that it was hackable (in more than one way, remember the hilarious telnetd thing?) and had a keyboard it was 100x better than the iphone. Connectbot was the absolute killer app for me. I also fondly remember the nice tactile navigation buttons, it's been all downhill since then on that front.

I always thought that the BB-like prototype looked pretty neat too, if the keyboard and button bar could have been made more compact to make more space for the screen.

Now all the phones are exactly the same, there is very little experimentation or innovation except for small players like the fxtec pro (waiting for mine to ship)

I really liked having the keyboard on the G1. Great keyboard on that little thing.

It was only surpassed by the Samsung Sidekick 4G. That had nicely spaced keys for quick typing, and a decent sized screen for the time.

I regret not getting to try out a Motorola Photon Q, which might have been a very nice experience. But it was released only for Sprint. And every expensive at the time.

And now you can't get a decent physical keyboard on anything. I've gotten used to swiping and am decently fast at it after years of practice.

I recall the G1 had cut and paste functionality that iPhones lacked for many new releases to come.

I get a feeling everyone in this thread did not buy the G1 because they liked the G1, but solely because they are google fans that buy anything google throw at them.

If you people really liked the keyboard, you would be praising the two last phones from blackberry.

physical keys, ctrl+a/c/v/z! it even have a gimmick that acts as a touchpad. and bloatware-less android (well, less than a pure-google anyway)

only downside of those phones is nobody managed to get root yet. But that is more an android issue. And some people might actually prefer a phone with no root entry points anyway.

I can only speak for myself but I got it because it looked like an awesome pocket ssh console. And it was. Connectbot was ready to go on launch thanks to the sdk and emulator that was released ahead of time.

Android being open source was a huge factor too but I probably would have stuck with the Treo 680 for a while longer if it wasn't for the keyboard.

And I do use a BB key2 right now :) At least until I get my fxtec pro1.

BB seems to have stopped selling the Key2 in the US a few months back so I really hope my current one holds out long enough.

I think that's a take that is obviously wrong for many people. The g1 was fun because of the hardware, and it didn't have an expensive plan, it was easy to write apps for. I liked the keyboard, I could put music on it that I controlled. It was my phone, instead of that mba thing, the blackberry. It was the perfect device for me at the time.

I got a pair of the G1s the first day they were for sale at T-mobile. One of the most used features of them was the bar code scanner and hangouts. Free messaging (many of the less expensive plans had limited SMS) that was automatically mirrored on your browser (through gmail) was somewhat novel at the time.

Used the hell out of those things, I was REALLY impressed with their physical robustness. My partner dropped their phone ... and ran over it with a bike. There was a tire print across the keyboard AND screen, without no harm done.

Gundotra's comment to Bray was "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped -- by which point, by the commenter's account (and yours), Google's strategy had shifted, and they were using Android as a future product, not just a stalking horse. So, I'm not sure there's a contradiction here.

Correct, after iPhone was released, it became apparently to Google that it wasn't just the carriers which were a roadblock to Google's unfettered monetization of the mobile space, but also Apple. Google leadership had these ridiculous fantasies of strong-arming US wireless carriers into ultra cheap unlimited data plans, and/or buying the 700Mhz spectrum for their own country-wide coverage with no dead zones. Hence the spectrum bid. When Apple released iPhone, it was not only a better product than the internal developing Android devices, but Apple also struck an exclusivity deal w/ AT&T which set the price point for these new devices. Google not only had their leverage yoinked out from under them, but they also started to realize becoming a wireless ISP is harder than they thought, and had no choice but to release what they could. I'm guessing at the time T-mobile needed the business inject the most of the big 4, and made Google the best partnering offer.

I was at google at the time of the spectrum bidding (but not having anything to do with phones) and that was a different situation. Recall that there was some minimum amount of money in the spectrum bid to require that the wireless data use would follow net neutrality rules. I remember they discussed this at TGIF and google was bidding up until it went over that amount. It wasn't a secret, it was openly discussed at tgif.

> ... "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped ...

Not necessarily. Steve Jobs was really pissed with Google after they launched Android because Android copied a lot of features from ios. And they could do so because Apple had given them early access to it to develop apps like YouTube (remember, the first iPhone / ios 1 came with the YouTube app bundled by default). Steve Jobs was also mentoring the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at that time, and they had unprecedented access to both him and presumably his company. That's why he believed that Android was the "stolen" property of Apple:

> According to Steven Levy's book, Jobs "concluded that he was a victim of deceit." He felt "he had been betrayed by the two young men he had been attempting to mentor. He felt the trust between the two companies had been violated […] Not only did he believe that Google had performed a bait and switch on him, replacing a non-competing phone with one that was very much in the iPhone mode, but he also felt that Google had stolen Apple's intellectual property."

Source: https://gizmodo.com/what-really-made-steve-jobs-so-angry-at-...

(Interestingly, it was after Android that Steve Jobs very rightly claimed that Google's "don't be evil" mantra was plain bullshit).

Edit: Turns out I may have been wrong about the YouTube app part. While I do remember reading elsewhere that Apple did give Google access to early prototypes of ios and iPhone, this article claims that the YouTube app initially bundled with ios 1 to 6 was built by Apple themselves, and not Google - https://mashable.com/2017/06/30/iphone-youtube-app-story/ .

Whenever I hear stuff about Jobs being pissed about stuff being "stolen" from Apple, it's just so disappointing. Jobs was a master at stealing ideas from others. Not saying he didn't have any original ideas (he certainly did!), but they weren't all his.

And I think all this "it was my idea and you copied it!" is just kinda dumb anyway. I mean, imagine you're an Android UI/UX designer from before the iPhone came out. You're doing your thing, and it's looking a bit like WinCE and a bit like BB, and who knows what else. Then you get wind of the iPhone, and you see how completely different the UX is, and it hits you: "wow, this is amazing and so much better than what we're doing". So what are you going to do? Sit back? "Well, shucks, I didn't come up with this idea, it's all Apple's... I guess they win and Android will ship as-is." No, of course not, that's insane. You step back, throw out the ideas of yours that weren't good, and adopt the new ideas that are better.

And frankly I still think there's a lot to the main launcher / home screen paradigm that Android has better. I love that I have an alphabetized app drawer listing all my apps, and then I get to make various home screens with just the subset of apps there that I want. I never understood why all apps on the iPhone live on one of the main screens and have to be organized, manually; it just felt like more work than I wanted to do. Android might be heavily heavily influenced by the iPhone, but it's not like they just copied it screen for screen, interaction for interaction, and called it a day.

Android and IPhone both stole from various less popular phones/tablets that had better screens, icon based launchers, and app stores. Motorola had a few (not popular in the USA) and Nokia has the n770 (800 x 480). I went to OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) in summer and 2006 and begged the substantial number of Nokia folks to add a WAN chip to their Nokia 770.

The n770 had a better screen than the first iphone (800x480), actually ran apps (the first iphone was web only), and had an app store. In particular Maemo mapper was crazy better than anything apple offered for many years.

The 770 and N800/N810 were amazing, and obviously the N900 was a real powerhouse at the time, but they just didn't have the marketing panache of Apple for widespread adoption.

I remember following the development of the N950 and being thoroughly disappointed when Nokia killed it off and went all in on Windows Phone instead of sticking with Linux-based systems.

We did the same on our internal employee demo shows, but that was seen as an attack to Symbian based devices, so...

Exactly. Wasn't Jobs proud to say, "Good artists copy, great artists steal"?

Jobs made amazing things happen, but he also had a Reality Distortion Field with the best of them.

The number of people I've recomended Dealers of Lightning to and have come to this same conclusion is close to 100%.

Damn Shane about Xerox, they really we're sitting on a gold mine.

Android copied iOS design screen for screen, gesture for gesture, form factor, hardware and app design. It was not a 'well shucks' type move, it was 'copy everything and undercut them to get mobile market share at all costs'. They knew the lawsuits were inevitable. Samsung lost a 500M judgment and Google bought Motorola for 12.5 Billion to use their patent portfolio as leverage against Apple.

No it didn't. If it was copying iOS screen for screen then surely it'd have started with the home screen, which was entirely different. The Android home screen was much more desktop-like with draggable icons, home folders, wallpapers etc, long before iOS did these things.

The Android top bar was also totally different. The Android bar was a full UI widget you could drag down to reveal a sophisticated notifications system. iOS barely had a notifications system at all when it launched.

There were really quite a lot of differences. That's why Apple was reduced to arguing nonsense like "we own rounded rectangles" and "grids of icons are iOS IP".

This wasn't 'nonsense'... Google spent 12 billion on Motorola's mobile patent portfolio and Samsung lost half a billion in legal judgements. If they spent half that money innovating and improving mobile design instead of copying everything to the point of confusion from the popular market leader.. we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Apple sure had a lot of innovations, like rectangles with rounded corners. Skipping that ridiculous argument, of course apple had real innovation too, more than form factor. Reality is that other vendors and device makers were innovative. Apple could have had even more of the market if they had been just a little bit less controlling, in my opinion.

You are missing the point - sure, everyone copies great ideas from their competitors. What Steve Jobs was mad about was they copied the ideas without letting him know they were working on a competing product. This helped them deliver a competing product much, much sooner and did cause Apple some business loss.

So from that perspective, he is right to be pissed and they did "steal" Apple's "innovations".

If Google did not have the early access to the prototypes from Apple, an ios like Android wouldn't have come so soon after iPhone's success became apparent. Apparently, ios like Android was launched within a year of the first iPhone. If Google had no idea about ios, they wouldn't even have devoted so much resource to Android (which they had bought to put pressure on the carriers and use as a negotiating tactic). And if they had started developing Android after the iPhone, Android OS would have taken more time to develop and launch. And who knows, by that time, another mobile OS (blackberry or Windows) could have become the number 2 mobile OS.

I remember the "reboot" bug on the HTC G1...

Apparently everything you typed was executed in a terminal, so if you typed "reboot" anywhere, including in a chat window, it would reboot your device.

Wait, how did this work? Surely not every typed word was issued as a command.

Every typed word between two CRs.

I think it was more like every keystroke was sent to a virtual terminal as well as the GUI, so <enter>reboot<enter> would reboot.

That was indeed the case. A better use for it was running "telnetd" which was how we got root access to the device initially.

Source? I could understand (!) `reboot` (with backticks) evaluated by mistake inside a shell script; but still reboot needs high privileges.

Yeah, it ran everything you typed as root.

So open up a chat app, type return, reboot, return. Tada.

I can't find some original sources, but there is a summary I found on Slashdot. https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-an...

> while the Dream was laughably bad, I did appreciate the bits of the Dream which compared favorably, like mobile web browsing and application development

Aren't those The Thing though? I was in the peripheral Nokia/Symbian world at the time, had been working on smartphones for a few years, and... the G1 was amazing. Straightforward SDK vs. the insane embedded toolchains prevalent at the time (remember: there was no iOS SDK at all yet!), hardware specs similar to the iPhone... I mean, this thing was a breath of fresh air.

Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends. But none of that seems to have been obvious at the time.

Now, it's true that in terms of market share the G1 itself didn't do very much: it wasn't until Samsung launched all the Galaxy S variants ~2 years later running Eclair that Android took off as a platform. But I don't see much of that as an indictment of the G1.

> Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends.

Not dead ends, just a bit too expensive for the cut-throat competitive market. I loved the keyboard and trackball and I still miss them in modern phones.

It was obvious at the time. G1 used a hw keyboard because Android was under incredible pressure to ship to meet the iPhone head on, but it had been originally designed for a Blackberry form factor. When the decision was made to switch to a full screen smartphone form factor there wasn't enough resourcing or time to develop a soft keyboard (which is a somewhat complex project), so they went with HW. It was just a scheduling and prioritisation issue.

> laughably bad

While not Dream-bad, the first iPhone was really bad, but with a better interface than every other phone. It didn't have an app store, so the interesting things were maps and a web browser, but with only 2.5G internet, they were mostly unusable.

I remember showing off my Blackberry to friends with a shiny new iPhone. The Blackberry had GPS and 3G, but its web browser was admittedly much worse than the iPhone’s.

Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4.

It worked fine so long as you didn't hold it wrong...

> Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4.

I used mine from a couple months after release until the 4S came out and have no experience supporting that - it was equivalent quality to any other phone I used during that period (pre-VoLTE). The main source of problems was AT&T's network but that affected all phones since it was do to them having massively underprovisioned their network.

I found that, at least where I was, it would take 45-60 seconds to place a call or fail trying. Yes, this was AT&T, and yes they had problems, but it was also in large part Apple’s fault. I had a chance to sit down with actual network engineers from AT&T’s local network contractor, and the story I got was that the iPhone generated much more signaling traffic than it should have, so it worked much worse than it should have. Certainly my old Blackberry could place calls easily on the same network in the same location.

(IIRC the iPhone issue was hypothesized to be related to an incorrect GSM power management implementation.)

That happened a lot, but also on every other model phone — AT&T had dramatically underprovisioned their network and 2G and 3G were less efficient at connection setup and supported fewer clients as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to blame the phone hardware but given every other interaction with that company I would default to assuming someone got a bonus for “saving” money on network capacity and then had to play damage control for a couple of years. My previous phone only had sound quality as good as the iPhone because I had unlocked it and enabled the higher-bitrate standard GSM codecs which AT&T's default policy had disabled.

I know someone who is still using an iPhone 1 and seems happy with it.

My parents still watched DVDs over composite cables on their 4K TV until this past Christmas when I got them a Bluray player, but that doesn't inherently say anything positive about the quality of that setup.

I disagree, it means they prefer the content way more than the resolution. Like most people.

That's interesting. I wonder why? I would figure the security problems, lack of a lot of extras, and probable slowness because of increased OS complexity (to the point it was supported) would make it less useful than many of the simple half-dumb phones out there.

The security problems would trump most other considerations for my for a modern era smartphone of that vintage.

I have one that I use occasionally. It's currently charging in the kitchen.

Though most of the stock apps on it don't work anymore, it's fine as an actual telephone, address book, very basic camera, and a few other things. A lot of the apps on it are no longer available, and since the App Store app is so slow as to be unusable, they don't get removed.

Safari works, but most sites look like they've had their CSS disabled. So it's kind of like WAP days.

It's a good phone for banging around with in uncertain areas, or where you need a phone that you don't mind getting wrecked.

In my opinion, the form factor is still unsurpassed. And it feels good in the hand -- weighty and assuring, but small enough to not get in the way.

The thing I use it for most, though, is the music player. Somehow it sounds better than the newer iPhones. But then, I also think the Shuffles sound better than the newer iPhones.

I understand it can be used for those things, it just seems like it comes with a fairly hefty downside also. You can get a Moto E5 prepaid for $40-$50 if you get it from an AT&T store and sign up for a $15-$20 a month prepaid service (likely cheaper than adding it to a plan anyway), and that's a fairly modern phone and includes a FM radio.

It's not free, which I understand, but it's also not nearly as likely to be immediately exploited by some of the various problems older phones have had (SMS hacks, browser exploit hacks, etc).

Staying one or two generations behind the latest "spiffyness" is usually a good idea.

That's why I still use my trusty 1080p LCD TV and 1080p AV receiver. They were less than $85 total a couple of years ago second hand, and do exactly what they need to do with a cheap HTPC hooked up to them.

> the first iPhone was really bad

I couldn't disagree more. Sure looking back at what we have today it is easy to laugh at it but it was literally the only product of its kind for perhaps the first 9 months of its life. It delivered on pretty much everything IMHO. It was reliable and it performed well. It really did replace an iPod, phone and PDA with one device.

Honestly the only thing it lacked was copy and paste which I agree was dumb but never did I think it was "really bad" because of this omission.

People can rag on Apple for a lot of stuff but man they really killed it with completely new gen 1 device. Not even the iPod was as good a gen 1 device as it lacked PC compatibility, a physical wheel that could/would break, etc.

It took at minimum a year for any other phone maker to bring something even 50% as good as the iPhone to the market and it took them several years to match (and exceed) it.

I'm not saying the first iPhone was perfect, obviously it was not. There is still not perfect smartphone. However it was a great product and I feel calling it "really bad" is very unjust.

Well, the OP's full line was "very bad but with a good user interface", which IMO is an important caveat.

In every category except user interface the first iPhone was behind the times. Devices like the Nokia N95 could do everything the iPhone could do, plus a lot more, with great (for the time!) performance.

But it's also a demonstration of why UI matters so much. I was using a Symbian smartphone and loved it but none of my friends did because it wasn't as intuitive as the dumb phones of the time. iPhones were as intuitive as a dumb phone and had a whole raft of new features... but only when compared to those dumb phones.

One thing the N95 and almost every other phone back then didn't have was a decent 3D accelerator like the PowerVR chipsets in the first iPhones.

So ya, it's UI, but most other phones were physically incapable of translating touch events into 60fps graphics like the smooth scrolling lists or mobile Safari's zooming interface.

Phones that did have PowerVR or something equivalent at the time didn't have a 3D accelerated double buffered GUI baked into the OS like what Apple had already developed for OS X.

Fair point however as someone moving from a Nokia N95 to the original iPhone I recall things very differently. While it is true the N95 could do a lot more than the first iPhone I hated using the N95 and iOS, while more limiting, was a breath of fresh air compared to the horrible S60 operating system on the N95.

I have vivid memories of getting frustrated with all Symbian smartphones, the N95 included. It was clunky and horrible to work with.

To me that shows just how good the first iPhone, and iOS, was. Even though it had no third party apps and was missing some common features it was so much more enjoyable to use that it made up for those short comings.

I tried for years to find a good "smartphone" (for the time). Palm, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, etc. I tried using a dedicated PDA (Palm Tungsten, etc) with GPRS(!) over bluetooth to a reliable phone (Nokia 6310i) and all that but it was still a horrible experience. Not because of the some what hacky ways you had to get things to work properly (that was a get it working and you were done one off) but because it never felt like good to actually use. Inputting data was awkward with a stylus, the UIs were poorly designed with no real thought put into users workflow for common tasks. Switching between apps was slow and you lose context or worse would lose what you had already input!

Then one day I had an iPhone in my hand and it did almost everything I wanted. It had a really good (for the time) mobile web experience, years ahead of any other platform. A great audio player with their iPod platform. The best YouTube and mobile video experience out there. A maps app you could actually use without wanting smart the phone. A solid email, calendar and contacts package.

Adapting to the on screen keyboard is easy for me, sure it felt different but I could never relate to people who kept talking about how they could never give up their BlackBerry with its "proper" keyboard. I hated those tiny physical keyboards. From sending my first SMS on an iPhone I knew I never wanted to use a phone with actual buttons again.

So yes the user experience was incredible on iOS compared to everything else before it however I stand by my reply that OP is being unfair to say it was "very bad but with a good user interface" because to me, and I am confident many others, that user interface is what defined the iPhone as being so good. Every other phone was instantly horrible to me because they didn't have such a good user experience. It didn't matter if some other phone had an hour long battery life or apps or a better camera or copy and paste. Every other phone had a garbage user experience which made it a worse phone.

The killer feature of the iPhone, for me, was the ability to use desktop webpages on the device, instead of getting "mobile-friendly" pages (which meant something pretty different back then).

I still think I'd rather zoom into a desktop page than deal with responsive designs, personally.

The "browse regular websites" was the killer feature of the original iPhone.

Up until that point, browsing on a mobile device was either horribly limited or various kinds of impossible.

The iPhone showed what was possible, and legions of people started to take mobile devices more seriously as full-fledged compute devices.

I am starting to agree with this sentiment, even for today.

I feel like it takes an iphone release and a set of features for Google to even consider some taken path.

I've been a long supporter of Android, by buying pretty much every released OnePlus phone and a few Nexus phones before that... (before the price exploded).

For my next phone I will be going back to the more expensive iPhone.

Everything built into Android feels like a compromise or an afterthought. The only really well built app is Google Maps. All of the other apps, like ones for messaging, calling, even the google assistant, everything feels buggy for some reason. Maybe it's One Plus? (I don't know?)

Permissions seems to have gone through several crazy iterations, but I can't seem to mute my phone, but not my texts, or mute a specific app, but still get slack updates. I know there are some new break the glass features, but it's extremely confusing.

I wish there were just simply profiles that I could just say - hey I want everything muted except slack and text messages. At other times, like the weekend, I want all apps muted except text messages.

But I can't easily do this stuff, it's just really convoluted. I don't know if my mileage will vary on iphone, but I think that's just to get away from general bugginess, voice recognition issues, "map start issue", bad data drops even when my phone has a signal.

Oh, one last thing on Google Maps - if anyone is listening, Can you please stop routing me to staff parking lots BEHIND the store I'm going to? Use some machine learning if you have to and find the best destination point.

>I feel like it takes an iphone release and a set of features for Google to even consider some taken path.

I feel very grateful to Android for bring the slide down notification bar, easy multitasking, multi-microphone noise cancellation, customizable background image, and more to smartphones. All these features were Android first, and I don't know how many of those iOS would have if it wasn't for Android.

I disagree with you on the profiles aspect. I miss two features from Android: 1. Extremely fine tuned profiles that are afforded by Tasker. 2. the much better digital assistant.

It's more than likely OnePlus uses their own phone app and everything else since their Android is a skinned modified version. I use the Google Pixel simply for the software. Btw can't you simply make a schedule in the do not disturb for the weekend with the apps you want included to not mute?

As a geek, the N95 was very amazing at the time:

1. Multitasking!!

2. Good maps app

3. 3G

4. SIP client

5. All the music you would ever need through Rhapsody

These came years, sometimes many years, to other mobile platforms. The downside with the N95 was the lack or touchscreen and the crappy crappy Symbian UI.

But in 2007, I could stream music from a subscription service while using mapping to navigate, then take a SIP call.

The camera was pretty far ahead of everything else at the time also.

Gotta say my Nokia N82 was a slightly better phone.

I read that Google was far more worried about Microsoft at that time. Before the iPhone, it seemed likely that Windows Mobile was going to clean up in the mobile space eventually.

There was also the Sidekick, which at the time seemed to be in the early stages of creating an app ecosystem.

It’s incredible how many companies in this space snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Microsoft, Sidekick, BlackBerry, Nokia...

You forgot Palm!

Palm screwed up by failing to replace their ageing OS in time. IIRC they bought the remains of BeOS, built a next-gen PalmOS on top, then panicked in the face of short term cash-flow, sold the development group, tried something else -- failed -- tried to buy it back again, and had to pulled out from under them. At which point the only way out was to buy someone else's OS. They gambled on Windows Mobile (in whatever incarnation it was at the time) then hit the buffers when a frankly rubbish OS running on the Treo phones (which were nice, for thumb-keyboard devices) ran headfirst into the iPhone.

(PalmOS 4+ was a moderately mac-like -- classic original MacOS, not OSX -- handheld operating system. Mac-like and crashed like a 68K Mac too, alas. But if they'd been able to build on their GUI/user interface chops with a modern OS they might have been able to get on board with the touchscreen trend.)

Similarly Psion has a pretty nice device. The psion 5 had a nice keyboard and limiting OS. It supports apps/app stores, but required windows and memberships to be a developer. I pushed them to open up a bit to get more apps, they thought it was a bad idea.

Speaking of which, there is a modern incarnation of that form factor in the shape of the Cosmo Communicator (and it's 1st gen predecessor, the Gemini PDA):

https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/cosmo-communicator

(I have both. Runs Android; desktop Linux port is promised: Sailfish also landed on the Gemini. If you want a modernized Psion 5 this is the biz, although caveat emptor: it's from a very small company and has rough edges on the software side.)

As for the Psion 5, its descendants only recently went away: Symbian (in all its flavours) was developed from the EPOC/32 operating system that it ran, after Psion hit the buffers and Symbian was spun out.

Yes! I think the Sidekick kind of gets forgotten in the story of "next generation smartphones," but it had an on-device app store, an early equivalent to visual voicemail, and arguably one of the better web browsers for its day -- albeit one that worked by having servers somewhere quietly rewriting web sites to work better on the Sidekick's screen. (Hey, it was way better than WML.)

The biggest player at the time (in the US) was RIM. This is why initial Android prototypes were built using the HTC Sooner devices - they wanted to copy the Blackberry and iterate on that layout. Once the iPhone came out, Google had to pivot and copy Apple's glass slab platform instead.

I think a lesson to learn from Google's experience with Android circa 2007 is...

If you have the main strategy right, and execute well eventually, you can succeed despites a lot of despites.

Those early androids were pretty poor value phones. But... the overall approach/concept was right. The strategy was very right.

There would eventually be plenty of good OEMs. The market needed a msft. Apple was never going to supply the whole world with phones.

The true lesson is: if you have a lot of money to throw at a relevant problem, you can succeed even if your initial iteration is terrible.

Those "MSFT" were Blackberry, Nokia and Sony.

"Google wanted leverage over the carriers to bring Google products to feature phones more easily."

"Google products" is not how another knowledgeable HN commenter recently put it in another thread.

He said Google created Android to make Google the default search engine on phones.

A commenter on the tbray.com page says the same thing.

Given Google's line of business, online ad services, the cumulaitive search traffic sent to google.tld as a result of being the default search engine easily outweighs whatever value could be generated from other "products". The OS might be loaded with interesting things for users and industry commentators to "review", however nothing could be more important to the company's bottom line than search traffic to google.com. If that traffic were to die down, the company would be in crisis mode.

An entire OS created just to be the default search engine. Was this the first time this was ever done.

search is a google product.

I loved my G1. I didn't think it was that bad.

> Apple then released iPhone and beat Google to the punch, and I remember us all thinking "oh shit this is WAY better than the janky, blackberry-esque prototypes we have in development"[1]. So everyone at Google scrambled to get something out the door in response,... I still feel Android is mostly a reactive product

This is amazing.

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