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One of the earliest “mobile devices” I had, the Nokia N800, quickly became a sort of mecca for porting efforts. In quick succession, I saw Abiword, Gnumeric and other staples of the Linux world ported over, meaning that with a little bit of luck and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use the N800 as a full-fledged computer. (I would know: I did use it as my primary computer for some three months while HP and I haggled over the warranty status of my main computer.)

By contrast, Android and the successive iterations of OpenMoko’s Neo and various other Linux phones simply do not seem to have inherited this rich set of applications. Even something as trivial as a proper .Mobi or PDF reader has not made it past the initial design stages. (Google “android PDF” to see the littered corpses of PDF readers through the months.)

I attribute this to two main causes:

First, like Nokia did with Maemo, I think that Google almost expects people to come to the platform and write such basic apps, because they are a well known company. On the other hand, unlike Nokia, which basically ignored (or provided not much leadership, at any rate) the Maemo development community until the Maemo 5 announcement, Google is trying to be responsive to the needs of its development communities. This includes things like a single storefront and a paradigm shift (in the Linux world) away from package management to app management, which is simpler and more straightforward for a non-technically minded audience. However, Maemo started life with a lot more apps out of the box; the lack of basic media capabilities on the G1 put me off the phone quite quickly (and by media, I don’t just mean music, but rather the entire stack of video, audio and document handling). From where I sit, as an end-user, Google seems poised to repeat Nokia’s mistake of essentially providing life support to its platform, rather than actively nourishing and sustaining the platform with its active participation in user-facing components.

Second, the G1 is also a cross road between two very different communities: a technically savvy, highly intelligent community of geeks who dig Linux, and second group of users that the first consider the unwashed masses. This is apparent most of all in the storefront: even in the early days of the G1, the first community would post demo code or a how-to for others to learn and be rewarded with feedback like “this application doesn’t do anything” or “what’s a proof of principle” or, even, “first!1″ from the second. While that’s allowed the big, mass-facing companies like EA Mobile or Namco to thrive, along with independents who are there to make a quick buck off the goldrush (much like the iPhone App Store), the Linux buffs have been scared away, along with their years of meticulously crafted and beautiful code, like Abiword and Gnumeric, not to mention VNC apps and H.264 decoders. Google can choose to ignore this community absolutely, if they so choose (there is often more money in the masses, after all), but in doing so, a shallower, less interesting platform emerges and many of the gems of the open source world will never make it to Android.

I’m not laying the blame at Google’s feet here. What I’m trying to point out is that Nokia had time to make mistakes with Maemo because it had huge first mover advantages. Google has more competition and needs to move more nimbly to ensure that its platform not just continues to survive, but thrive, and that can happen only with more Google code in Google’s code.

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T-Mobile is my “choice” of carrier here in the US, inasmuch as one can have a choice in a closed and stagnating mobile telephony market like the US. Google is my choice of cloud computing platform – from email and IM to news and weather, I use Google. I have also been an ardent supporter of open-source solutions wherever possible. Thus the T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Google’s Android, an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform sounded like a marriage of all my favourite things: Google, open-source, and T-Mobile. Toss in some Lego, and I think we’d be all set.

Coming from a background of Nokia S60 and, lately, the Apple iPhone, I am a power-user in many ways; except an instance of theft, and an instance of a lost SIM card, I have not been without a mobile phone since I first got one, the better part of a decade ago. What drew me first to the Nokia S60 platform was the applications – and the browser. My experience with the N80 were dismal; an awful in-warranty experience at Nokia’s NYC flagship convinced me of the folly of supporting a company that had no interest in supporting its users. While Apple has much of the same “thanks for the money, goodbye” mentality to its customers, both the community of Apple fans (rabid and otherwise) and the iPhone itself has over the months left me happy with the iPhone experience. That said, I am aware that few companies have the UI and hardware expertise of Apple and was willing to forgo some creature comforts in order to put my money where my mouth is: in open-source products. This is a review of the T-Mobile G1. It’s also a comparison, because I believe that Google has started a quiet revolution, that needs support, encouragement and criticism to make it truly the best product money can buy. (If you’re only interested in the bottom line, though, skip down to the antepenultimate paragraph – begins with “In its current form…”)

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