android.jpgFirst of all, the headline of this article is a little harsh, but it reflects a change in Google’s attitude. Back in the day when Google was little more than a bunch of students working in a garage, their informal motto was “don’t be evil”, this led them to resist opportunities that they considered anti consumer.

This has slowly changed and the example of what happened yesterday, when I went to purchase the new G1 phone powered by Google’s new mobile Operating System (OS) Android, is only the latest example of that change.

T-mobile announced that you could buy the G1 out right without signing a two year contract for $399 plus tax rather than at the subsidised price of $179. Well it seems that this is not the case in reality. There seems to have been instructions from the head office to initially only sell it to people signing up to a two year contract.

While I understand that it makes economical sense to tie consumers in to two year contracts, my company, TigerSpike, specialises in creating mobile web site and applications, and it is our company policy that we need to try them out on the handset in order to make sure that they render properly on all handset types. Luke Janssen, CEO of TigerSpike explains why: “When we developed our first application, 5 years ago, we tried to use a handset emulator and it was a disaster. So our experience has taught us that there is no substitute for physical handsets.”

The company currently has over 150 different handsets that our tech team uses to test our sites and apps, and you can imagine that we didn’t get 150 different contracts!

Luckily, after a fair amount of persuasion (and mainly because of the fact that, 2 hours after opening, the T-mobile store where we went had not sold more than 10 of their 70 G1 phones!), we managed to get our hands on one. But even then the guy from the T-mobile store removed the sim card from the pack telling us that as we did not sign up to the contract we did not get a sim with it.

And guess what, we could not use the Android software without a T-mobile sim inside the phone! So after returning to the store they gave us the sim! This whole episode is clearly pointless and only going to irritate consumers.

But that was not the end of our troubles. Once we had a T-mobile chip inside the phone, and in order to use the phone, we had to use a Google mail account. So this seems to be Google’s strategy to impose a Google world on us. But worst of all is that we could not use Wi-Fi to activated the account so we had to borrow a T-mobile sim that was activated from someone in the next door office in order to use her data plan to activate the Google mail account!

Eventually we were able to use our phone. But the fact that Google forces you to use a Gmail account and a T-mobile data plan to set up your phone shows that Google have gone a long way since its “don’t be evil” days setting out to protect the consumer.

Anyway now on to Android, my first impression was that, unlike the iPhone, there is no wow factor. When I first used my iPhone I was immediately hooked. The phone was beautiful, the user experience great and it just felt like it was so far ahead of the market. This was not my first impression of Android.

Having said this there are plenty of really cool features on Android. For example, street view is really cool (but completely pointless) and Shazam (music recognition app) even recognised my weird music tastes. Plus Android allows you to copy and paste text or forward e-mails, a major flaw with the iPhone.

Another cool idea is the bar scanning applications (they allow you to scan the barcode on your mobile phone and search for the best price while in a store). Although we had trouble in finding products that it could recognise (this will be sorted out in the long run) and you have to stay really still for the camera to work, it is a cool idea and it is apps like this that will drive Android in the long run.

The software is easy to use but not very consistent. For example to delete a contact in your address book you have to press and hold the entry and then a delete button appears. While in the alarm clock section, you have to press the alarm once and that takes you to another screen where you get a button to delete the alarm.

As more and more apps come out, Android will become better and better, let’s not forget that this is the first version of Android, which is still a work in progress. Whether we like it or not, Android is here to stay and will be bigger in terms of reach than the iPhone (simply because it will be on several devices).

My colleague, Johnny Makkar, has written more about the problems that you face when you buy an inactivated G1, read more HERE

Also MobiAD published a White Paper explaining what Android was, you can download it HERE

Finally have a look at this video of Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz explaining about Android  HERE