On the G1

Anybody who knows me (and even some who don’t) know that I’m a huge Nokia and Symbian S60 fan. I’m such a big fan that right after graduating from college, I couldn’t afford an unlocked S60 phone from Europe because I didn’t have a job… so I bought an N-gage QD. It was the only S60 phone available on AT&T at the time (before that I carried a 3650 from T-mobile). I carried the N-gage for a year and a half before replacing it with a much more respectable E61.

Anybody who knows me (and even some who don’t) also know that I’m a huge Apple fan. I’ve got lots of Apple stuff and, more importantly to the fanboy, I have immense faith in the Apple design process. Yet despite my love for their design philosophy and their (usually) quality execution, I derided the iPhone for most of its first year of existence. The little things (expensive for a 2G phone, no video or voice recording, lack of enterprise features) prevented me from liking it. I was not drinking the Kool-aid on this one. However, despite my own dislike of the original device, I regard the original iPhone as “an excellent first effort.” I appreciated that it boiled down the most basic features of a smartphone and molded them, as only Apple could, into a form that made it easier for Joe User to understand and take advantage of. I liked that Apple, a firm that had previously had zero experience with designing phones, came out swinging with their first mobile device. And I knew it would get better.

And better it got. The iPhone 3G improved on all of my complaints. It still didn’t get me to switch (I instead replaced my E61 with an E71), but it definitely moved the device well into “strong contender” territory.

Alright, so today, T-mobile announced the G1, the first phone to ship with Google’s new Android operating system for mobile phones. The New York Times was quick to laud the G1’s features as being “PC-like” and by all standards, the software demonstrated so far has been pretty impressive. You can read on tons of other blogs about what the G1 has, so I’m going to talk about what it doesn’t have and what that means for the G2 or G3 or what have you.

The G1 does not have a headphone jack. It’s not recessed, it’s not 2.5mm instead of 3.5mm; it’s just not there. Instead you have to use an adapter through proprietary port called ExtUSB (that until today I had never heard of) and the adapter won’t be available immediately at launch. Now let’s look at the history here: HTC, who produces the G1, is one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world and regularly makes some of the best phones available on a wide variety of platforms. And even before they produced and sold phones under their own brand, they made handsets for Samsung, among others. These are not new people to the world of handset manufacturing. They know what makes a good handset and what people look for in one. How could HTC, regularly regarded as one of if not the best handset manufacturers in the world leave off a standard headphone jack?

I don’t have an answer for that, of course. Instead I offer some speculation. HTCs line of high end Windows Mobile phones, while high quality, aren’t exactly stellar performers in terms of sales. The G1, like the original iPhone before it, is an excellent first try. If Android really takes off and Google’s own App Store explodes like Apple’s did, we’re going to see demands, from both users and developers, for more standardized hardware. HTC is in an excellent position to create a really flawless device: the G1 is just testing the waters.

Now if only they’d do something about that pesky Apache license…;