The “most exciting phone in the history of phones” was just released on Tuesday, September 23. The HTC G1 will be available through T-Mobile in October, and it will wield Google’s relentlessly hyped Android operating system. So is this the next “Jesus Phone”? I think that while the phone may be successful, it’s nothing groundbreaking. The operating system at its core, however, has the potential to lead to truly trailblazing advances in mobile computing.
I recently argued in this space that Google’s new Chrome Internet browser doesn’t pose much of a threat to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on its own, but that when Chrome is viewed as a small piece of Google’s larger strategy to make it easier for us to do more of our computing jobs online in the “cloud,” the disruptive possibilities begin to take shape. I see Android as something very similar: a product that, in its current incarnation, may not do much to the dominant incumbents, but has the potential to function as part of a broader disruptive strategy.
The G1 phone is not yet available to consumers, so hard facts about the Android’s quality are difficult to come by. That said, Android does not appear to be superior to the iPhone or significantly better than other incumbents and may need to fill in a number of gaps in its features (for example, it offers connectivity to Amazon’s MP3 store but unbelievably lacks a headphone jack).
The G1 enters an extremely crowded, competitive, and continually evolving market. I have no doubt that Google’s ability to deliver high-quality software will enable it to improve Android and add to its features, but right now Android is not a game-changer, and it does not offer any especially compelling or novel sustaining innovations in the mobile phone/Internet device space.
Nevertheless, I think Android is an exciting new development. As a mobile operating system (an open source one that allows software and hardware developers access to its innards), Android may very well find its way into the broader mobile computing space. If that happens, Android may (finally!) bring some standardization to the rapidly growing variety of devices that connect to the Internet, including set-top boxes and potentially cars, computers in televisions, and other products (as this blog post explains).
If Android appears in other devices it could target Internet nonconsumption. Many devices that could be usefully connected to the Internet aren’t yet (or are, but have mediocre operating systems and/or very limited functionality), so there could be a great disruptive opportunity for Google to make Android available in them.
Of course, one might reasonably wonder how Google plans to generate revenue from Android, since it’s being given away and is open source. I would imagine that, given Google’s dominance of search and the plethora of advertising revenue-generating applications it offers, the more people it can connect to the Internet more of the time, the happier (and more profitable) it will be.