Well not really, but today was the first unveiling of the T-Mobile G1, an android smart phone created by Google, T-Mobile, and HTC. The exciting thing about this phone is that the software used to run it will be open source so anybody who knows how to will be able to make application
s for the phone and share them, a lot like Mozilla Firefox the web-browser. But why they called it an 'android' phone I don't know. It always puts me in the mind of Starwars whenever I hear it.
I watched the unveiling press conference online. It was really strange!!! There were these four guys talking to a room full of reporters. They were in a really weird room, the walls were like fake stone or something with purple lights. There were also a couple screens for showing demo movies. It looked like the Batcave! Very strange. . .
The guys were a bit strange too. I'm not exactly sure who they were, well there was one guy who was a representative of HTC, one from T-Mobile, one guy from Europe, and one guy I thought was from Google, but I don't know names or anything. None of them were very good speakers. Well, they all did much better than I could've but you'd think that if these people spoke about their products for a living, they could do better. They weren't very engaging and they said a lot of weird stuff that was either strange stuff that I had no idea what it was supposed to be, or really weak attempts at jokes.
They also did a couple really dorky photo shoots. First they showed a really, really short teaser thing about the phone, then they all got up and said, "anybody who wants to take photos please come forward". Then the guys stood in a semi circle holding the phone and all the reporters took pictures of them. Then they did a longer video with more details about the phone and another video with different people talking about how great it was to have open source software. Then the co-founders of Google came up and stood around, and looked uncomfortable, and made strange jokes, and said how the phone was so fun to play with, then they had another photo shoot and left. I think they were even worse at public speaking than the other guys. Well maybe I'm being a little harsh on these people, the only people I've watched speaking in public recently are the presidential candidates and I suppose they have to be really good at it.
The phone itself seems pretty cool. It has a touch screen like the iphone and the menu and display look a lot like the iphone but it also has a full slid out keyboard. It has e-mail, web browsing, google maps, amazon music, and all that sort of stuff. Not anything that we've never seen before but it seems to work ok.
I think that it's exciting that the phone is open source and anybody can make up applications for it. Firefox is set up that way and I really like it. However, for the phone I have the feeling you might need to pay for some of the add ons. Who knows, it'd be nice if some of them were free but also if they are charged, the developer might get something for their work.
As I only turn on my cell phone once a week, my calls are seldom longer than three minutes, and I can't text a sentence in less then five minutes, I don't think that getting an android phone would be very helpful to me. Well possibly the internet access part would be useful but not the phone part and since it's a phone, well, that seems sort of strange.
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