This has been an exciting week for Android fanboys. First Motorola unleashes their Android device, the CLIQ aka the Dext and LG announces their first Android device, equipped with a 3″ touch screen and a horizontal slide out keyboard. Spec details are scarce, and it isn’t known whether or not LG went as far as to make a custom UI a la Sense from HTC of MOTOBLUR from Motorola, but it’s assurdedlly a very exciting time in the mobile landscape.
When Google first announced that they were creating a mobile platform, I was decidedly very excited. But almost year later, there is still only one Android device out, the G1 by HTC. The extremely open solid platform that Google created, free for everyone to use was out and about and no one was taking advantage of it save one, HTC. Many companies have promised to have Android devices out by the end of this year, but HTC is the first one up to show off a real device running Android. Today marks a pretty big day for Android with the official announcement of the HTC Hero and the highly customized Sense UI and a first for mobile devices with built-in Flash support.
Hardware-wise, the specs of the device are not mind blowing, but they are not unspectacular either. It has a teflon coated back, a 3.5mm jack, 3.2″ HVGA (480x320) capacitive touchscreen, a Qualcomm® MSM7200A 528 MHz CPU processor, 288 MB of RAM, 5 megapixal autofocus cam, GPS, quad band GSM phone (900/2100 MHz for HSPA), and a digital compass, but lacks a physical keyboard.
Reminiscint of Touch FLO3D for Windows Mobile devices, Sense UI is the new skin created by HTC. Both very slick and stylish, the new UI has the ability to add widgets, HTC’s own or a third party, moves relatively seamless and has highly customizable home screens. HTC also went through the trouble of creating their own virtual keyboard that seems to rival that of the iPhone’s and has haptic feedback. The biggest news is that HTC with the help of Adobe has built a Flash player into the browser and is capable of playing videos straigt from Youtube, though it isn’t 100% yet. Seemless is hard to the describe how Sense UI actually works, so check out the embedded videos below.
So CES is over and after looking at what came out there are some pretty strong themes at this year’s CES. For those who don’t realize, but CES is pretty much the precursor of this year’s trends in products and tech. What happens at CES usually, though not all the time, comes to full fruition in the upcoming year.
Let’s start with the what stole the entire show away, Palm. Palm’s press event was by and the large the runaway hit of the show. Weeks ago, Palm queitly invited some of the top tech heads to a conference they were holding at CES with a teaser ad for the “newness” of Palm. Not many people knew what it was going to be, but many people expected that this was going to be the make or break for Palm; if they didn’t do something amazing here, they would never have the chance to do it again EVER. There was much speculation of what they were going to do, but it was for sure that this was going to be their big reveal of their five year in the making redo of their dated Garnet OS. Low and behold, Palm pulled it off. They not only pulled it off by stunning people with a marvelously slick OS, but an equally slick device to complement the very polished, though still in alpha, OS. I am definitely looking forward to the Palm pre come June and may jump away from crappy AT&T and back into the arms of Sprint.
It seems as if companies are finally embracing the cloud with Apple putting their iLife suite into the cloud, Microsoft realizing that having all your information in a common place does matter to people and Palm having their entire platform revolve around premonition and the notion that your information does not only live on your phone. The year 2009 will definitely be the year of the cloud.
What was decidedly absent at the show was the number of android phones. Although CES was never known for great phone releases, I was surprised to not see even one phone from any manufacturer. The lone android phone that was supposed to be roaming the show floor, the Kogan Agora. Apparently Google went to the man behind the effort to push this phone out and asked him to not release the phone as there were features that the phone lacked that would gimp compatibility of applications. We did see one android device, the Giinii Movit, which is essentially the Nokia N800 with android instead of Maemo. From what I saw, it seems like a sweet little MID that I would gladly trade my N800 for. Hopefully, now that Google released the full source code of android to the masses, we’ll start seeing more android devices start to trickle down.
Now that the gag order has lifted, reviews have simply been pouring in for the T-Mobile G1 aka the first Google Phone. Here is the list of reviews thus far, in no particular order. I’ll update it as more reviews come in.
So I finally got a chance to test out Google Chrome… initial verdict is that it is so so. For the most part, it works with a lot sites that I throw at it, some it doesn’t handle too well and it is missing many of the essential features that other browsers have in strides or maybe I just haven’t figured out how to use it.
Styling and Shortcuts:
So shortcuts are all generally the same as Firefox, which is a great thing, since I’m just about a shortcut freak. I’ve been known to stop using applications if they don’t have shortcuts. The clean fullscreen style look is really nice, it gives it this strange inverted fresh feel that has been lacking in many browsers.
Performance:
I thought this multi-process thing was a great paradigm when I first read about it, but I have some reservations about it. Right now I have about 15 tabs open in one window and bringing up the task manager I seek 10 “chrome.exe” processes running. I’m not sure where the other 5 are, but it takes up roughly 215 MB of ram. Opera with 17 tabs, takes up roughly 96 MB. Firefox with a whooping 32 tabs across two windows and 14 plugins installed eats up 457 MB. Granted, these aren’t true benchmarks, I’m just making a note of all this so do with it what you will. Chrome hasn’t really chugged along on my machine, but my thinkpad is handling it all (all browsers at the same time) pretty well.
I currently have version 0.2.149.27, so it has a ways to go. If Google keeps this thing on track, it has a wealth of possibilities. But my prediction now is that everyone and their mother is gonna create a competing browser now, which could be a disastrous thing.
