Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

G1 vs. iPhone: All in the Design

I’ve post­ed a cou­ple of times to Tum­blr about the G1.

I used a friend’s G1 for about a half hour a few weeks back: it was my first non-iPhone cell phone use since I got my 3G in June. Over Christ­mas, I also used my broth­er’s LG Dare, and I sud­den­ly real­ized how spoiled the iPhone inter­face has made me:

The iPhone is all touch, all the time. If you’re in an appli­ca­tion, any appli­ca­tion, you will only use the touch screen. Every sin­gle action you’ll per­form involves the screen: taps, drags, pinch­es, swipes. You’ll go to a hard­ware but­ton if you want to quit the app, or if you want to change the vol­ume. That’s it. Not for text entry, not for answering or mak­ing a call, not for any­thing else.

This changed the way I use my phone. I’m now lost on new phones, because I sud­den­ly remem­ber I have to input things via soft­ware (touch) and hardware.

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There’s a fun­da­men­tal mis­match with Android on the G1:

The prob­lem with gen­er­al­iz­ing the soft­ware to such an extent is that while it works with many devices, it doesn’t work per­fect­ly with any device.

This quick­ly leads down the path men­tioned above. To sup­port all the user inter­ac­tion meth­ods that Android sets forth, some Android units will have to intro­duce ded­i­cat­ed hard­ware inputs to han­dle them.

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Aside: how does no one get angry at HTC for these hard­ware shortcomings:

1. No charging/sync and music or calls at the same time. What? That’s insane.
2. No A2DP. I think Apple has been exco­ri­at­ed on every mes­sage board and review of the iPhone ever for this. This is the first review of the G1 that I’ve seen men­tion it.