iPhone vs Google’s 1st Android Phone

Every time a new phone comes out with a touch screen, every obliquely tech related blog comes out with some story title like, “*New-Phone-Name* The iPhone Killer?” And each time it’s total crap. So this is not about an iPhone killer. Rather, what makes the T-Mobile’s G1 better and worse than the Apple iPhone?

With a touchscreen, a trackball, and a QWERTY keyboard, the G1 has more hardware potential than the iPhone. If that were the only factor involved, the G1 would have headlines, CBS news shorts, and lines wrapping around mall T-Mobile stands.

But the fact of the matter is, the G1 is no comparison to the iPhone. The iPhone’s media management is far superior: cover flow view, smooth as butter song searching, and standard 3.5 mm headphones. Not only that, but the iPhone has a much better web browsing experience. Multi-touch is much more intuitive. The zoom buttons on the G1 look outdated and bulky next to the iPhone… not to mention the choppy scrolling. These are some of the most common uses on mobile phones and Google should have made these experiences similar to the iPhone to even have a chance at a solid comparison.

The upside of the G1 (besides the hardware) is the fluidity of the Android OS. Being Open Source, any Android phone won’t be locked down to the same features it shipped with. So, in essence, many of the shortcomings of the G1 could be fixed by a wide and creative community. The downside of an Open Source OS—the only open source software that was better than its proprietary competitor is Firefox. The rest range from acceptable, free alternatives to downright unusable, unintuitive tech-head supplements for something that costs money. (Ever tried to read the “help” documents for open source software? Atrocious.)

Future love child of Apple and Google... and how they'll take over the world.

That being said, the one thing Android rocks at: Google Street View. You can literally move the phone around like it’s a window to where you want to be. Take a look at the example on the G1 launch page. Though the G1 is not comparable to the iPhone yet, it does have a chance. We just have to hope the open source community becomes more concerned with the artistic touch of the Android UI.