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Google just added voice and video chat capabilities to Gmail, the perennially in beta web mail program. It uses a special web browser plug-in available for PC and Mac, which requires Firefox, IE, Chrome, and a camera. The plug-in only weights 2MB.

For now there’s no video support in Google Chat, but you will be able to access this from the web browser, with the capability to tear the video chat into a separate window. According to Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds, the idea is to make it “quicker and easier to communicate with other people by whatever means is best convenient.” Which of course really means “easy to access video sex from any computer”. [Reuters and Cnet]

Those of you who use Gchat through Gmail can now send text messages to mobile phones. The function is experimental, so you have to go to the Labs tab inside of Gmail’s settings (or click on that little green flask icon) to turn it on. Your messages will appear as a 406 number—once you’ve sent a text through gmail, that’ll be your specific number. AIM’s had this feature for a while, so it’s not surprising that Google would implement it as well. Text your friends! See how it goes! [Webmonkey]

There is a lot riding on the shoulders of T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone. In some ways, it carries the collective hopes of Linux, open source and Google fans everywhere. It’s open, collaborative and community-based, in other words, everything the iPhone and Windows Mobile aren’t. As so many onlookers crowd around this newborn phone, there’s no way it can hold up all of their expectations—and it doesn’t.

After spending a week using the G1, I can say it’s a good start, and a clear indication of good Android developments to come. But the phone itself has some serious problems with accessibility and usability, issues that no number of third-party apps are going to be able to solve. Here’s what I loved and hated about the T-Mobile G1.

The Hardware
Body: The body was made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that makes Windows Mobile devices for Motorola, Palm and its own line. This phone is built just like those. The back is classic matted and grip-friendly HTC. The swivel-flip feels almost exactly like earlier HTC phones, only it extends out and then back in again, revealing the keyboard underneath. This motion gives a satisfying snap when opened, though it might be too loud in a quiet office.

Keyboard: It’s got numerous problems. First, it’s set so that the raised section on the right, with scroller ball and home and menu keys, is always in your way when you’re trying to type. This is annoying, even after you figure out how to work around it. The individual keys aren’t raised high enough over the body for easy touch typing, though at least the keyboard is backlit, in case you’re texting in the dark. The space and backspace key are tinier than we’d like. And it’s even more awkward than normal to type while charging the phone, because the miniUSB cable is in the way.

Buttons: There are five face buttons on the device—call, home, back, power/end and menu—and they’re all fairly straightforward. Hit home to bring you back to the home screen, menu to bring up a popup menu in your current app, and power/end button to lock your phone or hang up your call. That last part takes the most getting used to, since you’re naturally going to want to use the red power button to quit apps or end tasks, but all that does is lock your phone.

Trackball: It feels great, better than on the BlackBerry Pearl, and it clicks down solidly. Still, switching between the trackball and the touchscreen can get awkward.

Screen: The touchscreen is bright, renders text clearly and is, on the whole, pretty great. It uses capacitive touch, like the iPhone, so you use your fingertip, not a stylus, to poke around. There are cases when screen presses don’t register properly—they’re not too often, but often enough to be noticeable.

Battery: A full charge lasts about a day, mainly because push Gmail grabs the internet every time the account receives an email, and mine receives plenty. Couple that with 3G data browsing and app usage—which you’re most likely going to be doing a lot of—and you’ll need to get used to a mid-day charge at work. Thankfully charging from near empty to near full takes only about two hours.

Wi-Fi: The Wi-Fi range seems slightly to be on par with comparable smartphones (HTC’s Windows Mobile phones, iPhone), showing just about as many Wi-Fi hotspots in my house as the other ones did.

3G: I got noticeably decent browsing speeds, with an actual test registering 433kbps. This, of course, is only the case if your city has 3G access at all, since T-Mobile’s only just starting to roll out their network.

Camera: It’s passable and on par with previous HTC efforts. It does have autofocus, but other than that there’s nothing spectacular with the G1’s camera.

GPS: GPS is actually off by default, which produces a very inaccurate location when you try and find yourself on Google Maps. You’ll have to switch this on manually.

Other Issues: It’s hard to fathom why HTC left out a 3.5mm headphone jack in 2008, same for USB mass storage mode for Windows or Mac. Really? You have to pop out that microSD card and use a card reader every time you want to load a ringtone or a song or a photo or a video? Seriously? Also, when the screen is flipped open, it’s tilted down about three degrees—really annoying to certain people who like clean lines.

Operating System and Usability
Calling: Making phone calls on this thing works well. Call quality is good, but the screen annoyingly times out after about 10 seconds. If you want to power on the screen again, you have to hit the menu key or the “call” key, which takes you to the dialpad. It may just be that we punch in our credit card numbers or find contacts during a call more often than most people, but always having to bring up the screen again is a pain. And pressing the power/end button, which you’d think would power up the screen, actually just hangs up the call. Annoying. But as for the actually making calls part? No complaints from us.

Texting: Texts are arranged per contact in threads, and works well enough since texting is so simple. No cockups here.

Stability: The one word I’d use to describe the Android operating system is “solid”. It’s been my main device for a week, and I’ve yet to see the entire OS hang or freeze (haven’t had to reboot yet). Individual apps have crashed or frozen, but Android handles this spectacularly well by using the PC paradigm where you can choose to Force Quit a frozen app or wait for it to unstick itself. This way, very little can take down the entire phone under everyday use. (Buggy hardcore apps that snake deep into core functions could probably succeed.)

Background Apps: Multitasking is one thing Android does really well. Apps can run in the background, receiving data and continuing to “exist,” even though you don’t see them. The OS handles memory management for you invisibly, giving processes a lower CPU priority and taking away their RAM when other programs need it. For now, examples are simple, like opening a browser, then a bunch of other apps, then returning to the browser. You can use four or five apps before before the browser has to re-fetch data on the web page. Presumably, programmers will soon make more impressive use of the background processing power.

Window Shade: Google’s most unique multitasking helper is the notification window shade, which serves as an infodump of all incoming emails, messages, IMs and missed calls. Tapping a notification will take you to its corresponding app. No matter what app you’re in, the shade drops smoothly into place when you pull it down, dragging your finger from the top. (Just opposite the window shade is the pull-up app menu. If you run out of room on your three desktop screens, you’ll be visiting here for lesser used programs.)

Long Clicks: One convention that’s used often—but not consistently—is the long press. Long presses are a mix between right clicking and playing the lottery. Hold down an area of the screen—you may see a menu pop up or you may get absolutely nothing. Long click on the main screen and it asks you which app shortcut you want to move to your desktop. Long click on the text message screen and you’ll be prompted to delete or view a thread. Long click on Google Maps or a page in the browser, however, and nothing happens.

Interface: As we have observed, the UI suffers from general usability issues such as inconsistent actions or surprisingly unclickable regions like the browser’s URL bar or the home screen’s clock. But when you use it, you realize it is kinda pretty. Like the window shade, many of the transparencies, transitions, fade-ins, fade-outs, popups and other UI elements are slick, and definitely win out in aesthetics over smartphones like Windows Mobile. Compared to the iPhone, it still loses, but this comes down to a lack of multitouch capability—on the G1, for instance, you zoom by clicking + and - magnifier buttons. Like I said, it’s definitely a solid OS, but it also needs some real work by some UI experts to make it easier to pick up and play with.

Apps
Contacts: Phone contacts sync nicely with Google’s Gmail contacts—great if you use Gmail, and an extra place to backup your contacts if you don’t. You can even scroll through them fast by dragging a bar on the right. The problem though is that the quick-scroll dragger is hyper-sensitive, and holding your finger still in one place can make the phone jitter between letters. Each contact has a default phone number displayed under his name—when you tap a contact it feels like you’re dialing his number, even though you’re just pulling up details.

Mail: There are actually two mail programs on the G1: Mail and Gmail. Mail lets you manage five accounts, while Gmail makes you tie your phone to just one account. But Gmail is one of the best apps on the phone, giving you 90% of the desktop features you use on a day-to-day basis. Archiving, labeling, reporting spam, deleting and starring are super easy and sync to webmail almost instantly. The best part of this Gmail implementation is that it’s push, the only push Gmail on any mobile device. T-Mobile failed to mention its cool keyboard shortcuts—I had to fiddle to figure out that you can hit “r” for reply or “a” to reply all. (Surely there are more.) A dumb flaw is that it won’t auto-complete names when you start with someone’s last name. I have to sort through 10 Brians to find Lam’s address, when I should be able to just type Lam and have this be smart enough to figure out who I mean.

Marketplace: The Marketplace is divided into Games and Applications, with sub-categories such as Lifestyle, Productivity, Shopping and Tools. Downloading and installing apps are pretty much 1-click, like the iPhone App Store, and most apps launch just fine. However, since most developers don’t have an actual Android phone to test their apps on, a lot of programs will be sluggish or even crash-prone in the first few weeks. Expect this to be fixed soon.

IM: The IM app is a very good client that supports AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live (MSN), and Yahoo. It’s intuitive, works well with the keyboard and even offers background notification—unlike iPhone—so you can switch to other apps but still get incoming messages delivered to you via the top status bar.

Browser: The G1 browser, like Chrome on the desktop, is based on WebKit, the open source browser engine that also powers Safari and Mobile Safari. This means it’s pretty damn good. That said, the lack of multitouch gestures in Android’s version makes zooming a pain. It doesn’t have Flash support (YouTube gets forwarded to the YouTube app) and it doesn’t auto-zoom to maximize the column you want to read in your display. It can, however, remember your password for logins, like a desktop browser does.

Google Maps: Gmaps has most of what you’ll find in the desktop version, including Satellite, Traffic and Street View. Once you turn on GPS, the phone’s fairly decent at locating where you are even indoors, and Compass View is a gimmick that works sometimes and doesn’t work other times—but then again, spinning around like an idiot makes you look like an idiot all the time.

Music Player: It’s no iPod, but the G1’s built-in music player gets the job done decently. It fits in fairly well with the rest of the Android experience, but we’re definitely looking at third-party apps like TuneWiki to pick up the slack here. That’s not to say the Music app is bad—it’s perfectly fine. It’s just not great.

Third-Party Apps: Some of the more promising apps like Tunes Remote, TuneWiki and Video Player aren’t as fleshed out and stable as we like. Tunes Remote lags and crashes a lot, TuneWiki can’t find our music and Video Player only supports a handful of codecs. We expect these all to be fixed soon. Other apps like AccuWeather, Barcode Scanner and Pac-Man work just fine despite being developed on the Android emulator. We’re looking forward to good things here.

Verdict
The G1 phone and the Android operating system are not finished products. There are only three working Google Apps here—Gmail, Maps and Calendar—while Google Docs, Google News, Google Reader, Google Shopping, Google Images, Google Video, Blogger and Picasa are nowhere to be found. What’s the deal?

We have high hopes for third-party coders to fill in gaps Google intentionally or unintentionally left in this OS. There’s already a video player, and we’re sure VLC will try and port some kind of version over. But your question is not whether the phone will be great down the line, it’s whether or not it’s good enough for you to buy it now.

The answer depends most on who you are. Despite all the UI quirks and bad design decisions, it’s still better than other smartphone OSes out there. It’s not perfect, but for people who like tinkering, its cons are outweighed by its pros such as Gmail and the Marketplace. Hopefully Android updates and more ports of Google apps will augment not just future phones but this one too. This isn’t something you’re going to give your mom for Christmas, but if you’re an adventuresome gadget guy with some money to spend ($179) on a totally new, pretty exciting venture, then why not?

There is a lot riding on the shoulders of T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone. In some ways, it carries the collective hopes of Linux, open source and Google fans everywhere. It’s open, collaborative and community-based, in other words, everything the iPhone and Windows Mobile aren’t. As so many onlookers crowd around this newborn phone, there’s no way it can hold up all of their expectations—and it doesn’t.

After spending a week using the G1, I can say it’s a good start, and a clear indication of good Android developments to come. But the phone itself has some serious problems with accessibility and usability, issues that no number of third-party apps are going to be able to solve. Here’s what I loved and hated about the T-Mobile G1.

The Hardware
Body: The body was made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that makes Windows Mobile devices for Motorola, Palm and its own line. This phone is built just like those. The back is classic matted and grip-friendly HTC. The swivel-flip feels almost exactly like earlier HTC phones, only it extends out and then back in again, revealing the keyboard underneath. This motion gives a satisfying snap when opened, though it might be too loud in a quiet office.

Keyboard: It’s got numerous problems. First, it’s set so that the raised section on the right, with scroller ball and home and menu keys, is always in your way when you’re trying to type. This is annoying, even after you figure out how to work around it. The individual keys aren’t raised high enough over the body for easy touch typing, though at least the keyboard is backlit, in case you’re texting in the dark. The space and backspace key are tinier than we’d like. And it’s even more awkward than normal to type while charging the phone, because the miniUSB cable is in the way.

Buttons: There are five face buttons on the device—call, home, back, power/end and menu—and they’re all fairly straightforward. Hit home to bring you back to the home screen, menu to bring up a popup menu in your current app, and power/end button to lock your phone or hang up your call. That last part takes the most getting used to, since you’re naturally going to want to use the red power button to quit apps or end tasks, but all that does is lock your phone.

Trackball: It feels great, better than on the BlackBerry Pearl, and it clicks down solidly. Still, switching between the trackball and the touchscreen can get awkward.

Screen: The touchscreen is bright, renders text clearly and is, on the whole, pretty great. It uses capacitive touch, like the iPhone, so you use your fingertip, not a stylus, to poke around. There are cases when screen presses don’t register properly—they’re not too often, but often enough to be noticeable.

Battery: A full charge lasts about a day, mainly because push Gmail grabs the internet every time the account receives an email, and mine receives plenty. Couple that with 3G data browsing and app usage—which you’re most likely going to be doing a lot of—and you’ll need to get used to a mid-day charge at work. Thankfully charging from near empty to near full takes only about two hours.

Wi-Fi: The Wi-Fi range seems slightly to be on par with comparable smartphones (HTC’s Windows Mobile phones, iPhone), showing just about as many Wi-Fi hotspots in my house as the other ones did.

3G: I got noticeably decent browsing speeds, with an actual test registering 433kbps. This, of course, is only the case if your city has 3G access at all, since T-Mobile’s only just starting to roll out their network.

Camera: It’s passable and on par with previous HTC efforts. It does have autofocus, but other than that there’s nothing spectacular with the G1’s camera.

GPS: GPS is actually off by default, which produces a very inaccurate location when you try and find yourself on Google Maps. You’ll have to switch this on manually.

Other Issues: It’s hard to fathom why HTC left out a 3.5mm headphone jack in 2008, same for USB mass storage mode for Windows or Mac. Really? You have to pop out that microSD card and use a card reader every time you want to load a ringtone or a song or a photo or a video? Seriously? Also, when the screen is flipped open, it’s tilted down about three degrees—really annoying to certain people who like clean lines.

Operating System and Usability
Calling: Making phone calls on this thing works well. Call quality is good, but the screen annoyingly times out after about 10 seconds. If you want to power on the screen again, you have to hit the menu key or the “call” key, which takes you to the dialpad. It may just be that we punch in our credit card numbers or find contacts during a call more often than most people, but always having to bring up the screen again is a pain. And pressing the power/end button, which you’d think would power up the screen, actually just hangs up the call. Annoying. But as for the actually making calls part? No complaints from us.

Texting: Texts are arranged per contact in threads, and works well enough since texting is so simple. No cockups here.

Stability: The one word I’d use to describe the Android operating system is “solid”. It’s been my main device for a week, and I’ve yet to see the entire OS hang or freeze (haven’t had to reboot yet). Individual apps have crashed or frozen, but Android handles this spectacularly well by using the PC paradigm where you can choose to Force Quit a frozen app or wait for it to unstick itself. This way, very little can take down the entire phone under everyday use. (Buggy hardcore apps that snake deep into core functions could probably succeed.)

Background Apps: Multitasking is one thing Android does really well. Apps can run in the background, receiving data and continuing to “exist,” even though you don’t see them. The OS handles memory management for you invisibly, giving processes a lower CPU priority and taking away their RAM when other programs need it. For now, examples are simple, like opening a browser, then a bunch of other apps, then returning to the browser. You can use four or five apps before before the browser has to re-fetch data on the web page. Presumably, programmers will soon make more impressive use of the background processing power.

Window Shade: Google’s most unique multitasking helper is the notification window shade, which serves as an infodump of all incoming emails, messages, IMs and missed calls. Tapping a notification will take you to its corresponding app. No matter what app you’re in, the shade drops smoothly into place when you pull it down, dragging your finger from the top. (Just opposite the window shade is the pull-up app menu. If you run out of room on your three desktop screens, you’ll be visiting here for lesser used programs.)

Long Clicks: One convention that’s used often—but not consistently—is the long press. Long presses are a mix between right clicking and playing the lottery. Hold down an area of the screen—you may see a menu pop up or you may get absolutely nothing. Long click on the main screen and it asks you which app shortcut you want to move to your desktop. Long click on the text message screen and you’ll be prompted to delete or view a thread. Long click on Google Maps or a page in the browser, however, and nothing happens.

Interface: As we have observed, the UI suffers from general usability issues such as inconsistent actions or surprisingly unclickable regions like the browser’s URL bar or the home screen’s clock. But when you use it, you realize it is kinda pretty. Like the window shade, many of the transparencies, transitions, fade-ins, fade-outs, popups and other UI elements are slick, and definitely win out in aesthetics over smartphones like Windows Mobile. Compared to the iPhone, it still loses, but this comes down to a lack of multitouch capability—on the G1, for instance, you zoom by clicking + and - magnifier buttons. Like I said, it’s definitely a solid OS, but it also needs some real work by some UI experts to make it easier to pick up and play with.

Apps
Contacts: Phone contacts sync nicely with Google’s Gmail contacts—great if you use Gmail, and an extra place to backup your contacts if you don’t. You can even scroll through them fast by dragging a bar on the right. The problem though is that the quick-scroll dragger is hyper-sensitive, and holding your finger still in one place can make the phone jitter between letters. Each contact has a default phone number displayed under his name—when you tap a contact it feels like you’re dialing his number, even though you’re just pulling up details.

Mail: There are actually two mail programs on the G1: Mail and Gmail. Mail lets you manage five accounts, while Gmail makes you tie your phone to just one account. But Gmail is one of the best apps on the phone, giving you 90% of the desktop features you use on a day-to-day basis. Archiving, labeling, reporting spam, deleting and starring are super easy and sync to webmail almost instantly. The best part of this Gmail implementation is that it’s push, the only push Gmail on any mobile device. T-Mobile failed to mention its cool keyboard shortcuts—I had to fiddle to figure out that you can hit “r” for reply or “a” to reply all. (Surely there are more.) A dumb flaw is that it won’t auto-complete names when you start with someone’s last name. I have to sort through 10 Brians to find Lam’s address, when I should be able to just type Lam and have this be smart enough to figure out who I mean.

Marketplace: The Marketplace is divided into Games and Applications, with sub-categories such as Lifestyle, Productivity, Shopping and Tools. Downloading and installing apps are pretty much 1-click, like the iPhone App Store, and most apps launch just fine. However, since most developers don’t have an actual Android phone to test their apps on, a lot of programs will be sluggish or even crash-prone in the first few weeks. Expect this to be fixed soon.

IM: The IM app is a very good client that supports AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live (MSN), and Yahoo. It’s intuitive, works well with the keyboard and even offers background notification—unlike iPhone—so you can switch to other apps but still get incoming messages delivered to you via the top status bar.

Browser: The G1 browser, like Chrome on the desktop, is based on WebKit, the open source browser engine that also powers Safari and Mobile Safari. This means it’s pretty damn good. That said, the lack of multitouch gestures in Android’s version makes zooming a pain. It doesn’t have Flash support (YouTube gets forwarded to the YouTube app) and it doesn’t auto-zoom to maximize the column you want to read in your display. It can, however, remember your password for logins, like a desktop browser does.

Google Maps: Gmaps has most of what you’ll find in the desktop version, including Satellite, Traffic and Street View. Once you turn on GPS, the phone’s fairly decent at locating where you are even indoors, and Compass View is a gimmick that works sometimes and doesn’t work other times—but then again, spinning around like an idiot makes you look like an idiot all the time.

Music Player: It’s no iPod, but the G1’s built-in music player gets the job done decently. It fits in fairly well with the rest of the Android experience, but we’re definitely looking at third-party apps like TuneWiki to pick up the slack here. That’s not to say the Music app is bad—it’s perfectly fine. It’s just not great.

Third-Party Apps: Some of the more promising apps like Tunes Remote, TuneWiki and Video Player aren’t as fleshed out and stable as we like. Tunes Remote lags and crashes a lot, TuneWiki can’t find our music and Video Player only supports a handful of codecs. We expect these all to be fixed soon. Other apps like AccuWeather, Barcode Scanner and Pac-Man work just fine despite being developed on the Android emulator. We’re looking forward to good things here.

Verdict
The G1 phone and the Android operating system are not finished products. There are only three working Google Apps here—Gmail, Maps and Calendar—while Google Docs, Google News, Google Reader, Google Shopping, Google Images, Google Video, Blogger and Picasa are nowhere to be found. What’s the deal?

We have high hopes for third-party coders to fill in gaps Google intentionally or unintentionally left in this OS. There’s already a video player, and we’re sure VLC will try and port some kind of version over. But your question is not whether the phone will be great down the line, it’s whether or not it’s good enough for you to buy it now.

The answer depends most on who you are. Despite all the UI quirks and bad design decisions, it’s still better than other smartphone OSes out there. It’s not perfect, but for people who like tinkering, its cons are outweighed by its pros such as Gmail and the Marketplace. Hopefully Android updates and more ports of Google apps will augment not just future phones but this one too. This isn’t something you’re going to give your mom for Christmas, but if you’re an adventuresome gadget guy with some money to spend ($179) on a totally new, pretty exciting venture, then why not?

The Gadget: Pantech’s Matrix dual sliding phone was just announced today on the AT&T network. Unlike last year’s WInMo-running Pantech Duo, the Matrix opts for a more straightforward dumbphone interface while adding 3G HSDPA, GPS and a slick looking design into the mix.

The Price: $80 (after two year contract)

The Verdict: For an $80 phone, the Pantech Matrix is really good deal. Pantech could have skimped on the build quality and pushed out a cheap, flimsy phone, but instead created a product that feels solid and slides smoothly in any direction. Despite being about an inch thick, the Matrix doesn’t feel oversized—they made it as narrow and short as possible so that it doesn’t feel too cumbersome. As a result, the Matrix sits nicely in the hand, and when the backlit keyboard is exposed, it almost feels sleek. I really like the 0-9 keypad, as its flat design and glowing numbers gives it a clean look. And though buttons aren’t physically separated, each one has a bit of a bubble on it that gives a nice click when you press down.

Call quality is crystal clear and signal strength is never a problem wherever I’m at in San Francisco. The microSD port allows for memory expansion for files like photos or mp3s. The non-smartphone OS is responsive and well organized, suiting a phone like this well.

Some features aren’t as powerful or developed as they could be, but given the price, it’s understandable. It only has a 1.3 MP camera, and doesn’t have much in the way of an internet browser or media player. But that’s not what Pantech is focused on with the Matrix. This is a phone for texters and emailers, and as a result, it has most major IM clients preinstalled, and preconfigured access for Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail (No preconfigured Gmail?! Hello, 1997!). GPS features are also limited to AT&T’s TeleNav subscription service.

But there are also features which are inexcusably lacking. My biggest complaint lies with the keyboard. It’s not that it’s too small as much as it’s that the buttons are too mushy and flush with the surface. Sometimes you push a button down and there’s no tactile response; and each button seems to feel a little different which doesn’t help the familiarity factor. If buttons were just a tad more distinguishable and clicky, they keyboard would be perfect. The soft keys and call/end buttons feel a little small and understated on the front of the phone, undermined by the (admittedly cool-looking) circular layout.

The bottom line is this: the Pantech Matrix is an inexpensive, multi-functional phone that does more good than bad. If you can work with the flawed keyboard and accept that its not a multimedia powerhouse, you might be impressed with what it does well—call and message.

As a guy who spends way too much time in Google apps, I look forward to testing Android now and as it develops. I need my Gmail and Gcal straight away, and would expect to see support for Google Docs materialize at some point, at least via the browser. Now that it’s launched, though, it’s easy to see some obvious weaknesses to Google’s Android strategy, starting with a lack of target user. Jesus explained why average consumers may not fancy the hodgepodge open-source UI of the G1, but business users really get the shaft here, too. At present, Android poses no threat to BlackBerry or even Windows Mobile, and makes the iPhone platform’s restrictiveness sound like a sales pitch.

Let’s start with the obvious: No Exchange server means no corporate push e-mail. This didn’t catch us off guard, as there were rumors that the G1 would launch without it. However, we were surprised by the sheepish looks on the Google executives’ faces when reporters pressed the matter. “We expect this to be solved by third-party developers,” was all that they said. Yes, it is true that some very nice mobile e-mail management has come from third parties such as Good (now owned by Motorola). But the fact that the Android team isn’t spearheading the integration of push e-mail means it doesn’t think of enterprise apps as a priority.

Jump from there to the lack of desktop syncing. I am with all the people who like the fact that mail and calendar data syncs over the air (for “free”)—it is a great consumer service. But if you can’t connect to an exchange server and desktop ActiveSync to Outlook is out of the question too, well, that means hordes of suit-wearers will simply have to say “no” to this device.

As if that wasn’t enough of an ix-nay for IT buyers, Android’s security issues are pretty significant. Because of the open-source nature of the OS, programmers have access to core functionality they wouldn’t be able to access when dealing with platforms such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or the iPhone’s OS X. True, like Windows Vista, the system is designed to ask you to grant new applications permission for each and every capability that an app desires, as you can see above. But it’s easy to say yes to things you wouldn’t necessarily understand. Is it bad that an app I don’t know well can “modify global animation speed”? Honestly, I don’t know.

Update: What we meant was open, not open source, as in more freely accessing parts of the hardware that apps don’t necessarily need to access. An example would be a rogue flashlight app that you happened to grant permission to access your microphone, and it theoretically records your conversation with your coworkers.

More importantly, apps with that kind of access can easily muck up the rest of the system, like so much crapware on a new PC. An app full of weird conflicts doesn’t have to be malicious to be disastrous. The Android Market is a place to get Android apps, but Android apps will be available from any source, and you’ll be able to install them directly. It’s good news for tinkerers who know what they’re doing, and it does support the free-market approach for distributing software, but it could easily lead to brickage of company property.

IT pros look for certain security features too, such as the ability to remotely wipe a lost or stolen phone’s memory, or to establish a virtual private network. Trusting third party apps for this isn’t a problem on paper, though shopping for, vetting and deploying competing applications as they’re developed could easily create as many problems as they’re supposed to solve.

The trouble with leaving core features to third-party developers is that it often leads to nasty blame games. Microsoft has gotten in the most trouble in the past when it launched software platforms—a good example would be the PlaysForSure music DRM—then refused to take responsibility when third-party developers failed to implement it successfully for users. It’s a built-in cop-out, and that may work for daring nerds with extra cash and a disdain for status-quo devices, but it doesn’t work for mass-market consumers, and it certainly doesn’t work for the most skittish buyers of all, corporate IT dudes. Sorry Google—I for one would like to see a little more stewardship, and an acknowledgment that if Apple can implement Exchange, VPN and other corporate goodies, well, you got no excuse.

As a guy who spends way too much time in Google apps, I look forward to testing Android now and as it develops. I need my Gmail and Gcal straight away, and would expect to see support for Google Docs materialize at some point, at least via the browser. Now that it’s launched, though, it’s easy to see some obvious weaknesses to Google’s Android strategy, starting with a lack of target user. Jesus explained why average consumers may not fancy the hodgepodge open-source UI of the G1, but business users really get the shaft here, too. At present, Android poses no threat to BlackBerry or even Windows Mobile, and makes the iPhone platform’s restrictiveness sound like a sales pitch.

Let’s start with the obvious: No Exchange server means no corporate push e-mail. This didn’t catch us off guard, as there were rumors that the G1 would launch without it. However, we were surprised by the sheepish looks on the Google executives’ faces when reporters pressed the matter. “We expect this to be solved by third-party developers,” was all that they said. Yes, it is true that some very nice mobile e-mail management has come from third parties such as Good (now owned by Motorola). But the fact that the Android team isn’t spearheading the integration of push e-mail means it doesn’t think of enterprise apps as a priority.

Jump from there to the lack of desktop syncing. I am with all the people who like the fact that mail and calendar data syncs over the air (for “free”)—it is a great consumer service. But if you can’t connect to an exchange server and desktop ActiveSync to Outlook is out of the question too, well, that means hordes of suit-wearers will simply have to say “no” to this device.

As if that wasn’t enough of an ix-nay for IT buyers, Android’s security issues are pretty significant. Because of the open-source nature of the OS, programmers have access to core functionality they wouldn’t be able to access when dealing with platforms such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or the iPhone’s OS X. True, like Windows Vista, the system is designed to ask you to grant new applications permission for each and every capability that an app desires, as you can see above. But it’s easy to say yes to things you wouldn’t necessarily understand. Is it bad that an app I don’t know well can “modify global animation speed”? Honestly, I don’t know.

Update: What we meant was open, not open source, as in more freely accessing parts of the hardware that apps don’t necessarily need to access. An example would be a rogue flashlight app that you happened to grant permission to access your microphone, and it theoretically records your conversation with your coworkers.

More importantly, apps with that kind of access can easily muck up the rest of the system, like so much crapware on a new PC. An app full of weird conflicts doesn’t have to be malicious to be disastrous. The Android Market is a place to get Android apps, but Android apps will be available from any source, and you’ll be able to install them directly. It’s good news for tinkerers who know what they’re doing, and it does support the free-market approach for distributing software, but it could easily lead to brickage of company property.

IT pros look for certain security features too, such as the ability to remotely wipe a lost or stolen phone’s memory, or to establish a virtual private network. Trusting third party apps for this isn’t a problem on paper, though shopping for, vetting and deploying competing applications as they’re developed could easily create as many problems as they’re supposed to solve.

The trouble with leaving core features to third-party developers is that it often leads to nasty blame games. Microsoft has gotten in the most trouble in the past when it launched software platforms—a good example would be the PlaysForSure music DRM—then refused to take responsibility when third-party developers failed to implement it successfully for users. It’s a built-in cop-out, and that may work for daring nerds with extra cash and a disdain for status-quo devices, but it doesn’t work for mass-market consumers, and it certainly doesn’t work for the most skittish buyers of all, corporate IT dudes. Sorry Google—I for one would like to see a little more stewardship, and an acknowledgment that if Apple can implement Exchange, VPN and other corporate goodies, well, you got no excuse.

Filed under: Cellphones

Uh, c’mon guys — this is a little ridiculous. Now typically, you want to keep this sort of thing under wraps until the day of your event, but it seems like the cats and kittens at T-Mobile can’t contain themselves. Yes, you’re looking at the first official product shot of the G1 Android phone ever. Enjoy it.

Update: TmoNews has just uncovered new specs and info on the phone. Here’s what they’ve got so far: the phone is 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 inches, weighs 5.6 ounces, features a 480 x 320 HVGA display, sports 3G (obviously), GPS, has a 3.1-megapixel camera, supports up to 8GB of memory (though no format is mentioned), and will feature 5 hours of talktime with 130 hours of standby. Strangely, the phone won’t do video capture (what?), won’t have stereo Bluetooth, will require a Gmail account, and won’t be sold at stores outside of a 2-5 mile radius of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage areas. That last bit sounds a little odd to us, but we’re guessing a lot of the functionality of this device will be shot in non-3G regions.

[Thanks, Luis; Via, TmoNews]

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Amid the iPhone 3G launch hysteria, we made a pronouncement that, looking back now long after the dust has settled, pretty well nailed it: forget hardware, it’s code that counts. Code via the juggernaut that is the App Store, which allowed the iPhone to truly came into its own as a mobile platform.

Now, our first official look at T-Mobile’s G1, the first Android-capable phone built by HTC, is less than 24 hours away, and the same adage holds true now more than ever. Android’s openness puts the emphasis even more squarely on the code this platform will run, making the hardware almost an afterthought. And while it’s still quite early in the game and things won’t really kick up until the G1 becomes available sometime in October, the Android Market is already looking like an equally if not more vibrant place for great apps for your phone.

One of the main positive points in our Android preview guide was that Android will likely be home to the best direct tie-ins to Google’s web apps like Maps, Docs, and Gmail, of any device around. And not only will they shine individually (remember’s Apple’s proud claims of the iPhone’s custom Google Maps integration?), each Google service is set up as an open API within Android, meaning they’re all available for mashing up with any other type of data imaginable in third party applications, effectively allowing developers to easily convert awesome Google service hybrids (like Beer Mapping, one of my favorites) into mobile apps.

Unsurprisingly, Maps integrations are the main focus being taken by the early wave of Android Apps, many of which were written in response to the Android Developer’s challenge. Throw in location awareness via GPS or cell towers (another Android core service), and we’ve got ourselves the ingredients for some truly next-level stuff.

Enkin: When many people envisioned a location-aware future for mobile tech, they were probably dreaming up something like Enkin. If you can last through the somewhat brutal video here, you’ll see some amazing potential: Enkin is basically a visualization framework for location information which can place locations on a two-dimensional map, a quasi-three-dimensional Google Earth type view, and coolest of all, overlay them onto the view streaming live out of your phone’s camera. It uses GPS and accelerometers to sense exactly which direction the camera pointing, giving you an annotated view of the real world. You can add your own placemarkers or draw them in from the internet.

Locale: Borne from an MIT class specifically for writing Android apps (and winner of a $275,000 first prize from the Android dev challenge), Locale lets you define your most frequented places on a map and set your phone to respond to those places in a number of different ways. While the prototype is mostly focused on phone settings (like switching to silent when you’re in the office or at a movie theater), these kinds of frameworks can be expanded infinitely. Home automation software could be programmed to turn on the lights (or start cooking your breakfast, Pee-Wee Herrman style) once you’re a few blocks away from your home, for instance. It takes Bluetooth proximity to a whole new level, one that’s not dependent on the limited proximity to another device but only your actual real-world location independent of any other variables.

GeoLife: In a similar vein is GeoLife, a location-aware to-do list. You can pair actions on your list to locations (or types of locations) to get a reminder to buy milk when you’re near a grocery store.

Ecorio: Using GPS, Ecorio runs in the background (another edge Android has over the iPhone) and estimates the carbon output of your day’s journeys. Once it learns your habits, it can then suggest public trans or carpooling alternatives. Another $275,000 first prize winner.

Cab4me: Takes your current location and feeds it into a database of nation-wide cab companies, allowing you to order a cab pickup instantly with your current locations. Google Maps overlays also show areas of cities where you’re likely to hail a cab off the street.

BioWallet: Not all of the innovative apps are map based. BioWallet uses your phone’s camera as an iris scanner to lock down sensitive information like account numbers and passwords on your phone, or even the phone itself. Handwriting-based IDs can also be implemented, all processed on external servers and sent back to your phone with a pass/fail reading.

CompareEverywhere and GoCart: Both capture photos of product UPC codes to then tie into online databases for comparison pricing, product availability, and shopping list compilation.

TuneWiki: Music apps are a bit thin pre-release, but TuneWiki (which is already out for jailbroken iPhones—not in the store yet, which won’t be a problem with Android) looks impressive for grabbing lyrics and album art with your music. See it in action here.

Teradesk e-Storage: We love Air Share on the iPhone, and e-Storage looks to provide many similar services, with file versioning and Google Docs integration (one of the first of many G-Docs tie-ins, surely).

True, some of these apps could seemingly be just as at home in the iTunes App Store and on other platforms (many mobile OS’s have some iteration of a barcode reader, for instance). But what has the potential to set Android apart though is its open source foundation; with the support of the open-source development community—one of the largest and most important driving forces of innovation in computers and software throughout history—Android could blast open mobile platforms even further than the iPhone has or could. Especially when you consider the core open-source projects that have shaped the internet since the beginning—Apache, MySQL, PHP, ssh, and countless others—making it onto phones in a core and unified way. Despite early SDK kinks, we could be seeing some exciting stuff in the next few months.

For a few of the other sides to the Android coin, be sure to check out our guide to five things both good and bad about Android. And if you’ve seen any other embryonic pre-release Android apps that look exciting, tell us in our new-and-improved threaded comments.

Filed under: Cellphones

Uh, c’mon guys — this is a little ridiculous. Now typically, you want to keep this sort of thing under wraps until the day of your event, but it seems like the cats and kittens at T-Mobile can’t contain themselves. Yes, you’re looking at the first official product shot of the G1 Android phone ever. Enjoy it.

Update: TmoNews has just uncovered new specs and info on the phone. Here’s what they’ve got so far: the phone is 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 inches, weighs 5.6 ounces, features a 480 x 320 HVGA display, sports 3G (obviously), GPS, has a 3.1-megapixel camera, supports up to 8GB of memory (though no format is mentioned), and will feature 5 hours of talktime with 130 hours of standby. Strangely, the phone won’t do video capture (what?), won’t have stereo Bluetooth, will require a Gmail account, and won’t be sold at stores outside of a 2-5 mile radius of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage areas. That last bit sounds a little odd to us, but we’re guessing a lot of the functionality of this device will be shot in non-3G regions.

[Thanks, Luis; Via, TmoNews]

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