10 years of Android, time to celebrate the changes over the years for the next 10 days leading up to the Pixel 3 (3XL) launch.
And let’s kick it off with the phone that started it all, the G1 (aka HTC Google Phone G1). This the phone that truly kicked things off with android. The phone built by HTC, one of the leading phone manufacturers at the time, was designed to compete with the heavy hitting Blackberry.
Originally designed to look like the Blackberry phones, with a physical keyboard, Google wanted the “Sooner” to be able to compete in a field of phones dominated by Windows, Blackberry, and Symbian. But then the iPhone came along, and it changed everything. Google then went back to the drawing board to change things up and what we got was a phone that combined a touchscreen with mechanical keyboard.
The G1 released in September of 2018 (on the 23rd to be exact) exclusively on T-Mobile. The T-Mobile G1 was available for purchase October 20th of that year. And later to other companies around the world under the names G1 and HTC Dream.
The specs, a 3.2 inch capacitive LCD touchscreen with a ratio of 320 x 480. The phone had a slide out Qwerty for typing, as well as a trackball to help with navigating and scrolling. 528 MHz Qualcomm with 192MB of Ram, and 256MB of internal storage. Expandable storage of up to 16 GB micro SD card slot. A 3.15 MP auto-focus rear camera, no headphone jack, and came in white, black and bronze.
But what is also special about this phone, other than it running the first android system on a (officially released) phone, was that it was open sourced software. Aka, it could be rooted and modded. And really this was the true birth of android. Rooting, ROMs, was quickly followed by overclocking, themes, and led to the phones we have now.
