Okay, so you're all a bunch of iPhone sycophants. (j/k sorta) But I've always despised the thing. Probably because of the ones that I have to service at my job. I can't stand typing on the screen. I always seem to hit the wrong keys. I've got a T-Mobile G1. Good mix of touch screen and qwerty keyboard.

Anywhoo... This topic is devoted to Android phones. As far as I'm concerned Android is the bees knees when it comes to smart phones.

The interface is slick. I've never seen anything like it. Windows Mobile and iPhone alike are lightyears behind. (IMHO) I'm sure there are individual apps with crummy UI, but that'll go for almost anything. (Admittedly iPhone apps generally have pretty awesome UI too, but with all the restrictions for building iPhone Apps you really have to try make a lame UI.) It's the little design details in Android that make it so fantastic. Like background images. On Windows Mobile you're stuck with one homescreen and that's it. The iPhone can let you set a background for the home screen but if you slide over to another page it's the same image duplicated over. Android is awesome in that it takes one wide image and spreads it across three pages so as you slide from one page of the "desktop" to another you reveal other parts of the image. This is actually much cooler than I make it sound. I should do a little video demo later.

The quality of the apps in the Marketplace is pretty damn awesome too. The only thing lacking is a REALLY GOOD MS Exchange app. Some of my favorite Apps include:

ShopSaavy - Clicks an image of a product barcode and finds info about the product online.
Locale - Changes the settings on my phone based on conditions such as location, time, battery, etc.
(The Friggin) Browser!!! - Yup, Android's browser is damn awesome with great JavaScript support. Missing flash, but supposedly that's coming soon.

I think the reason for the quality apps on Android has to do with the dev. environment. The SDK is robust but simple. You just need to know some Java to get started. The test environment is really cool. It puts a virtual phone up on your screen to play with your software and interact with the phone. In fact if you wanted to try out Android that's a pretty good way to do it for free. Just download Eclipse and the Android Dev Tools. (I've actually been using my Mac for using Eclipse. I didn't want it on my Windows box.) Windows Mobile is really friggin easy to work with as well, but I find that you're limited by the phones. The lack of standards on WinMobile phones makes it really hard to build a consistent UI. Don't get me started with iPhone Dev. Sure it's easy to build a UI. They basically have UI legos that you have to move around in a grid until you get a little shiny okay from Apple that your UI is acceptable. As for the code you're stuck with Objective C which is about as fun as a getting a lobotomy at the same time as a colonic. I know that Apple fans LOVE Objective C but as a programming language it's totally out of date. It's almost a punch card. It's amazing that people write software for Apple or iPhone at all.

All Done.

I'm all for variety. Of course I'm the Palm Pre guy so of course I say that.

I didn't include the Palm Pre in my list because they haven't really opened up dev for that OS yet.

If the android weren't so late to the game, and google actually supported the DEV kit better early on, and it weren't tied to crappy t-mobile, I was actually considering it. I don't like apple, but I do love my iphone.

_________________
This is the dawn and drew show
In costa rica there is no snow
knjshow.com

I pretty much figured. That is the first and most obvious thing to knock the Pre down for, no apps, and it's understandable. It's a great phone, but one where you have to jump in knowing you need to be patient about some things.

I have heard good things about Android though, and hope it does well.

Is it possible to used the android operating system from the G1 on my Wing? Pretty self explanatory, Is it possible to used the android operating system from the G1 on my Wing? I'm going to be getting the g1 on the first so i was curious if theres anything i can do with the wing.

The Wing is a Windows Mobile device. If you have the chops to do it, you could probably install Android on it but only if you had absolute control over the firmware, and you'd probably have to roll your own implementation of Android to work with the baseband firmware on the Wing.

http://developer.android.com/

_________________
Minion #554
Help kick the shit out of cancer! Join Team #53338.