Apparently Google and T-Mobile announced the first phone that will use Google’s Android mobile platform. David Pogue has a great blog post about Android and the phone, so I won’t get into many details about that–essentially, it’s a T-Mobile Sidekick running Google’s software. It’s similar in many ways to the iPhone, but also comes with a tactile keyboard, an expansion slot, a removable battery, and voice dialing. It doesn’t quite have the iPod functionality, nor is the touch screen a multi-touch screen, and it has five buttons (not one), but it still has rich apps built-in on the phone, has 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, an over-the-air downloadable App Store and Music Store, and even adds a cool feature to Google Maps that has a built-in street view that automatically rotates itself as you rotate yourself standing somewhere.

However, some of the stuff coming in this phone, which will be called the G1, blows away some of the aspects of Apple’s offering. The Android platform is completely 100% open source; you can go download the source code today and change it without Google’s permission. The App Store is completely open and will not be censored at all by T-Mobile or Google; you could even add a Skype app on there without a worry. The phone can be unlocked after 90 days and will accept any cell service’s SIM card. These are some clear advantages over Apple’s iPhone offering and, combined with a pretty nice smartphone interface, will likely make the Android platform a very real competitor for Apple’s iPhone. (Unlike the Zune, which isn’t anywhere close to being viable iPod competition.)

In some ways, it almost feels as if it’s the 1980s all over again. Apple comes up with a bunch of innovations behind the Macintosh (okay, they got a lot of it from Xerox PARC, but let’s overlook that) and releases its first Mac in 1984, and the Mac OS is specifically tied to the Mac. Microsoft is a close partner with Apple on the Mac introduction and releases Word 1.0 alongside the Mac, but that the same time works on building their own operating system which borrows lots of ideas from the Mac OS, which will eventually become Windows, and which Microsoft will license out to multiple vendors. And the rest is history. Now, we have Apple coming up with a bunch of innovations to release the iPhone in 2007, and Google indeed is a partner in this product launch as it brings its technology into the awesome Google Maps implementation. But at the same time, Google develops its own mobile phone platform which borrows lots of ideas from the iPhone OS, which becomes Android, and which Google plans to make available for phones by multiple vendors (hopefully replacing Windows Mobile). The one obvious difference here is that Google Android is open source; Microsoft Windows wasn’t/isn’t.

Nevertheless, it feels to me like history is repeating itself. Will Google’s Android turn into the Windows of the smartphone world, against Apple’s Mac-based iPhone OS? More interestingly enough, will Apple make the same mistakes with the iPhone? They’re kind of in an oddball place right now, particularly given all of the anger and bad press that their App Store has been getting.

All I can say is that Google Android looks like it will become legitimate competition to Apple’s iPhone. However, I applaud Google for their efforts, both as a fervent supporter of open source and someone who believes that competition is a good thing because it keeps both competitors innovating. Perhaps if Google’s approach is successful, Apple will reconsider the whole “exclusive AT&T agreement” thing, become more open with their App Store, and do a few other things better. At this point, we’ll just have to wait and see…

Tags: Android, Apple, cell phone, competition, Google, iPhone, open source, smartphone, T-Mobile

People who have been following me for awhile know that until recent months, I was notorious for always moving all over the place, particularly in the realm of chat clients and web browsers. I’ve already viewed the chat client that I’ve settled on, and for this review, I want to focus on my web browser selection.

Now, web browsers are no easy topic to talk about. Essentially, web browsers are like politics. Just like most everyone has their own political beliefs, most everyone has their own favorite web browser. And of course there’s the group that just doesn’t like any of the politics but still picks a side for the heck of it, just like there’s the group that just doesn’t like any of the web browser selections out there but still picks a side for the heck of it. Either way, it’s a debate that can pit even the closest of friends up against each other.

For the longest time, I’ve been one of the latter group: someone who had something to complain about for every web browser, which is why I kept changing browsers every few months. Now, my colleagues Robert and Larry on PreviewCast are die-hard Safari fans, which has prompted some of our infamous browser wars on the show, and which also prompted a web browser bet around the 2006 Tour de Peninsula ride that I managed to survive. I’ve tried all the web browsers, haven given a few months of my life each to Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb, and also a few minutes each to Flock and Opera, until settling a few months ago with Camino, which I am still using today.
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Tags: browsers, Gecko, open source, review, Software, web browsing, WebKit

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the oldest technologies for online chatrooms, used in particular by the open-source communities (I’m looking at you, #phpbb, #phpbb-mod, and #wordpress). However, the selection of clients for Mac OS X has been rather miniscule and pathetic, with the best being the venerable Colloquy. However, Colloquy has had its share of problems, including a number of bugs in the code, incompatibility with Safari 3, and a number of design quirks that I’ve not been happy with (honestly, I really LIKE seeing the whole channel topic, and don’t tell me otherwise!). Thankfully, I’ve recently discovered a new competitor for the Mac OS X IRC “market”, Linkinus. (Do all OS X IRC apps have to have weird names?)

Linkinus doesn’t contain that many “revolutionary” features, but it’s a very solid IRC client that takes advantage of the Mac OS X look and feel very nicely. It has a fairly iTunes 7-style interface, which very nicely lists the networks and channels on the left, but lists the users on the right, instead of in the same list (much smarter than Colloquy). You can choose different styles for the message window, so you can have your messages displayed in totally blinding style or a calmer plain style. One of the more ingenious features concerns my beef with the channel topic (see above). Instead of listing the full channel topic on the top or restricting it to just one line (like Colloquy does), it displays the channel topic in one line, but when you hover your mouse over the topic, it neatly scrolls the topic across, marquee style. That’s one of those eye-grabbing features which is really slick. Linkinus also includes support for the more advanced IRC features, including aliases/shortcuts (for example, I have /dfph to do “/me passes around the deep-fried pickle hearts” and /slap %1 to do “/me slaps %1 around a bit with a large trout”).

Overall, Linkinus is a very stable IRC client that works very well and has a very well-designed and well-thought out interface, which beats all the other OS X IRC clients out there. Colloquy is okay if you don’t want to pay anything, but if you’re a real IRC junkie, Linkinus is definitely worth the $20.

Final Rating:

Tags: chat, IRC, Mac, open source, review, Software