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The long awaited release of Google’s Android mobile OS on the much anticipated HTC G1 phone has finally taken place.  Being on the other end of the nation, Next2Friends had to watch the excitement from afar.  But we’ve been watching these developments closely since it directly impacts our mission to reach the most people possible with the Next2Friends mobile social platform.  So we’re aggregating all the impressions from the various blogs and sites that we follow, including an exclusive quote from someone inside T-Mobile.

The first overall message that seemed to ring clear was that the release of an open mobile platform is nothing short of revolutionary.  Crunchgear said, “it looks like we’re seeing an epic paradigm shift in the mobile space.”  And Endgadget summed it up nicely by saying “it felt a bit like a new era for the mobile industry…with high-profile companies backing a Linux-based, touch-driven mobile OS, and spouting the word “open” every two sentences.”

But like any revolution there are voices of dissent.  One of the loudest coming from Gizmodo.  Jesus Diaz begins by lamenting the seemingly small fact that the clocks on the G1 do not match.  But he builds his case quite well:

“The problem with the clocks would have never escaped Apple’s ferocious attention to detail, but it is not the image itself that’s so troubling. It is what it symbolizes, what is missing at Android’s most fundamental level: Attention to detail.”

Then there is the perspective of developers.  Will Android’s Marketplace be worth the time and energy?  The “open” nature of the platform could be fertile grounds for disenfranchised iPhone developers as reported in this Wired post, but there remains a central issue that stands in the way of the Android Marketplace taking off.  Frasier Speirs, developer of the iPhone Exposure application, puts it best in the Wired article:

“I’m basically playing with Android but I don’t really see that I’m going to seriously develop for it,” Speirs said in a phone interview. “The Android software package is a known quantity now, but the hardware ecosystem is not. It’s not clear to me that every phone running Android will be just like the HTC G1: There may be phones with touch screen and those without. I think that whole part of the Android story is really unclear right now.”

But all complaints aside, it seems safe to say that there just is too little information to form a firm opinion right now.  It remains to be seen how the public decides to engage (or not) with Android.  The open model versus Apple’s highly restrictive and closed model should make for some interesting battles in the future.  But we’ll leave you with a quote from Bruce Cook, a manager at T-Mobile who has had a G1 longer than most (the G1 won’t be available until October 22nd, 2008):

“I’ve worked in the mobile industry for over 10 years, and I’ve seen a lot of mobile phones come and go, and I personally haven’t been this excited and engaged by a phone in 5 years.  I love the functionality and have not experienced even one glitch so far.  The G1 is just the start of what I believe will be a promising future.”

Well put!

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