I’m planning a G1 night for my Android Group. Many people who bought
the first Android Phone had to deal with a lot of frustration. Mostly
because they didn’t work. They were slow, they didn’t have all the
menu items you needed, and in a few iterations there were 6 different
volume sliders.
bricky phone around that never really just worked. I have some friends
who just went with the marketing. Some of us chose it out of a belief
in the principles of open development. Some of us had tanked in the
financial crisis of ’08 and were literally kicked off AT&T.
Disenfranchised from the iPhone (and our app purchases) by the
inexplicable single carrier phenomenon that defines the iPhone’s era.
Where the world learned to enjoy one thing together. The truth in hindsight is: you had to be a pretty interesting cat to
pick up a G1 during the peak of the iPhone’s halcyon days. To
literally think *very differently* about the nature of development,
royalty and entitlement. Some interesting characters arose from this
fringe element. With innovative ways to cope with having a “kit” when
you needed a phone. At the XDA-Developers forum developers would regularly post pictures
of the home screens of their tricked out phones, because of the G1′s
open architecture and Android’s open source project, there were new
opportunities for these fringe-within-the-fringe elements. Some
developers began posting not only images of their home screens, they
started to post the whole ROM. Enabling others to try it on their
phones and try to make their own. When the practice took the shape of a few well written step by step
guides (Thank You Haykuro, JF, Cyanogen) the practice boomed, and an
über fashionable ROM remixing community was born. This community fueled the Android user and developer base and provided
some peace of mind that if the device didn’t work, at least it was
getting better every day. If you hated something, at least you could
change everything in one flash of your ROM. On top of that, if you
wanted the latest and greatest phone, you could depend on this
community to port the ROM to the G1, and race to see who could release
a port first. This peaked in coolness when Hayuro released a ROM running the Rosie
UI from HTC. It was the first killer Android UI and everyone wanted
it. We all wondered if this was ok with HTC. They must be flattered
that we’re willing to risk bricking our phones just to use their UI,
we thought. All good things must come to an end, I remember the day that Cyanogen
Tweeted that his updater had 30k users. Quite a victory to have 30k
cellphones running your customized ROM and no interest in ever
monetizing it. Many of us also remember the day he was served a Cease and Desist
letter by Google. Everyone had a sneaking feeling that they were
getting away with murder every time they hit ALT+S to load a newly
downloaded ROM from *somewhere* that promised to fix a bug or add a
feature. Luckily, Google listened to what was being said on the
development boards and heard the roar on Twitter and drew a very clear
boundary around what you can distribute and what you cannot. With some
negotiation, Cyanogen and the ROM Remix community got a seemingly
permanent and Google endorsed carve out. HTC released the source code for the entire Sense UI under a “limited
license” which basically states “remix the S#$T out of this code but
don’t you dare try to sell a ROM or device running it” Now, with the launch of the Nexus One, Android begins it’s Second
Generation and the G1 can breathe a sigh of relief that whatever this
community is able to get a G1 to do, it won’t be sharing the spotlight
(or going under the microscope) with Google’s Flagship “Internet
Device”. I have 3 of these myself and a Nexus One. I believe the G1 is the most
capable and arguably most hacked and experimented on device ever. I
think we will be suprised in the days to come where we see them pop
up. Portrayed in virtual Polaroid, The “G1 AfterParty” depicts
anthropomorphized G1 phones acting badly in candid shots. They are
shown doing things the stock carrier ROMs that they came with would
never do, such as turn by turn navigation, live wallpapers, speech to
text and the latest camera app. It’s meant to portray a celebration
for a Ponochio-tale of a phone that embodied frustration for so many
people yet will survive as a symbol of perseverance, as it now can do
everything a Nexus One or an iPhone can do. Maybe not as wide a pipe for multitasking and less amazing graphics
but is still competent and expandable, and it continues to be
expanded. As of this writing there are a little under 200 ROM images
of varying quality(and risk) available for the G1.
I remember when there were three. Code Named very appropriately “The
Dream” the G1 is likely to go down in history as one of the most
successful 1st generation products and an enduring cult classic. When
it’s time I’ll put mine down in the closet shoebox that serves as the
resting place of my Atari 2600 and my Lynx II. If you own a G1 and want to make it sing and dance follow me on
Twitter @sidgabriel or join The Android Makers at
http://www.AndroidMakers.com Take care, Sid Gabriel
