After spending a week at Google earlier this year witnessing the development of the Android phone, I attended the grand unveiling this morning and left impressed by the phone, but underwhelmed by the presentations.
Some random thoughts about the competition, the staging and the lukewarm commitment to openness:
That other phone
If this i
s not intended to compete with the iPhone, but with platforms like Windows Mobile (see this earlier Wired story on the planning of Android), why show up with just one model of the phone?
Doing so takes away from the power of Android as Google sees it: an open (more on that in a second) OS capable of freeing the wireless web through widespread distribution. Going live with just one handset also sets up inevitable comparisons between the HTC Android phone and the iPhone, one which HTC wins in some cases, such as the responsive keyboard, and loses in others, such as the bulky size. Now the Touch HD, that would have been a fair fight.
Openness is a virtue
T-Mobile made a big deal about being one of the few carriers embracing open standards and open 
systems – which is true. Yet just how open is a (sorry)
open question. When I talked to Cole
Brodman, the CTO of T-Mobile, after the event about what would stop something like Skype from designing a program that could run on the phone, negating the need for a massive voice plan, he said he had
"worked with Google" to make sure Android couldn't run VOIP. "We want to be open in a way that consumers can rely on," is the way Brodman put it to me.
Developers are your friends
Android has excited (and sometimes enraged) developers 
like no other phone OS has before. Google is counting on them to both spread the word of Android's awesomeness and to develop apps that will make the phones a must-have. So why weren't there hundreds, or even tens, of developers at the curtain raising? Instead there were two: one group of guys, all dressed in black with green t-shirts, who created a program for measuring your carbon footprint; and another developer who created a program that lets you take a picture of a barcode and get information on prices and locations of places that sell the item. Google could have simply had its Street View guy (pictured) walk around Silicon Alley 10 minutes before the event and pick up enough developers to have filled the hall.
The hardware's the thing
HTC makes some ground
breaking phones and is, rightly, trying to redefine themselves from being a white-box provider to a name brand. Yet their name is tiny on this, the most high-profile phone they've ever launched in the United States. The only place it appears is on the side of the flip-out screen. I asked CEO Peter Chou about this and he likened it to the way Gore-Tex gets its brand image on the sleeves of jackets. I'd love to have been in the room when T-Mobile, HTC and Google (all of whose brands are on the phone) were fighting over who got to go where and at what size.
One more thing – not
Why not make a big deal out of the fact that this OS allows cut and paste? That and the lack of true multitasking are the two biggest flaws in the iPhone, and here Google seems to be making them happen without any sweat from its programmers. Isn't that worth crowing about? All the players today could have used a bit more cockiness about what they've created.
To Steve, or not to Steve
So Larry and Sergey surprised everybody by showing up. But did they have to do it on rollerblades? And would it have killed them to have some remarks prepared? Is this a big deal for Google or not?
Daniel Roth is a WIRED magazine senior writer, based out of New York.
