By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Director of  Academic Computing and User Services

No Escaping the Big G

The move to bring the entire Internet to the palm of your hand progressed a bit recently with the September announcement of the T-Mobile G-1, the first mobile phone built on the open-source phone operating system named Android. The phones hit T-Mobile stores in late October and while the G-1 hasn't eclipsed the news of the U.S. Presidential election or the current world-wide economic turmoil, it does represent a first step that could change the communication and information landscape in a significant way.

Approaching Convergence

The G-1 at its simplest is cell phone that brings the world of Google to you in a compact package that you can hold in your hand. But to call it a phone is to limit the definition of its true capabilities. It represents further progress along the line of convergence we are seeing between phones, PDAs, and portable computers. Smart phones like the Palm Treo, Blackberry, and iPhone have all but eliminated PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) unless you count the iPod Touch as the PDA for the new millennium. The G-1 is Google's answer to the iPhone, but with a few significant differences.

If you want to know all that the G-1 can do, you can visit the official T-Mobile site for the phone and view the videos, if you can stand the initial burst of busy music and video that introduces the gadget. You'll find that in addition to Google Maps and GMail, you can access other Google applications including You-Tube videos (which while actively embraced by the iPhone universe, remains a Google-owned service.) Integral to the G-1 is a web browser, Google Maps, and the Google search engine that we can't live without. Of course on the iPhone, you can access a Web Browser, Google Maps, and the Google Search engine that we can't live without. An important distinction of the G-1, however, is not that it's built on different hardware or software but that it is built upon a different philosophy.

What makes the Android tick?

The Android operating system that is the engine for the G-1 is based on the open-source Linux operating system. Linux is an operating system that supports all kinds of programs, so the G-1 is already starting with a set of applications that is potentially quite large. Linux is also a development platform for a lot of software creators, so finding people to write applications for Android is not a hard task. Finally, Android is not the property of Google. It is available to anyone who wants to make a new kind of cell phone, and available at no charge. So, any successes with the G-1 might spawn a whole bunch of other similar phones from different manufacturers which means more choices for people who are using those phones.

A paradigm shift ...

So, it won't restore your 401K and it's not as historic as the election of the first African-American President of the United States, but the G1 could very well help change our methods of mobile communication and the way in which we interact with the world. When you have maps, and encyclopedias, and news sources, and dictionaries, and videos, and chat sessions, and the phone system all in your pocket, you may no longer be lost, or uninformed, or unknowing, or bored, or out of touch. The little brain in your pocket will make sure of that.