The G1 event has come and gone and it looks like we’re seeing an epic paradigm shift in the mobile space. iPhone started the ball rolling and Android is about the finish the job. The change? Phones are now officially computers and the expectation for most users is that they behave in the same way a powerful laptop or desktop PC would perform, albeit in a considerably more compact package.
I was struck by something during the G1 presentation today and it took me a quite a while to figure out what it was. Back in 1997-98 while I was at Carnegie Mellon we were at a crossroads in IT. The web was taking off in a general way and email was king for college students. The school was full of computer clusters - some Mac, some PC, and some greenscreen Unix dumb terminals in the library running X Windows. While the Macs and PCs were easy to understand and run, you could just tell that the Unix machines were like an iceberg - 98% of the power is under water, unseen by the average user. Putting the G1 through its paces showed a intense attention to detail on the part of Google and a tacit promise from the phone that it was far more powerful than originally described. This is G1’s blessing and curse.
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