The beautiful & ugly side of G1 Android

I ain't gonna talk about the physical or the look of T-Mobile's G1, that runs the most anticipated Android platform in it. I think everyone has gotten out what they wanted to say in their chest, about the handset design that is originally made by HTC.

But instead, I'm gonna take you (yet again) to look behind all the solid of G1 Android's body. There are interesting stories behind all that, controversial and yet true, trivial matter and yet important. Let's see the ugly side first shall we? So then you'll have a good - happy ending, and a good night sleep. ~LOL~

An ex-Google employee, Ulf Waschbusch is once Google's product marketing manager not so long ago, so he must have seen the company's Android in its early stages. In fact, Eric Schmidt introduced the device himself to Ulf. Here's the snipped words from Ulf taken via Valleywag:

"It’s funny - but the first time I heard about Android was about 2.5 years ago, when Eric Schmidt told me about the device at Stanford after I got a job offer from Google (yet before I accepted it!). Since then I have seen many iterations of the software. The software. Not the device itself, because sadly it hasn’t changed in many years. The reason many people see the phone as ugly and old-fashioned is simply… because it IS! It’s a design unchanged for at least two years, without iterations on it besides color schemas (it’s now available in Zune-brown along with white and black) and the silly ‘with Google’ description on the back. Don’t ask me what ‘with Google’ means. I didn’t understand it back then and still don’t understand it today."

Ulf even bravely declared in his

blog the G1 as an ugly device: "The reason many people see the G1 as ugly and old-fashioned is simply … because it IS!" He then updated his blog with more clearence of what he has said, after the blogosphere picked up the pieces together. You can read what Ulf got to say at the picture above.

You may disagree with Ulf about the 'ugliness' of G1 design, but you'll have to admit that it took too long for Android to come into its shape right now. We've heard the first rumor about gPhone / Google-phone long time ago, and we've just see it become materialized this year. Another fact comes from Forbes article: The font, dubbed Droid, is the product of a two-year collaboration between the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant and Ascender, a digital typeface company based in Elk Grove Village, III.

Ascender's chief type designer, Steve Matteson, who created the Droid fonts, says Google requested a design that was friendly and approachable. "They wanted to see a range of styles, from the typical, bubbly Google image to something very techno-looking," Matteson says.

We can appreciate the Droid fonts in almost every details in G1 Android, from the characters, symbols and numerals on the phone's physical keyboard to its software--everything from drop-down lists to the address book to map applications. Applications written for Android will also feature Droid, since the font is built into the platform's software development kit.

And so is when you open up the Android web browser, you can find the Droid fonts are imbued within the web pages. You can watch the video demo of Android's web browser just below this post, it works beautifully and could become a very serious competitor to iPhone's Safari web browser. Which the Google has pledged its Android's web browser as the real "Full Web Experience", I wonder how Apple is gonna take it since it was sued due to the false interpretation of iPhone ads in U.K. ;-D

[blogged with my Treo 750v]