Joe Wilcox: I'm Googled Now

Joe Wilcox is very tempted by the T-Mobile G1, which, given that he's been a bit skeptical about the Android project is as much of a surprise to him as it is to anyone else.

I'm much happier with the iPhone than Joe was (he returned his due to the bad call quality), but I'm still pretty tempted by the T-Mobile G1. There's three things which make me look longingly at it:

The keyboard

Every now than, I take the old BlackBerry 8800 out of the shoebox it's stored in and give it a run out. And every time I do, I end up going back to the iPhone and missing the keyboard. that said, I'm not totally convinced that the design of the G1 will work for me, as I look at the buttons on the bottom and wonder if it will feel right in the hand when it's in landscape orientation.But having a keyboard again would be good. 

Openness

Every time Apple does something to remind me that the Mac and the iPhone are closed systems which it wants to keep under very tight control, a little voice inside my head admonishes me for using their products. While I am less concerned that Apple controls the platform on the Mac (after all, you can always boot a Mac into Linux), it's desire to control the iPhone and all developer work on it gives me the heeby jeebies.

And the contrast with Google couldn't be greater. Sure, the G1 only works out of the box with Google services. But there is absolutely nothing stopping you creating applications to work with Microsoft services, Apple services, or whatever. And, because those applications have the ability to be background applications, they are on the same playing field as Google's own - there's no "we'll save that ability for ourselves" here.

Google-centricity

Like Joe, I use Google Apps for my Domain (the enterprise edition - I like the idea of 25Gb of mail storage), which means that a lot of my world runs around Google apps. Yes, I have misgivings about committing everything to the cloud, but those misgivings are tempered by the general ability to get everything out of Google if I need to.

The apps have it

Given all this, it's pretty obvious why the G1 would have a lot of appeal for me. What will almost certainly determine what the winner is the same thing that determines the winner between Mac and Windows for me: the applications that developers create. So far, the applications that have appeared for the iPhone have been a mix of extremely poor and exceptionally good. If developers rally around Android, then, for me, it will be a winner. If, on the other hand, all the best apps appear on the iPhone, then it will be my phone of choice.

For this customer, applications matter.