I have a not-so-secret pride. Android is now turning 15 years old, and I was one of the first people in the entire world to use it. In fact, the very first Android phone ever was my first smartphone, too. I’ve since moved on to the Apple universe and switched to the iPhone, but the gadget nerd in me still harbors love for that chunky, button-heavy brick of a phone.
Today, Android phones are literally everywhere. As my colleague Jessica Dolcourt notes in her Android retrospective, 70% of phones worldwide use Google’s software, not Apple’s. But back in 2008, when the T-Mobile G1 came out (it was known as the HTC Dream in some parts of the world), both the G1 and Google’s mobile platform were a crazy-looking alternative to the new iPhone world order.
In those early days, using a T-Mobile G1 set me and my phone apart. The iPhone, which had just debuted in 2007, was the first modern smartphone, and everyone wanted one. It was a status symbol. It sold in droves. A year and change after its release, I began to feel the inevitable pull toward buying a smartphone for myself. But not the “magical” iPhone. Hell no.
Apple is into walled gardens, and Android promised freedom to tinker, the way I did on my Windows PC. AT&T had the iPhone exclusive, and I was a longtime T-Mobile subscriber, back in the days when phone contracts still mattered. With the cost of the required two-year contract from each carrier factored in, the G1 on T-Mobile was a lot less expensive than the iPhone on AT&T.
The original anti-iPhone was weird, but lovable
From the moment I picked up the bronze G1 in the T-Mobile store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I was hooked.
This thing was supremely geeky, the antithesis of the svelte iPhone in so many ways: chunky and thick, with a weird (lovable, to me) “chin” that interrupted the typical rectangular profile. It had all the extras: a microSD slot for expandable memory, a little clickable trackball in the middle of the chin for navigation and selecting, actual dedicated buttons for Home, Back and Menu, and even more buttons dedicated to making a phone call and taking a photo. And it said “Google” on the back.
Of course the G1 had a touchscreen too, but the best part was the slide-out physical keyboard. I really felt superior to iPhone users with that thing. Those tiny little virtual keyboards, which took up half the screen, seemed impossibly slow and error-prone compared to the glorious, fully backlit, five-row tactile QWERTY powerhouse (with dedicated number keys!) that revealed itself when I slid aside the G1’s screen.
I loved how the screen reoriented automatically into landscape mode when I opened the keyboard. I loved the substantial, satisfying “snick” sound as it sprang into action. I even loved how it made the phone physically bigger, like a miniature computer. At the time it seemed like the ultimate gadget, and in a lot of ways it was. Having never owned a smartphone before, I was amazed at its utility, the camera, the GPS capabilities and turn-by-turn navigation – all the marvelous complexity in a tiny, portable package.
Chunky? Check. Chin? Check. Geek cachet? Double check.
Gmail worked beautifully on my phone, with all of the features like labeling and archiving that I got on the PC. I also loved the home screen widgets like the Google search bar, and the ability to pull down the top of the screen for notifications, like new texts and emails, was great.
Read also: The T-Mobile G1 Almost Looked Like a BlackBerry
Pulling out my chunky phone to make calls or type texts occasionally earned curious looks from people, but it was New York and everybody was familiar with iPhones and BlackBerrys. Most people didn’t seem to notice or care.
I played a lot of games on the G1, from Bonsai Blast to Doom to Chrono Trigger, and the keyboard was actually useful on many of them. Screen-only games at the time had awkward controls that overlaid the screen, but some games for the G1 mapped the controls to the buttons, just like a computer keyboard, which left the whole screen for the game itself. I could fire with the space bar and use WASD to move around.
I remember the Android app universe always felt a step behind Apple’s, especially at the beginning. Apps for the system were sparse at the time, and my iPhone friends had apps and games (like Angry Birds) that I didn’t. I justified the lack by telling myself that the majority of nongaming stuff I wanted to do, like read news articles and forums, I could do on the phone’s browser. Today, looking back from a world where apps rule and browser-based functions on phones drool, I laugh at silly young me.
My phones 15 years ago and five years ago: the T-Mobile G1 (left) next to a Galaxy Note 8, keyboards deployed.
Eventually I outgrew the T-Mobile G1 and moved on to another, bigger Android phone, the Samsung Vibrant. This was T-Mobile’s variant of the very first Galaxy S phone, and it outpaced the now old G1 with a larger, much nicer OLED screen – but no keyboard. By that point I had come around to the coolness of the virtual keyboard on an all-touch display, and thanks to autofill and predictive text suggestions, it was actually faster than typing on my old G1.
And much, much later, around the beginning of the pandemic when I had to start working from home – which meant filming all my own TV review videos in my basement – I ditched Android and bought an iPhone 12 Pro Max. I read a bunch of reviews (thanks, Patrick) and convinced myself that the iPhone would be better for photos and video. I also felt the lure of the crowd I had spurned in my younger days. Tech-savvy friends and coworkers at CNET swore by the convenience and slickness of the iPhone, lauding how well they worked with Macs, for example (which I had been using at work for years).
I still have my 12 Pro Max, and truth be told, it’s a great phone today. And 15 years ago, Google’s first Android phone was a great phone for its period. It sparked my enduring, if not eternal, allegiance to Android and paved the way for even bigger, better phones like the Vibrant. It’s Google’s openness that has given Samsung the latitude to create geeky, capable phones like the Note series and foldables like the Galaxy Z Fold 5.
I’ll probably never want a physical phone keyboard again, but thanks to the T-Mobile G1 I’ll always have a modicum of anti-Apple geek credibility.
This article was originally published in 2018, when the author was still on Android, and has been updated with additional details.
