Ok so my loving girlfriend recently did an amazingly awesome thing and bought me an HTC Dream (more commonly known as the T-Mobile G1) for my birthday. As a geek these kinds of things make your skin stand up on end, as well as bring about manic depression as you bunk work early during the week of it’s potential delivery, hoping to be at home when the item arrives. Depression kicks in naturally as the item is more than likely late, leaving you devastated and without your new toy in hand. Yup, while we geeks do grow up and become evil geniuses with the capacity to rule the world, when it comes to new toys we pretty much turn into mindless kids.
So, after a few bouts of depression and three missed deliveries, my new mobile was finally in my hands. I had a guilty sense of delight watching that little green android glow on the screen as the device booted for the first time. Actually, I still get that same warm feeling, not that I’d openly admit it to anybody.
Wait, why not an iPhone? It has more applications, a smaller footprint, a higher resolution screen and supports 3G in Canada already!
Well, to sum it up: I want to develop applications, and with Android being open source and Linux based I figured it would be the preferable development environment. From a business perspective, if I ever wanted to sell said hypothetical application Android would be a better platform than Mac to sell on since it will inevitably reach a vastly larger audience than iPhone ever will. (Do you see DR Congo getting iPhones anytime soon??). Smells like 1984 all over again, except this time Google will take a turn kicking Apples butt for being ignorant.
Anyway, I actually bought my device on eBay from the US so I can’t buy paid applications right now. Hopefully Rogers new addition of the G1 / G2 will change this though! I was going to buy a US sim card to trick my device into thinking it was a US based device but perhaps I won’t have to anymore.
Note: I just want to mention here saying that this post was substantially longer as of yesterday, but with this news this morning, my whole blog post was pretty much nullified! I was writing a beautifully informative article on getting my G1 working in Canada, but since the darn thing is coming here via Rogers next month anyway it doesn’t really matter!








