10 years of Android: How the best mobile OS was made http://fe | Android

10 years of Android: How the best mobile OS was made
http://feeds.androidcentral.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/TIEi5MYeIWI/10-years-android-how-best-mobile-os-was-made

You've come a long way, baby.

Step into the Wayback Machine and travel to October 2008, if you will.

I was with a small crowd of other folks at a Washington, D.C. T-Mobile store waiting in line to buy the T-Mobile G1. It was a phone that had a very limited release — in the U.S. only high-volume T-Mobile retail stores in areas with 3G deployments were selling them — and it was also a phone that wasn't even going to work once I got it home (blame that pesky T-Mobile 3G-only thing again). But I had to have it because it was a phone that was running this crazy new Linux-based OS from Andy Rubin and Google called Android.



A turbo-charged Sidekick?

By today's standards, the T-Mobile G1 was a dumpster fire. It featured a 3.2-inch plasticky-feeling capacitive display, a big chin with a weird clicky trackball that didn't act at all like the trackball every BlackBerry user was used to (and there were a lot of BlackBerry users back in 2008), a sliding horizontal qwerty keyboar...