This could have been the first Android phone

It is always fascinating to discover the origins of operating systems And devices that are part of our lives today. The 2007 it has in fact passed into the annals as the year of birth of the smartphone as we know them today thanks to the launch of the first iPhonebut in those months the struggle to define the future it was far from written, with several actors such as Google, Apple and Microsoft engaged in ambitious projects.

To reveal some background is Rich Minerone of the co-founders of Google, in a series of posts on Twitter in which he denies that Google copied Apple, but was actually developing a your device in parallel.

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At the time, Larry Page was convinced that the smartphone they would become pocket computers, and the biggest concern was that Microsoft repeats its dominion that it had in the market for PC on the nascent industry with Windows Mobile. Google was investing in browser, and saw in the smartphone a promising bet.

Five months before the launch of iPhone, Google was studying two devices, Sooner And Dream. Sooner was a model like Blackberry and Dream, or Google G1it was instead equipped with a touchscreen.

As you can see from the image above, the phone was equipped with a QWERTY keyboard retractable in very bright fluo green color, which could also be glimpsed from the edges when closed. The same color was used for the Google brand above, for i physical buttons for the email and the snail (“@”) just below the screen and the icons down.

Immediately below, in fact, we find the buttons for the reply and the rejection of calls, the home and the back buttoneach highlighted by an icon that wheel based onorientation of the phone. On the right, there is a circular ring, evidently for moving between menus, and according to Miner this was just one of the options for the input, meant not for rotation but for pushing.

The launch of the iPhone changed everything. Sooner was canceled and the project Dream was brought forward. The similarities with iPhone according to Miner were only due to the technological limits at the time and at similar technology. In 2008 Google G1 became the mythical HTC Dream or T-Mobile G1. The phone was equipped with five physical buttons and a trackball for movement in the menus, as well as a slight curvature at the bottom to mold to the face.

Miner then goes on to say that at the time it was thought that the smartphone market would have reached the 30% of the telephony market, not that it would completely engulfed, is that Android it has never chased Apple, indeed in 2010 it surpassed it.

Unfortunately, what Miner doesn’t explain is what happened between mid 2006 and the 2008 and why the Dream / Google G1 has not been launched before. At that point, perhaps it had to be clear that the danger was not Microsoft, but Apple.