Sure, the very first iPhone released today, but does anyone remember the first Android smartphone?
In October of 1998 HTC’s T-Mobile G1, or HTC Dream as it’s known outside the U.S would launch being the first phone with the Android OS. The G1 was priced at $179 — which was pretty affordable even in those days — and featured top-of-the-line specs including a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor, 192MB of RAM, and 256MB of internal storage (expandable up to 16GB). It also stocked a 3.15MP rear camera, and a 1,150mAh battery.
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I don’t think 1998 is correct, this was my first Android phone and I used it in 2008 (a decade later than OP) which is what the wiki also says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream#History
First released in September 2008, the Dream was the first commercially released device to use the Linux-based Android operating system
Android itself didn’t start development until 5 years later than OP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History
Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White.
I also found this cool category for phones that came out in 1998. They’re all Nokias. This was even a year before BlackBerry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phones_introduced_in_1998
I miss the days of android phones with physical keyboards. They were just better
YES. I turned off all auto-correct and spellcheck and whatever on my Nokia N900, I didn’t need it, I just TYPED. It was so easy!
And it had Shift, Ctrl, and arrow keys… I miss it so much.
I do too. Hence I built one. And it’s open source, so anyone can: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry
You’re my hero
I prefer on screen keyboards now with swipe typing being a standard.
And that’s fine. I just miss there being choices. I get that the hinges increased costs, but dammit, why can’t we just have some expensive phones with hinges and let people choose?
I recall seeing physical keyboards on at least one phone that still let you swipe text.
I think it was a blackberry one, IIRC
Same. I’ll never stop blaming Steve Jobs’ hate of physical keys and practicality in favor of looks. Fuck him, but above all, fuck all the competitors that jumped on the “EVERYTHING ON THE SCREEN” bandwagon.
What surprises me is that no one has made a phone case that integrates a flip or slide keyboard. It would be an easy way to add an aftermarket physical board to a phone, and from these threads it’s clear there’s at least some demand. I understand it’s probably not enough demand for a whole phone line, but surely something like that would be possible.
When I lived in Japan I had a lovely flip phone with a nice big screen (for the time), no thicker than my cased pixel phone now when closed. The only clamshells that are left have comically tiny screens and are thicker than a fully loaded wallet. They’re substantially less functional than what I used in 2007. It’s bizarre.
years ago they used to have phone cases with a bluetooth keyboard so you could slide it open and it would be pretty similar to having a keyboard integrated right in the phone
must not have been popular cause I don’t really see them anymore
We had actual form-factor innovation back then, for a while phone designs still dared to try something besides the slab. Some real work went into that G1 slider mechanism.
The keyboard was great on the g1 and it even included keyboard shortcuts for quick launching and power use. The unsung hero of that device, especially since the touchscreen did not support multitouch, was the little trackball nub.
It was SO SATISFYING to roll around and it allowed for the BEST test select of any mobile device I’ve used since. In a pinch opera browser would give it a mouse pointer which was SUPER useful navigating the late 00s internet which had losts of hover menus. I miss that little track ball more than any other thing.
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I think about that! Our mobile technologies have been becoming less and less accessible as they’ve all settled into the same form factor of big screens with few to no buttons
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User studies with people not familiar with existing computer metaphors are always so interesting. It always leads to novel computing experiences completely divergent from the classical desktop metaphor. In many ways, we’ve outgrown the desktop metaphor and could start coming up with better and more captivating machine interactions if we just divorced ourselves from the concept. I don’t really have any good suggestions for what to do about it, but I often think about the hamburger menu icon. That shit doesn’t make sense. You see it everywhere because everyone’s settled on it, but if you were told “make a website that people who aren’t familiar with websites can use and enjoy” you would never use that stupid icon
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1998?! Try 2008.
I edited the typo in the post but edits suck on federated social media and don’t update on all instances. This is like the 5th I’ve seen this comment.
1998, man? Try 2008. 🤪
Jesus H Christ do any of you read the comments? I’ve seen this reply like 6 times now. I edited the typo but federation and edits are like oil and water.
1998?! Try 2008.
It was very satisfying flipping and sliding phones like this. I wonder how it would be to transfer back to a tactile physical keyboard after all this time. I’m not sure if it’s just nostalgia but I almost feel like it would be better
I built a keyboard attachment for my phone (https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry) because I missed having a keyboard so much. Since it’s easy to detach, I can quickly switch between physical and software keyboard.
For example, if I want to type really quietly, I switch to the software keyboard. But I really hate it. The physical keyboard is SO much better.
That looks neat! Remind me of the Keyboard Covers Samsung had for the S7 and S8. Those worked by covering up part of the screen and the physical keys were triggering the touchscreen and a special touchscreen keyboard driver. Worker pretty well and it was nice to have the flexibility to have the cover on or off. It could be stowed on the back of the phone when not in use.
I used the fxtec for a bit just for the keyboard, it truly feels better however the rest of the aspects of the phone were a bit rough
The G1 had a great keyboard with its staggered keys, truly a great experience. But the manufacturers all seemed to transition to a grid style (rows and columns all aligned) and with it a poorer experience.
I feel like this design would work pretty well even for a modern phone. Just flatten the bottom-right menu section and extend the screen over it, and you’d get a regular full-size smartphone with a slide-out keyboard and some handy physical buttons!
i was in the root/rom community for a decade & anytime i see anything about classic android i get nostalgic af. while i was a bit too late to own an htc dream, i still boot up my lg optimus v running android 2.2 (well, it was on a 4.4 rom at one point but i flashed it back to stock) every few years. while i don’t miss the horrible ui, bugginess, slowness & clunkiness of android before 4.x, at the same time… i also kinda do for whatever reason lol. not enough to actually go back to it, but still. something about that white status bar, square icons & the overall mismashed together ui made of gray headerbars on top of white & black feels pleasant in a way i can’t explain.
That keyboard, though. 🤤
That keyboard was excellent and the slider mechanism was solid too! A lot of the later pkb phones don’t have a dedicated number row. And I really miss the physical Home and Back buttons, even pkb keyboard don’t have those these days. My only complaint is about the trackball. It was ok for some things but not accurate enough and got flakier with use.
I also loved early-Android UI. The modern stuff might be smooth but ergonomically it’s crap. For me the G1 represents a golden age, I am sad that I gave it away.
I had this phone. It was great. I really miss tactile keyboard keys.
You can still get them if you care enough, some of us still use them. There have always been at least a couple reasonably modern physical-keyboard Android phones available, there are a few choices today too. I never had to resort to a non-PKB phone since the G1.
I still have my G1 and my G2! The G2 was one of my favorite phones of all time and, sadly, the last I ever owned with a physical keyboard.
I just went looking for my G1 too as I recall finding it in a box somewhere a few months back. Definitely a badass phone and I wish we still had some options for sliders with a full keyboard as it’s far superior for typing.
Do they still function?
G2 still does! I dont think I have a charging cable for the G1 anymore so I cant test it.
It’s so beautiful 🤩
Haha I had one of these phones. It’s battery was terrible but it was super nifty
Yes but this was in the day of replaceable battery packs! I had a third party battery pack that had 2-3x the capacity. Great phone!
I wish I had one!!! I wish I had saved all my tech over the years along with all my magazines.
They were really cheap for a time! A friend of mine got one when it was a generation old for $100 on craigslist. I think I might still have the one I had at my parents house… I should look next time I’m in town
Bring back unnecessary physical keyboards!!!
My first Android phone was my Motorola Cliq, which I got after my Blakcberry Pearl died. Good times with those phones.
My first was an HTC Merge in 2011. Looked very similar to OP’s phone, but had dedicated capacitive buttons on front for home, back and recents.
I loved having a keyboard. Still have the phone here somewhere, power it up for a nostalgia trip sometimes
Had one for less than a day. I was the designated driver, stopped to get gas after dropping everyone off. Put the phone on the car. Drove home… bye bye G1 😭
I had one back in the day got it in 09 which means I would immediately wind up with buyers remorse as t-mobile in my area was not great at the time and the motorolla droid would soon release and have just enough horsepower to do more.
Overall though the G1 had things about it that I absolutely love and things that made it objectively not great. 2nd gen androids would be a lot more usable.
The good:
The form factor was great. Pocketable, the keyboard was a good size for your hands, and although it looks like cheap gray/black plastic the material was actually fairly soft and nice to the touch. The device was also an absolute tank. I dropped my g1 so many times and like big drops on concrete and rolling down stairs bad. It still works! The keyboard was a joy to type on and I could walk around while not looking at my phone and type away to finish a chat, and the little track ball nubbin was possibly the greatest loss to history. It was so smooth and precise and satisfying to use.
You could get an extended battery and it would last all day. The rom support was also EXCELLENT since this was the first android and although everyone running anything higher than 1.6 was lying to themselves about how usable and fast it was, the fact that it got as many releases after being abandoned was amazing. Android was also so new and green that the roms were exciting and offered quite a bit on top of the vanilla experience. Things like using a swap partition on an sdcard or installing apps directly to a linux formatted partition on your sdcard to deal with the limited space. It was so cool.
The Bad:
While I have nothing but praise for the casing and it’s form factor, the hardware was not up to snuff for android. The resolution of the small screen was too low and it was only single touch. You couldnt even pinch zoom which is why android still has that double tap one finger zoom option. The cpu and ram were NOT up to snuff at all for the hardware and the g1 became so dated so quickly that despite being the original it could NOT handle android 2.0 and beyond. Which means a little over a year into it’s launch the first android device lost official software support.
The OS was also so forward thinking while also lacking some super important features. You had true unfettered access and background usage and there was no way to actually close programs if they didnt have “close” option in app. You needed a third party task killer. Not auto killer mind you but something that let you pull up what was running and close misbehaving programs or ones that just didnt have an close button. Ram was already tight on this device, and cpu limited but unfettered background apps could grind this phone to a hault. The upside to this is that using a third party rom with swap partition gave me better multitasking than any android phone I had since until I got a device with more than 6 gigs of ram. (Even then my g1 could run multiple browsers in different windows without them closing each other) .
The camera was awful. Like genuinely bad and even a slight shadow would cause your camera to be a noisy mess. It also didnt have a front facing camera so no selfies or video chatting.
The battery life was also bad. Easily fixed with a 3rd party replacement but it did turn your phone into a little brick and the back case that came with those batteries was always worse than original.
Oh also headphone jack fans should note this phone required a headphone to miniusb adapter.
Overall since I got a new phone I’ve always said if they would release a true g2 with same form factor and good hardware I would drop money on it in a heartbeat. Maybe make the screen slightly bigger. Other than that the phone was a flawed little thing. It was my first smartphone though and I absolutely loved using it.
Oh, that reminds me of my HTC Touch Pro with Windows Mobile. One of the greatest smartphones of the time
