So, for the past year or so, the iphone has been all of the rage. It is definitely the cool big kids toy for 2008.  I mean, apple is hot right now, everybody in the industry is looking at them, either with an aim to emulate them or annihilate them.

Hence comes the gphone, google’s answer to the iphone.  But is the gphone really just google’s lackluster attempt to combat the iphone?  That is one way to look at it, but I think that the differences between the two phones far outweigh the similarities.  What we are really looking at are several different companies attempting to engineer the future.  Let’s get some perspective by going back in time a little bit.

Open vs. Closed vs. Half-Open

First of all, I want to say this is not an apple-bashing post. I love apple computers.  I’ve been using them and telling others about them since I got my first ibook back in 2001.  But I’ll start my story back a little further…

During the dotcom boom I became interested in linux and began my explorations by installing mandrake on an intel pentium 486.  Linux is the open-source offspring of unix, and hence, from the ground up designed and implemented with a networked environment in mind.  This is an os based the idea that multiple users will be communicating with each other over multiple machines.  Windows on the other hand was first a program that, oddly enough, was an os whose main goal was to run peoples programs in windows.  Networking was such an afterthought when the chucked it in on the ‘95 version and was still half-baked in the ‘98 versions (I believe the versions after that started getting better because they used NT as the scaffolding, but I haven’t owned a copy of windows since way back then so don’t quote me).

What struck me the most at the time was the networking capabilities of linux vs. windows.  I spent all day long at my job explaining to people how to uninstall and reinstall the network drivers in windows because they would  get really slow inconsistent connections or just suddenly stop working, “Okay, go to the control panel, now find the icon labled network properties…”  It was the same thing over and over again.  Then there were the computers with the “winModems” which weren’t even hardware but microsoft’s puny attempt at writing software modems.  (Looking back, this was yet another job of mine over the years that directly related to the misfortune of others).  This way back in the dial-up days before hardly anybody had broadband connections to their homes.

So when I would get off work at night I would go home and tinker with the linux machine.  I think I had edonkey or something installed and I would search for larger and larger files to download over my dial-up connection.  It never crashed.  I had it going for days at a time.  I would tell people at work about it and they would scratch their heads.  Was the difference really that obvious?  It sure seemed so to me.

Around this time apple released their first version of os x.  I got really excited about it because I could see that this was a bold move by apple to bypass microsoft in the new internet era of computing we were moving into (I especially liked the move to by apple get microsoft to give them much needed capital by agreeing to inlcude IE on all the new macs).  Rather than going the whole way open source with linux, apple chose to license Berkley unix and use that as the foundation of its os.  This it would allow them to benefit from all of this wonderful proprietary networking technology that had been in active development since the 60’s.  It also gave apple access to an incredible repository of open-source technology as well because linux programs can easily be configured to run on unix systems, sometimes without any modification at all.  Some would say that this was the best of both worlds.  From a business perspective alone, this was probably one of the best decisions ever made by apple, although at the time lots of classic users were furious their beloved os was being shelved.

Also at this time, my friend Shannon convinced his employer to get him a G4 powermac laptop.  What a beautiful computer, I still remember playing unreal tournament in the passenger seat of his car while driving around Ft. Smith, Arkansas.  He got a beta copy of OS X and while i was messing around with it I completely wiped the hard drive (yes, *ixs can be extremely dangerous if one knows a few commands but not the irrevocable power they possess, i think i did rm -f ./ in root).  Anyways, he ended up having to install this beta version as the sole os for the computer.  He struggled with it for a while, but still managed to get it working in a useful way.  His main problem was that microsoft hadn’t moved the office suite to that platform yet and there wasn’t much out there in terms of open source alternatives.

I thought the apple hardware with the unix-based os had to be a winning combination, so when the opportunity came for me to buy a new computer in 2001 I couldn’t resist getting one of the redesigned ibooks.  I still have it, and it still works!  I put 10.4 on it a couple years ago which takes up about half of the 10GB hard drive so about the only use I have for it anymore is checking email or doing stuff on the net that doesn’t require a lot of speed or memory.  Other than a few problems with the wireless connection (which i’m not sure if i can blame on the airport card in the computer or my router) it is still a functional, useful (though somewhat slow) computer.

I would call apple’s system half-open.  OS X uses a lot of open-source software (for instance the gcc compiler) and benefits from having access to that environment, but they had developed a lot of closed source software on top of that platform.  The appstore for the iphone is the probably best example of this dichotomy of apple’s identity.  Steve Jobs is, was, and always will be all about control.  Like many of the brilliant businessman of our times, he likes benefiting from openness of others while keeping a clenched fist himself.

All the while we were all using these computers of various types to do something, and that something was “surfing the net”.   So we google away, in droves we make our pilgrimage to their minimalistic home page and type into the little box.  The google success story has been told and retold already many times but looking back I just can’t help but remember how extremely useful it has always been (and I don’t just mean for finding good porn).  I think that before that I had been using metafilter which aggregated the results from other engines.  Google’s pagerank technology was clearly superior to everything else out there then as it still is for finding relevant results to your search queries.

I think from a purely technological level, google is the most sophisticated company in existence.  Mainly because they have become the thread that connects us all. I mean,  the system they have laid out for retrieving information is based on sound engineering and design principles.  They are masters of statistics and analysis.  They have always been an ideas company.  And related to this topic, they have always used open-source technology to run their business.   They were able to use linux to keep themselves from becoming dependent on microsoft.  Google really helped to pioneer the server farm concept and bring it out of the specialized niche of hollywood graphics rendering and turn it into something that everybody in their living rooms had access to.

So fast-forward ten years to 2008 and google has introduced a phone, the gphone.  Not a phone, really, an operating system for cellular phones.  So in this sense they are more like microsoft than apple, in that they are not distributing hardware.  Now the big differences in corporate philosophies of these companies is really starting to come out.  In contrast to the iphone, the android os on gphones is open-source, and anyone is allowed to develop whatever applications they want for that environment and make them available to others through google (though malicious applications will be screened).  The operating system itself is open-source.  All of it.  Not just half-open like apple, or not closed like ms.  Moreover, because google has simply given an us an os (which is btw, completely free to download and distribute) and not locked us into a hardware system, there will be many gphones to apples single model of iphone.

Today, the gphone looks a bit bulky and and maybe even cheap beside an iphone, but in the not-so-distant-future, there will be not only many different models of gphone to choose from, but probably a lot more software available to those using this system than those using the iphone.  From a developer’s perspective it just makes more sense.  I would argue that other than running the iTunes software there won’t be a lot of stuff that a gphone will be unable to do compared to an iphone.   Because of apple’s plans for stifling competition and controlling applications, there will probably be a lot of stuff gphones will be able to do that iphones won’t.

Seeing as in how I have an ipod and no use whatsoever for listening to music on my cellphone, even though I’m a huge apple fan there isn’t much about the iphone that appeals to me.  The main problem right now is availability.  I live in Canada.  When is the android phone coming to Canada?  I’ve been searching the news for months about this and not getting any relevant results.  It appears for the time being no Canadian telecommunications companies are interested, or at least if they are they are being tight lipped about it.  The best case scenario would be if they just sold the phones with android preloaded.  There are a few carriers that will allow you to use their service without having to buy their phones.  But then we get into another problem because the cost of wireless bandwidth usage in Canada is possibly the most expensive anywhere in the world.  There isn’t going to be any huge growth in mobile internet usage here until those rates come way down, and even if I were to get a gphone today I don’t think I could afford to use it very much.

So what do you think, when is the android phone going to come to Canada?  Do you want one too?