I have an Android phone, and its name is &#8220;moogly&#8221;.
<p>I have acquired a Googlephone &#8212; a brand-new T-Mobile G1 to replace my eight year old and on-its-last-legs Sprint phone.  </p>
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<p>I&#8217;d say I had to get one of these because it&#8217;s got some of my software in it, but as a one-time maintainer of GIFLIB (not to mention named contributor to libpng) just about <b>every</b> cellphone has some of my software in it.  (And every browser.  And the Microsoft X-box.  I am become <s>Shiva, destroyer of worlds</s> ubiquitous and omnipresent.)  No, this one is special because it&#8217;s got Linux inside.  And open source is part of the branding, though the look of polite incomprehension on the face of the perky blonde T-mobile salesbeing I dealt with suggests that there is no danger of imminent mass enlightenment from this campaign, alas.</p>
<p>First impressions:  Pretty good, stacked up against the iPhone better than I expected.  Well-designed user interface, I was flying through it within three hours of familiarization and think less technical users would too.</p>
<p>Hardware: The keyboard, predictably, sucks &#8212; zero-travel chiclet keys.  Display <em>very</em> nice, crisp 320&#215;480 with good luminance contrasts.  Charges from any USB port &#8212; what a cool idea, I might never actually use a dedicated charger again. Speakers suck too but no blame attaches; in an enclosure this size, non-suck is not a physical possibility. Wider and longer than the decrepit Samsung  660 it&#8217;s replacing but thinner; it fits comfortably in a pocket.  The trackball works nicely but worries me a bit because it feels fragile, a potential failure point.</p>
<p>Interface bugs: In the Favorites editing screen, the entry for &#8220;Name&#8221; stops accepting characters well before you get to the end of the box &#8212; screwed-up font metrics, or a silly length limit, or both.  You can choose from a palette of icons for your five favorites, but contacts outside that group have to be iconfied with a picture.  Why is that?</p>
<p>Other bugs: The OS apparently crashed and rebooted once in my first four hours of operation.  Hasn&#8217;t done so since.</p>
<p>Omissions: Where is my fetch-ringtone-from URL function?  Where is my fetch-wallpaper-from URL function?  I wanted to make my default ringtone the Star Trek communicator sound; had the MP3, needed to figure out how to get it onto the phone&#8217;s ringtone list.</p>
<p>This turns out to be easy by a slightly different route.  Plug the G1 into your Linux system; it (or rather the SD card in it) will present as a removable disk with a subdirectory.  Drop your sound file in there; open your music player; click Menu and select &#8220;Set as Ringtone&#8221;.  Voila!   Oddly, you may have to unplug the USB cable to make the music file visible in the phone.</p>
<p>Setting wallpapers isn&#8217;t too tricky either.  The SD will have a directory called dcim/Camera; drop the image in there, and it will become visible as a Picture under Settings->Wallpaper.  My G1 now shows a nice astronomical photograph of M33.  640&#215;480 images work nicely as all it has to do is a 2:1 scaledown in the Y direction; to save space on your SD card you may want to pre-shrink them.</p>
<p>Finally, a cellphone I can hack!  Just superficial stuff, so far, of course, but the relative ease with which I sussed all this out within a few hours of acquiring the device is very promising.  I like it.  And apparently a lot of other people do, too; we had to canvas three T-Mobile stores to get one, they&#8217;ve apparently been selling like crazy </p>
<p>Overall: No, this isn&#8217;t quite as polished as the iPhone and lacks the cool multitouch gestures.  But it&#8217;s seriously cheaper, almost as good already from a purely functional perspective, and the open-source stack will mean it gets better fast and will add value from  third-party apps at a rate Apple&#8217;s walled garden won&#8217;t be able to match.  Especially given that multiple cellphone vendors will be shipping Android phones; this means a broad-based, stable market sure to attract lots of developers and service providers.</p>
<p>Even the first-out-the-gate G1 seems perfectly designed and positioned to disrupt the iPhone&#8217;s market from below. If successors feature hardware with an even slightly slicker presentation, Apple better watch its ass. </p>
<p>Bonus karma points to the first commenter to correctly explain why, when I figure out how to telnet/ssh into the underlying Linux, the only possible thing for me to change the hostname to will be &#8220;moogly&#8221;.</p>
<p>UPDATE: and here&#8217;s an <a href="http://img300.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ngc7331ik2.jpg">astronomical wallpaper</a> I made which happens to fit the default placement of the clock and icons perfectly; NGC7331 gets the unoccupied center of the display.</p>
