Dial G1 for Google

WIRED:THE NICKNAME for the iPhone is the Jesusphone, so called because of the Messiah-like level of hype that preceded it, and the degree of partisanship exhibited by its users, writes Danny O'Brien

What should be the monicker for the G1, the first phone to use the new Android operating system? One has already fallen into popular parlance. When techies ask me about my new phone, they talk about the G1. When anyone else does, they call it what it is - the "Googlephone".

I'm not a gadget hound, and this isn't a review, but I bought the G1 on the day it was launched. One reason why I did so is that I'm already a subscriber to the only US mobile phone provider that stocks it: T-Mobile.

As an upstart, T-Mobile tends towards a scrappy openness to innovation. It uses the world's GSM standard rather than inventing its own, as other US phone companies did. It has better policies on unlocking phones. When other telecoms were fighting VoIP (the technology that allows cheap or free calls over the internet), T-Mobile was the first to offer phones that worked both on its own cell towers and on your WiFi internet connection.

Another reason why I bought the G1 is that, as a geek, I was curious to see if I could take advantage of the openness of the phone. Android, the operating system developed by the Open Handset Alliance and championed by Google, is intended to be what the IBM personal computer was to other computers in the 1980s.

Faced with dozens of incompatible PCs, the IBM triumphed in large part because it wasn't just from IBM - companies like Dell, HP and Gateway were able to clone IBM's design and sell their own compatible devices.

IBM clones were a competitive market, which kept hardware prices low, but software written for the IBM ran on all the machines, so there was plenty of applications to go around.

I remember writing code for the IBM PC. As well as the unexpected excitement of seeing all these odd variants run the same program, it was amazing to do this on a PC itself, without any extras. You didn't have to pay or beg IBM or Microsoft to be allowed to write competitors to their programs: you just did it.

The Android platform is the same, and the Googlephone is a good name for its first model. It may boot up with the T-Mobile logo, but embossed on the back of the handset is an irremovable "with Google (TM)" message.

When you first activate the phone, it asks you set up a Google account or enter your existing one: after that, Google is inextricably linked to your contacts, e-mail and calendar. But Google provides the original code to all these hardwired phone applications, and Android's open nature lets you reconfigure and reinstall them on your phone. Programmers could gut them all of Google's influence or excise Google and include links to Yahoo or to their own mail and calendar services. It wouldn't be easy, but it wouldn't be impossible.

Google's gamble - and it's almost certainly a correct one - is that the majority of users won't care that their phone is handing over all their personal data to Google's repositories. It has chosen openness to a fault because it knows that tempting competitors into its territory only serves to make the defaults on the Googlephone, and Google's own overall power, stronger.

For the increasing numbers of us who care about privacy, or for businesses that find themselves competing with Google in other areas, the Googlephone presents a dilemma - one that the more farsighted of Microsoft's competitors in the early PC industry would recognise. With enough time and effort we can change the Googlephone, and the Android operating system, to whatever we want. Similarly, Microsoft deliberately left its operating system open enough for competitors to operate within: with enough time and effort, you could write a competitor to Microsoft Word and Excel on Windows. But every computer that sells because you provide your software on Windows makes Microsoft a little richer, and a little more able to crush its competition - you.

I'm the embodiment of that dilemma. I'm concerned about Google's control over data. But I'd love to help write alternatives to its applications.

Should I have bought this phone? Will everyone who writes for the Googlephone be claiming their small piece of the pie, while helping to grow their competitor Google's overall power?

We'll see. The G1 may be the Googlephone, but not every Android phone will have Google's technologies so firmly embedded within it. If others choose to make deals with companies like T-Mobile and provide Android phones with just as good, non- Google defaults, then Google will have real competition. It may be that Google has chosen not to be Microsoft, but to be IBM - the company that, through accident or design, allowed its inventions to be cloned.

IBM suffered in the short term as its monopoly in non-personal computers was devoured by evermore powerful clones of its own PC. But these days, IBM does quite well out of a larger computing market - just as Google is bound to benefit from an internet that reaches out to our phones as well as our PCs.