That’s another year over and done with during which mobile continued to drill into everyday life for everyone in ways that couldn’t have been readily predicted. For me personally, the most notable feature was that I wasn’t desperate to get my hands on some new phone. I received my G1 on the 19th December 2008 and have used it is as my main mobile constantly since then. The much maligned hardware has proven much more robust than everyone thought and the software is brilliant.

Like any gadget, Android offers a lot more features than I actually use, so I thought I’d look what I do actually use.

Probably the biggest workload goes, unsurprisingly to email and browser. The email client is not great, but it does a much better job of rendering HTML e-mail than any other mobile email client that I’ve used. The browser is good - it does the job especially for the specially-built sites like Flickr which is the one I use most.

Direct search integration is wonderful - I love being able to simply type into the phone and get a search query. As a family we often look things up on the phone at meal times.

Google Calendar integration is awesome - and the calendar widget is great. My home screen has the clock, the  calendar widget, and the eight most common functions which are Calendar, Google Maps, Google Mail, HulloMail, Dialer, Messaging, Email, Browser.

HulloMail is a free visual voicemail service which sends your voicemails to you as MP3 attachments and has a nice Android client to see who called and when. It also tells you who called but didn’t leave a message while you are on a call, something that Vodafone’s own voicemail doesn’t do.

Google Maps is worth a special mention as it is so good and the GPS on the G1 so fast that it becomes an instant habit to use it frequently. When people ask me for directions, which happens disproporianately often,  I often use Google Maps to show how to get from where we are to their destination. I tried really hard to use Nokia Maps on my N95 8Gb but was plagued by two problems: the slowness of the GPS and the appearance of the mapping itself. I found it curiously difficult to figure out which was I was pointing on Nokia Maps and found myself walking down streets the wrong way until common sense registered that landmarks weren’t going the right way. Never had this problem with Google Maps - it just works.

On the other hand, Street View is fun to play with and great to demo, but has little practical utility that I’ve found.

Moving off the home screen, the left-hand side has the search widget, which is actually redundant, and the Facebook widget. If I was a heavy user of Facebook I’d probably put it on the main screen as it is very good. I use that to demo the utility of widgets - at least for real-time information. The music player widget completes the screen, but I’ve not got much music on the device and don’t play it very often as a result.

On the right-hand page I have AK Notes which is a great little app for keeping, well, notes. The absurdly-complex alarm cloc, the inexplicably-simple calculator and the Facebook app.

I also have FourSquare installed by find it of little value as the local information is out of date and the user interface is frustratingly awful. And last is the Compass app, which is a good bit of software but of limited utility for urban beings.

And that’s it - I don’t have a lot of downloaded apps installed. I did have Twidroid but it crashed so often I removed it.

I’m looking forward to a burgeoning of good stuff for Android this year, and may opt to upgrade to a new device at some point. The key driver for that is likely to be incompatibility of updates with the G1 as the device is the right size and offers adequate performance.

In our office we have a “donut meeting” each Wednesday where everyone gives a quick summary of what they are doing, accompanied by the eponymous confection.  However today I upgraded my Developer G1 phone to Donut, as Android V1.6 is called.

The upgrade process is very developer centric - normal people would faint in terror at the instructions let alone actually doing it. People with T-Mobile G1s just get an over-the-air update that just happens, but developers use a command-line tool to side copy the update to the device then load it through a series of secret-handshake key combinations. Then the long wait to see if you’ve broken it.

So far so good, but it’s only been a few minutes. All the Google cloud info returned automatically, which was a good start.

Google Maps comes up with some new features, including a nice view-once “what’s new” box which would a good thing for all mobile apps. Hoping that e-mail will continue to be improved. Cupcake wasn’t as stable as I’d have liked so I’m hoping that Donut will have fixed the occasional wobble. I’ll report back in a few days.

I ordered one of the Google unlocked developer Android G1  phones mid December. It finally arrived on the day of our office Christmas party so I was able to play with it over the festive period. I’ve yet to do any development for it, so this is a review of the phone itself.

Since this is a developer model I wasn’t expecting any smart packaging, and was therefore not disappointed. None of the packaging theatre of the iPhone, just a pragmatic white box. US-pronged powersupply, but the order form warns of that.

While the handset isn’t that impressive to look at, it sits nicely in your hand and has a good case texture. I much prefer it to the iphone which is too wide and slightly too thin for comfort. I like the slight bend at the bottom. The sliding screen arrangement feels a bit wobbly and even a little bit Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg for US readers) but it works well enough and the open mode is surprisingly well balanced.

The little keyboard is good as these things go - it works certainly as well as a BlackBerry keyboard and is just soooo much better than only using the iPhone screen keyboard.

The screen is very good, and the heat-sensitive finger tracking as good as anything I’ve used. I do like having hardware green/red buttons as you can operate them with gloves on (important in Scotland in winter) and you can find them without looking, unlike virtual buttons.

The trackball looks a little bit redundant, but I find myself using it more than I’d expected. It is easier to use than the BlackBerry Pearl but I think that’s probably because the ball is slightly stiffer and acceleration is much lower. The ball is a great compliment to using the G1 in landscape, keyboard mode.

Turning down the brightness of the screen gives at least one day of heavy use from a charge, which is acceptable. Charging via USB is ideal for computer workers, although I can see that the power of the software (see next post) means that it would be easy not to lug a laptop about as well.

The GPS is fast and accurate, and the compass very cool.

Phone audio is great and speakerphone is adequate. Bluetooth headset support is excellent, and the Samsung model I use works better on Android than it did with Nokia.

Wifi is great when it connects, but it’s not so good at reconnecting when you walk out and back into a registered Wifi zone. This is a bit of a problem in our house where the kitchen is out of wifi range - be connected, walk down to the kitchen, walk back and the wifi does not reconnect. It is easy to reconnect and it doesn’t get stuck disconnected as I’ve seen some devices.

The camera is small and fuzzy and has no xenon flash. Installing a Market camera app (SnapPhoto) gives much better results.

The most impressive thing,  however, is the sheer performance of the device. I guess this is because it was designed to run Windows Mobile which is a resource hog. The much lighter Android software flies on it like and it is just much, much faster than anything else I’ve used.

So how does it compare to the N95? Well, I’ve cleaned all my personal info off the N95 and put it into the office test pool.

How does it compare to the iPhone? The iPhone sits in my back most of the time unless I’m developing for it.

As my VC friend Sandy says, “Game changing, mate, game changing!”

Steve Jobs famously said that there would be no native iPhone apps in case they “took down AT&T’s network”. Well, 300m downloads later I haven’t heard of any major outages, although from some commentators’ comments on the speed of access it might be hard to tell.

But this week we now have something that could genuinely be a threat to network integrity - the unlocked G1. It is not just unlocked in the conventional sense of not being locked to one network operator - it lets you boot your own version of the operating system on it.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions about phone testing, qualification and approvals. I’m sure the carriers are just thrilled about the impending storm of Linux fans booting their own personal favourites and adding a whole new dimension to phone phreaking.

I’ve ordered mine, but I have no intention of fiddling around with booting. I just want to build some apps for it.

You can feel the glee oozing out between the words as the journalists report that Android has been delayed. We told you so, the mobile world is not as easy as you tried to make it look screams the whitespace between some banal reporting.

However this Schadenfreude hides the real story, which is hinted at in this quote from FierceWireless “insiders say carriers are having trouble customizing Android so it promotes their own Internet offerings.”

The whole point of the internet and Android  was openness and configuration, so this translates as “the carriers are finding it difficult to prevent users getting access to Google’s services.” It would be simply stupid to blame replacing one icon with another pointing to a fixed carrier deck for a multi-month slide in deadlines, it must be deeper.

So my I told you so for the day was that the “open” in Android is only for the operators, not for consumers.

Copying what Apple and Google have done to encourage new starts to build applications for their platforms, RIM have announced that they are putting together a $150m Blackberry mobile app fund. But there’s a very smart twist. This fund is being build in association with Reuters, a very clever publisher who definitely gets it when it comes to all things 2.0.

Compared to the rather depressingly repetitive and dull lists of Apple and Android apps that are available, this has the potential to wheel in some new and powerful business models. We can hope.

People are getting excited because there’s pacman running on an Android demo box. Gosh. So a 30 year old game is the best we can do? Compass mode is a cool toy, where the streetview changes direction when you move the device, but what practical use is it? Looks like something you show to your friends and say, wow look at this, and then never visit it again. The rest of the UI looks like an iPhone without the odd restrictions.

Where is the real innovation?