Android turns 10: Google's first Android phone was ugly, but important

[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Bonnie Cha, senior editor for cnet.com and today we have the first look at the T-Mobile G1, as most of you know the G1 is the first Smartphone to run the Google operating system and will be available from T-mobile. October 22nd, been playing around. So I didn't personally review this phone, Bunny Cha did and I definitely bugged her about it until she let me hold it. I really wanted to see how the design was. We knew what the design details were but holding it in your hands and. And I'm playing with it and taking a look at that stupid chin up that's out. I don't know. It was part of the fun bonding activity. Everybody kind of crowded around. It's really ugly. [LAUGH] I remember the Open Hands Alliance when they made that announcement 2007, I think. So it was right when the iPhone was coming out. I was there at the original launch of the event in New York. It was out on the east side. And there's event space. The most noticable thing obviously Larry Page, Sergey Brin coming in halfway through the presentation on roller blades, roller blading up saying that they had actually roller bladed across town to get to the event. The thought on my mind was how is this going to Back up the iPhone. Was this going to match up with the idea of the modern smartphone that Apple presented just two years earlier? And at some point I remember, we all crowded into a conference room and somebody said, what if it's not a phone at all? What if it's google soft Where, that lives on a phone and that round up being exactly what it was. So, here's our phone, here's our homepage I'm gonna pop this open cuz this is really the money right here. The thing that I really liked about it at the time that it wasn't an iPhone, it wasn't the thing that everybody else had, it was a little [UNKNOWN] with my views if you say that I remember the G1 being a little clunky and bulky, which is funny when looking at it now. It looks absolutely tiny. At that time, physical keyboards, they were still pretty common. We hadn't gone to this virtual-only world. Apple came out with the iPhone, only virtual keyboard. I know a lot of people that just couldn't get into that for a long [UNKNOWN] And I tried typing on an iPhone a bunch of times. That screen keyboard really messed me up. So I love this larger physical keyboard with buttons, actual numbers, a space bar, the whole nine. Well, I really loved buttons at the time, so this was a big deal for me. There is a physical camera shutter button. And on a phone this size and on something with this sturdy, hefty design, it's actually pretty stable. One of the things I really like about the operating system was it was actually pretty easy to use. I mean, all the apps were right there, just like an iPhone, but you could slide down this notification thing from the top and get things for popups for your wifi and when you had a incoming email, stuff like that. At the time that was pretty revolutionary. It also has GPS with google. It was the first to have turn by turn navigation, which was fantastic since most of the GPS systems back then, you had to pay for, and this was free. I would have used search. I would have used maps. Slacker radio, definitely. The Opera Mini browser because the browser just had a lot of extra features. And I've reviewed a lot of browsers. I reviewed the Dolphin browser too, that's on here. Android is really important because it offer choice. It offer the choice of handsets. So if you need to go all these different types of handsets, whether they have keyboards, whether they didn't, whether they're big, whether they're small. It's because of Android, you've got smartphone makers Making $100 smartphones not necessarily $1,000 smartphone. So, really this android brought the mobile experience, the full mobile experience to masses. [MUSIC]