Android Crunch

Thanks to the guys at ModMyGphone, we are starting to see the early stages of Android skinning.  Created out of boredom, Living Sword has taken his jailbroken G1 and devised new icons for the status bar.

We’ll see just how far people are able to get with this since the RC30 update is due any day now for most users.  Icons and themes are something that people should be able to pick from easily.  There ought to be an option to select the color scheme, icon pack, etc. as easily as changing the wallpaper.  Although there is nothing wrong with the stock images, sometime users just like variety.

There are some pretty inspired artists out there who can create some rather cool looking stuff.  If the process proves easy enough, we could soon see a slew of skins.  Say that last sentence three times fast.

Meebo has announced that their popular all-in-one instant messaging tool is now available for T-Mobile G1 users through Android Market. The application allows anyone with a Meebo account, or an account on one of the popular IM services to chat with their buddies while on-the-go.

Just like the desktop web version, Meebo for Android gives users access to all of their IM accounts through a single login and single buddy list. In addition, the Android app supports real-time notifications, alerting users of new instant messages through the status bar. This works even when Meebo runs in the background.

Meebo’s Seth Sternberg commented on the release: “Enabling access to Meebo on the go means that more and more people will think ‘Meebo’ for open communications whether they are at their at home, work, school or none of the above!”

While Steve Ballmer never associated Android with poo nor did he suggest that killing puppies could look dignified next to building Android, he did say that creating a mobile OS was “financially unsound” for Google and that Google was already far behind the competition.

“They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense.”

He also questioned their financial strategy, claiming that Android has no revenue model and that carriers will take android and then charge Google big bucks to carry their search on the standard Android deck or UI.

“Google doesn’t exactly bubble to the top of the list of the top competitors we’ve got going in mobile. They might someday. But right now..” he said at Telstra’s investment day.

Steve, Steve, Steve… Windows Mobile is popular for one simple reason: it seems to work reasonably well with Windows. This is fine for the fleet IT market - there’s no shame in buying up 500 Palm Pros for your entire executive staff - the low-end feature phone market is a mish-mash of OSes, including WinMo and to some extent Symbian. Mostly, however, you find OSes that are unsupported and essentially proprietary.

Android will replace those OSes first. Carriers won’t care - or will care less - when face with the cost savings of installing Android vs. rolling their own OS and the charges for search placement will be a wash. As Android bubbles up, WinMo will get bit first, then Symbian, then, dare I say it, RIM. While I’m not in love with Android, I know a contender when I see one. Hopefully Steve’s posturing will buy WinMo enough time to escape off into the woods to die.

Android’s first phone, the G1 on T-Mobile, was originally pitched to sell around 400,000 units before the year was done. Based on some fresh orders to manufacturer HTC, apparently the G1 has already reached 1.5 million sales in pre-orders alone, with lots more on the way once it hits shelves on October 22nd. The hardware design has left a lot of folks unimpressed (after all, the thing hasn’t changed in about two and a half years), but the massively open source nature of the project will bait in a lot of developers and give the G1 plenty of software fighting juice to run on. Clearly customers are buying into the strategy, but here’s hoping some of the other manufacturers out there will make something more visually appealing before the Android hype dies down.

We already knew that Motorola was looking to resuscitate their cellphone biz by developing for Android, but a recent job posting on Coroflot may have revealed a twist in their plans. The posting calls for an Interaction Designer “responsible for leading and actively participating in the concept, design, documentation and development of user interfaces for our mobile products including our new Android Social Networking SmartPhone.”

So, it appears that Moto is going to actually try and develop an Android smartphone built around the concept of social networking. The buzz here is that going niche like this might help Motorola stand out from the avalanche of Android phones coming down the line. I couldn’t agree more. But, of course, there has been no confirmation of Motorola’s plans, and any real-world product is most likely in the early stages. [via BGR]

The world’s first mobile phone powered by Google’s Android OS is making waves before it is even available in stores. T-Mobile, the US carrier that gets the G1 Android phone first, has announced that “heavy demand” has claimed all presale units. If the current smartphone market trends are any indication, the future may be bright for the G1 and other Android phones.

Revealed after much hype on September 23, the HTC-built G1 phone for T-Mobile brings a new smartphone formula to the table, one founded upon Google’s open-source Android OS for mobile phones. The device offers key features like Google app integration, an open Android Marketplace for finding and installing new software, applications that can run in the background, and even Amazon’s MP3 music store for purchasing DRM-free music on the go. In the increasingly competitive smartphone marketplace, the open-platform G1 is an almost exact antithesis to Apple’s alluring iPhone—the device that arguably set the standard for more powerful handsets, but one that is also completely locked down by its manufacturer.

T-Mobile began taking preorders for the G1 after its announcement, and the carrier quickly ran out of the initial batch. The carrier is now claiming that G1 presales are better than anticipated, since HTC tripled production for launch day and preorders have been filled for those as well. T-Mobile told Ars that preorders will be taken through October 21 for delivery at a later date.

Actual sales figures from the preorder rush are not being disclosed yet, however. There is no word on exactly how large T-Mobile’s initial batch of G1 phones actually was, but HTC announced recently that it plans on selling 400,000 to 500,000 units during the fourth quarter of the year. It also disclosed that T-Mobile is planning to order as many as two million G1s “in the near future.” A T-Mobile spokesperson would only tell Ars Technica that “we expect T-Mobile G1 will be a very popular device, particularly with the holiday season on the horizon.”

In a move that takes a page straight out of Motorola’s RAZR playbook, Apple has rocketed to the top of the US sales-charts with their iPhone 3G. According to NPD, Apple has seen its iPhone 3G become the No. 2 best-selling handset in the US. Motorola’s RAZR V3 still takes top billing as the overall best-selling mobile phone in the US.

With massive iPhone 3G sales spurred by the iPhone 3G buy-up craze that defined the iconic cellphone’s US launch, the iPhone 3G is currently one of the hottest handset in the US.

What’s more, the iPhone 3G has also managed to clench a solid 17% of the US smartphone market. Thanks to the brisk sales numbers that helped the iPhone 3G become the No. 2 best-selling handset in the US, the iPhone 3G became the top-selling smartphone in the US since its launch. The top-dog smartphone, iPhone 3G, has outpaced the likes of the Blackberry Curve, Blackberry Pearl, and Palm Centro.

“The launch of the lower-priced iPhone 3G was a boon to overall consumer smartphone sales,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for The NPD Group. “While the original iPhone also helped win customers for AT&T, the faster network speeds of the iPhone 3G has proven more appealing to customers that already had access to a 3G network.”

It’s clear that the iPhone 3G has given AT&T a shot in the arm, boosting the carrier to higher highs.

So much so that 30% of iPhone 3G customers defected from other carriers for a chance to use the iPhone 3G on AT&T’s network. Of those carrier-defections, 47% came from AT&T’s top rival Verizon. A healthly 24% of defectors came from T-Mobile and 19% jumped the Sprint-ship for the good-ship AT&T.

The iPhone 3G is clearly selling well ahead of smartphone launches from Sony Ericsson (XPERIA X1), HTC (Touch HD), T-Mobile (G1), and Nokia (5800 XpressMusic Tube). As the top-dog in the US smartphone market, these new entrants are going to have a bit of a race to overtake the iPhone 3G. But, with more powerful features (like WVGA touchscreens and high megapixel cameras) and new mobile platforms (like Android and the Sony Ericsson Panel UI), the iPhone 3G could have some stiff competition. Apple is going to need to step up their game to keep the newcomers at bay. Could we see a price-drop on the iPhone 3G for this holiday shopping season?

Many remain skeptical about Android and are sniffing around it at best, but Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford is all-in for the open source movement, according to a recent interview. Sure, the Symbian Foundation and their talks with Google are a bit of a giveaway, but it’s good to hear it all coming right from the horse’s mouth. Nigel talks a fair bit about the importance of developers, lowering boundaries for entry, and how the market’s changed since they’ve taken the lead (including his reactions to new competitors). While he’s generally thumbs-up for open source, he comes off as unenthused about Linux-based systems.

“In terms of mobile Linux I’d rather be where I am than anywhere near mobile Linux … If you look at the fragmentation, if you look at the amount of time it’s taken anyone to produce anything usable with mobile Linux and the expense that they’ve gone to to do that… “

Whether or not he’s including Android in there is a bit of a mystery

For those not watching too closely, NTT DocoMo is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). The Japanese carrier has announced plans to sell Android based handsets in Japan by 2009. Rumors indicate that the chosen model is the HTC Dream / G1.

This good news for the Japanese Android’s Fans was brought by Ryuji Yamada, DoCoMo’s president.

NTT DoCoMo will also be carrying some other high profile handsets, like RIM’s latest handset, the BlackBerry Bold.  The Bold will be available in Japan in the first quarter 2009.

You can check the upcoming (Google) Android phone by T-Mobile in a rotateable view as well as in an emulator that lets you click through the menus. The emulator is rather incomplete though, so on a lot of screens you’ll be seeing dysfunctional mockups.