Bijan Sabet

Thinking about Android

I am excited about the G1. And I’m really happy for my friends Andy Rubin and Rich Miner who were the founders of Android which Google acquired several years ago. Andy and I worked together at WebTV. It’s been a long road and a lot of work and sweat for those guys.

After reading a bunch of the reviews last night, here are my quick thoughts about Android:

1. Android is the right long term approach. The whole world is going to open and Android is determined to open up the last closed network. Lots of folks have talked a big game about open but Google is really doing it. Apple is sort of open and as Peter Semmelhack tells me time and time again, you can’t be sort of open if you are trying to provide an open system.

2. I use the browser on my iphone every day, multiple times a day. It doesn’t matter if I’m on Edge, 3g or WiFi. It’s a part of my daily life. It wasn’t like that in my pre-iphone days. the browser on the blackberry is just awful imho. I think over time Google is going to have a better “browser” on their platform than Apple. That is my guess. As they say, “Google was born on the internet” and that is a big difference.

3. The lack of MS Exchange support out of the box is a buzzkill for me. My office is dependent on MS Exchange. Most of my colleagues use a blackberry and the combination with MS Exchange works really well (understatement) for messaging, scheduling, etc. Using a G1 as my primary device won’t work until Exchange sync is available and I’m not holding my breath

4. Andy Rubin’s prior company Danger created the Sidekick which you can see helped provide some of the thinking behind the G1. The device is sophisticated the network does a lot of the heavy lifting. That approach is a winner and Andy knows how to make that work better than just about anyone.

5. Open software means that there will be all sorts of hardware supporting it. My biggest beef testing the Blackberry Bold wasn’t the physical design - it was the crappy software. A Blackberry Bold like device with Android software & services would be killer.

6. A number of people live blogged the event yesterday. Instead of going to those various blogs I just used Twitter Search and was able to see real time tweets about the G1. Amazing.

7. while I’m getting used to the iphone keyboard, the keyboard on the G1 is seductive.

8. The apps on Android should be better than iPhone. They can run in the background so you can run multiple apps at once.

Look forward to getting my hands on one !