14 DAY TRIAL // HTC Dream, the first smartphone in the world to arrive on shelves with Google’s Android operating system on board, turned four this week, as Google is moving closer to the launch of a new flavor of the platform.
The smartphone was launched on October 22, 2008 at T-Mobile in the United States as the T-Mobile G1, and arrived on shelves in Europe one week later in the UK.
Other countries received it starting with early 2009, including Austria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and France.
Based on Android 1.0, the handset packed a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A ARM11 processor inside, 256MB of ROM, and 192MB of RAM, and was seen as one of the nicest devices of the time.
It featured a 3.2-inch 480×320 pixel touchscreen display, complemented by a sliding QWERTY keyboard, and packed a 3.2 megapixel photo snapper on the back.
Four years later, things have changed impressively in the Android area. The platform is now leading the smartphone OS market, with over 1.3 million new devices being activated each day.
Recently, Google announced that there are around half a billion active Android devices out there, and that the number might double by next year.
Today’s Android smartphones are delivering far more performance capabilities than HTC Dream was able to offer, come with multi-core processors and sport some of the largest screens on the market. They also got rid of physical buttons and come with on-screen ones, offering a more compact design.
For example, HTC’s latest such device was announced with a quad-core CPU inside, a 5-inch screen, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a nice range of other top-of-the-line hardware specs packed inside.
HTC Dream was the first Google phone out there, but the family is expected to grow significantly before the end of this month, with new devices coming from various mobile phone makers worldwide.
Rumor has it that the Internet giant is preparing the unveiling of Android 4.2, and that the new OS will be loaded right from the start on Google phones coming from LG, HTC, Samsung and other handset vendors.
With new features and various performance enhancements packed inside, Android 4.2 should help the platform strengthen its position at the top of the smartphone OS market, despite efforts from rivals such as BlackBerry, iOS, or Windows Phone to bring it down.
Since 2008, Google released countless of new flavors of the platform, including Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, and 4.1, each of them with its own set of smaller versions (and now the expected 4.2), and it seems that it is not done just yet.
It took Android less than four years to grow from powering a single smartphone to being loaded on hundreds of them and to conquer the tablet PC market as well, and we’re left wondering whether it would be willing to leave the top position anytime soon.
