Posted by Bonovox
Check out the Google Sooner, one of the early Android prototypes
7 hours ago by Prasad 19 comments
We have seen pictures of a BlackBerry-style phone running Android OS even before the OS was officially announced. Eventually, we got a lot more pictures of how Android looked back in the day. Now, developer Steven Troughton-Smith has managed to get his hands on an early prototype of the device, called the Google Sooner.
The phone was manufactured by HTC and is actually called the HTC EXCA 300. It has an OMAP850 processor with 64MB of RAM, QVGA non-touchscreen display, 1.3 megapixel camera with video recording, full QWERTY keypad with five way D-pad, Home, Back, Menu and Favorites button, miniSD card slot, the old-fashioned HTC mini-USB port with one flat side and black and white color options. The phone supports EDGE but no Wi-Fi or 3G. The phone is running the htc-2065.0.8.0.0 build, which is at least six months older than the first version of Android that was announced.
Smith also has loads of screenshots taken from the phone and you can see how little it has in common even with the first version of Android that we saw on the HTC Dream (or the T-Mobile G1 as it was called in the US). The notification bar, the Google Search bar and the clock widget are perhaps the only familiar elements but everything else is different. A lot of it is also similar to the BlackBerry OS of the yore, which is not surprising since RIM was the market leader back then in smartphones, at least in the US.
The general hardware and the software led Smith to conclude that the iPhone was a major influence to the way Android turned out to be when Google finally launched the OS on the Dream. But Dianne Hackborn, Android Framework Engineer at Google, begs to differ. She says that the software on the Sooner is the same basic software on the Dream but the one on the Dream is optimized for touch. She does not, however, mention why it would look so dramatically different on the Dream if it was the same basic software. She also says that the work on the Sooner began in 2005, well before the iPhone (Hackborn herself joined Google in 2006) and that the Sooner was never going to be launched even if the iPhone had not come out, although she does not remember when exactly this decision was taken.
She has said a lot more in her comment on OSNews, which you can find in the second link below. You should also check out the first link for more pictures and screenshots of and from the Google Sooner.
Source 1 • Source 2
http://blog.gsmarena.com/chec[....]-the-early-android-prototypes/
Posted by tranced
So HTC was the manufacturer from the beginning. It seems Android has gone through a big breakthrough since it was first developed.
Android is anything closer to what it was in this version. BTW, that Earth app is what we know now as Maps?
Posted by rikken
Must be google earth
Posted by etaab
If it ran ICS i'd buy it !
Posted by Bonovox
Yep. Seems ironic one early prototype had a keypad
Posted by etaab
Well the first brought to market Android device, the G1, had a keyboard so comes as no surprise.
You can tell its simply a developers phone however, look at the mini usb slot at the bottom of the phone how square the casing is around it. Its practical and not designed to sell. In a retail unit it would be more flushed into the casing.
Posted by tranced
With 64MB it would not be a Sandwich but a hard steak.
On 2012-05-08 11:15:21, etaab wrote:
If it ran ICS i'd buy it !
And after seeing this prototype, the surprise was that the G1 came out with that sliding mecanism.
Well the first brought to market Android device, the G1, had a keyboard so comes as no surprise.
Posted by etaab
HTC have always had strange and totally impractical hardware when it comes to keyboards. So it was good news when they recently announced they were dropping the form factor.
Posted by Tsepz_GP
Wow, the UI bares quite a resemblence here and there to modern day Android, e.g. the set in the top bar, and the Google ,plus Clock widget, plus the Font seems a lot like the Android1.6 one, great to see how far its come, Android4.0 is so well refined, im loving it.
Posted by Bonovox
HTC Cha Cha
Posted by alenn
This phone is cool,I love to see interesting news like this
It looks as nowadays Android,with that notifications bar and search bar.