How was Android in the beginning?

A new book to be released tells the story of Android through the fate of its creators. An opportunity to go back to the beginning of the mobile system that makes up 80% of the world’s handsets today.

In 2004, 178 million computers were sold worldwide. A great achievement, but an absurd number compared to the 675 million phones that passed in the same period. At the time, we were not talking about smartphones. The iPhone is not yet born, our mobiles were equipped with 32 megabytes of RAM and thanks to the processors running at 200 MHz. Features of PCs directly from the late 90s.

The beginning of Android

Taking this as an opportunity, a few engineers embarked on a crazy project: to provide an open source mobile operating system that is acceptable to all phones. This is the introduction of Android.

However, the operating system that portrays 80% of smartphones in the world today has almost never seen the light of day. The story is told in an upcoming book Androids: The team that developed the Android operating system Wrote Chad Hassey And no Ars Technica publishes the correct sheets.

A few months before the purchase of Google, the company Android Inc. Made a big change in strategy. After failing to convince investors to support their efforts to develop a camera operating system, the team decided to create the first versions of the popular mobile OS.

A flip phone OS

In 2005, the company hired Andy McFadden, an engineer who previously worked on the design of digital video recorders. His first task was to create a tech Android demo and the rest of the team wanted to sell it to potential investors. At the time, Android was very distant, similar to what we know today.

The first versions of the computer were designed to run on mobiles at the time, not coming with a new type of touch device like Apple did two years later. Android’s ambition is to replace Microsoft Mobile, Symbian (OS used by Nokia at the time) and other embedded systems in our good old glam shell or brick shaped mobiles.

So with that idea and this tech demo under it that team started touring investors and big digital companies. In early 2005, after the first meeting with Google, it did not lead much, the company will look at Samsung in Korea. The builder looks at them and laughs when they say they can create an operating system with 4 or 5 pairs of hands. To achieve the same results Samsung employed 300 people at that time and its managers called the Android project a sweet dream. A reflection that also inspired the name of the first Android phone, le HTC dream (Translated as “dream” in French).

Android BlackBerry way

A few months later, Google contacted Android Inc. again and offered them an aggressive offer, which was explicitly accepted. For a while, the team continued to work on a system designed for touch tone phones.

A prototype was discovered in 2012 Google shows a phone that looks like a BlackBerry at the time during the lawsuit between Google and Oracle. It was only after the release of the iPhone that Android decided to take touchscreens seriously. Good luck if you know what the Android interface was like before.

The rest of the story is known. At the end of 2008, HTC Dream released in the US And in a few years, a revised and revised version of Android will be needed on most phones on the planet.

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