Back in January of 2007, Apple released its first iPhone, changing the way people would look at cell phone technology forever. Since that time, competitors from company's like Samsung and HTC have thrived in the new smartphone market while others from BlackBerry and Nokia have floundered.
At the time of the iPhone's unveiling, Google was already working on its now famous Android platform. Chris DeSalvo, an engineer at Google who was a part of the Android team says that when he and the rest of the people at Google saw what Steve Jobs and the iPhone had to offer the world, he knew that the Android team would need to "start over," according to an excerpt from the new book "Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution" by Fred Vogelstein, via The Atlantic.
"What we had suddenly looked just so... '90s," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
DeSavo, Android chief Andy Rubin and many others were a part of the Android team and had been working for six months on platform prototype phone prior to the unveiling of the iPhone. A launch was planned for the end of 2007, but the concept needed to be completely scrapped and re-imagined in the wake of Jobs' unveiling of the iPhone.
The phone was "ugly" according to the book and "looked like a Black-Berry, with a traditional keyboard and a small screen that wasn't touch-enabled. Rubin and his team, along with partners HTC and T-Mobile, believed consumers would care more about the great software it contained than its looks. This was controversial wisdom back then."
The Android team quickly switched its focus to creating a more elegant and sleek phone like an iPhone that was completely touch-screen enabled, which would eventually become the HTC Dream, otherwise known as the T-Mobile G1 in the U.S.
"I never got the feeling that we should scrap what we were doing-that the iPhone meant game over. But a bar had been set, and whatever we decided to launch, we wanted to make sure that it cleared the bar," said Erick Tseng, Android's project manager in the new book.
