The hype around Google's Android mobile OS has been huge, but what's the verdict for small and midsize businesses? Yankee Group's Steve Hilton asked an SMB test panel to put the T-Mobile G1 through the paces and find out.
Each month, SMB expert Steve Hilton of Yankee Group answers real reader questions about small and midsize business technology in Ask Steve.
Google was the darling of the tech market pre-implosion. Maybe it still is. We decided to put Google's much discussed Android OS to the test with our SMB test panel. This panel gives us insights into technology implementation, use, and ongoing support from the SMB's perspective -- something difficult to find. Was the G1 worthy of superstar status or the super trashcan? Got new technology for us to test? Let us know!
Jay from Boston asks: As owner of an online game company, I'm thinking about giving our developers mobile phones. What do you think of the G1? We use Macs a lot but want to do game development on Android.
Steve: When T-Mobile shipped us a G1 to play with, we were favorably impressed with the look and feel of the device. Full keyboard, intuitive design, and the open Android platform spoke well for this device being a winner in mobile markets. But we wanted to see what SMBs thought of it, so we shared the G1 with several SMBs on our test panel.
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Some of our testers were fairly heavy Google application users (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, etc.); others weren't. All had prior experiences with mobile devices, including the iPhone, Treo, BlackBerry, and Centro. All had prior experiences with T-Mobile as a service provider but weren't as familiar with HTC, the handset manufacturer for the G1. Just for the record, we did not ask the SMBs to test the quality of the T-Mobile network; that's a test for a different day. We focused our SMBs on the G1 device.
Testers found the Android platform fairly easy to set up and link with existing Google applications, although non-Google-centric users wanted easier integration with more Mac and PC applications. Android didn't have classic word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation (PowerPoint) applications, which annoyed at least one tester.
On the device side, all testers noted the lack of standard headset support and short battery life as big drawbacks. Some testers found the keyboard placement made two-thumb typing and playing video games like Pac-Man rather difficult. (Un)fortunately, Ask Steve is old enough to remember Pac-Man on his friend's Atari 2600.
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