#google sooner

When Google first showed off Android, they showed it running on a device very similar to Blackberries or Nokia E-class devices of the time. This device was the Google Sooner - an OMAP850 device built by HTC, with no touchscreen or WiFi. This was the Android reference device, the device they originally built the OS on.

Recently, I got access to a Google Sooner running a very early version of Android. With all the recent information coming out of the Oracle vs Google trial, I thought it would be interesting to take you on a brief tour of the OS. The build of Android this is running was built on May 15th 2007 - four months after the iPhone was announced; the first M3 version of Android was announced in November 2007, and Android 1.0 didn't come 'till a year later.

Hardware

The Google Sooner, aka the HTC EXCA 300, runs on an OMAP850 with 64MB RAM, and comes in two colors: black, and white. It has a 320x240 LCD screen (non touch) and a 1.3 megapixel camera sensor on the back, which supports video recording. Its curvy profile is surprisingly light and has a certain quality to it. It has a full QWERTY keyboard, a four-way d-pad, four system buttons (menu, back, home, and favourites) and call/end call buttons. Inside is a 2G radio, which is capable of EDGE speeds, but no WiFi or 3G. It has a mini-SD slot (not micro-SD), and a mini-USB port.

Software

This device runs build htc-2065.0.8.0.0, and was built on May 15th of 2007. This means it's much earlier than any previous look we've had at Android to date - a good six months before the milestone 3 (M3) version of Android, the initial release, was announced.

Home Screen

This is the primary interface to Android. You get a handful of Gadgets (a Clock, for example, and applications can provide their own), and a Google Search bar (that pops up when you hit the down arrow). There is no conventional homescreen with widgets - this is literally all you get when you turn on the device. It was an OS designed to search Google from the very start.

Apps

Hit the Home button and a drawer of apps shows up. This appears to be the shortcuts bar - any time you're inside an app you can hit the menu key and add the app to this. You can also add specific activities in an app to the favorites bar - for example Bluetooth settings, similar to those allowed on Windows Phone 7. You can also access your notifications and Cell/Battery settings from the shortcuts bar.

Hit the down arrow and the shortcuts bar expands to show all applications installed on the system. This acts just as you'd expect from a 2006-era non-touch device. There are no sorting or view options; what you see is what you get. The applications drawer appears as an overlay, so you can access it from any app without navigating back to a home screen.

Funnily enough, there's a second 'All Applications' screen, this time housed inside an app. It has a slightly different look and feel, but works exactly the same.

Future home screen

If you remember the M3 version of Android, as shown in the original announcement video, it had a very different home screen. This homescreen actually exists on this Sooner's build of the OS, but as an app. I imagine it wasn't finished yet, and as they prototyped this new homescreen they just left it as an app you can launch (similar to how you can have multiple launchers on Android today). Here you have the shortcut dock across the bottom of the home screen. Eventually, by the time Android was released, this became the traditional homescreen we know today.

Browser

The browser on the Sooner is based on WebKit [ Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh ; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3 ] and seems to pretend to be a Mac (perhaps to help mask itself, since this is many months before Android was announced). Browsing is a painful and slow experience, even though rendering isn't too bad.

Gmail

A rudimentary Gmail app is included, with basic access to your email. This is a far cry from Gmail on Android today.

Google Talk

Google Talk is present and seems to work great (if you like green…).

Other Apps

Here are just a few of the included apps. Some work, some don't, and some work partially. All are very rudimentary at this stage. I'm not sure if this was before or after The Astonishing Tribe [re]designed Android, but I'm betting before. Although Maps, YouTube and Google Earth come on this device, I wasn't able to get any of them working to show you (Maps and YouTube launch, but neither seem to be able to access content. It's quite possible that the server endpoints they used for testing no longer resolve.

Note Pad

Address Book

Calculator

Calendar

This doesn't quite work in my build, but here is what the error looks like.

Camera

Text Messages

Wrap-up

It's quite clear that Android was being designed to a completely different target before the iPhone was released. What we see here would have fitted in perfectly with the world of Symbian and BlackBerry. This early build of Android is in fact even less capable and mature than the 2004 release of Symbian Series 90 (Hildon), the OS that runs on the Nokia 7700 and 7710 - Nokia's first, and only, pre-iPhone touchscreen smartphones. It's not hard to see that iPhone really changed the thinking across the entire industry, and caused everybody to start from scratch. Android, webOS, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8, BlackBerry 10 - all of these exist because of the iPhone, and standing on its shoulders they have made some amazing and unique contributions to the ecosystem.

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