Respect Authority

T-Mobile’s G1, the notorious Google Phone, was released in the UK yesterday and coldly cockblocks Apple’s path to world wide mobile domination. To be clear, by “cockblock” I mean the phone grabs Steve Jobs’ dick, rips it off, travels back in time and tricks young Steve Jobs into eating it when he wasn’t a slowly dying vegan. It’s that cold.

CNET UK, armed with a brand new G1 and a hopelessly passé iPhone 3G, staged a wireless data competition and found that the G1 downloaded webpages twice as fast as the iPhone 3G.

…we visited barackobama.com. The G1 took 45 seconds to load the page, the iPhone 3G took 1 minute 38 seconds…

They ran an additional test on their WiFi network and found the load times to be comparable, meaning that the software and processing capacities were about equal. CNET UK speculates that the O2 network, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in England, is holding back the iPhone’s capacities. Well what about their chipsets?

The article makes the point of comparing another T-Mobile 3G phone to the G1 (I know, not enough Gs in that sentence, here’s another… aaaand his myspace for good measure). The point is, two phones on the same network had widely variable load times. So its not the network, its the chipset right?

Apple’s iPhone 3G uses an Infineon chip, which has no reported history of inadequacy, whereas the G1 uses a dual-core integrated processing chip from Qualcomm. Now, I have no idea what that means but I do know that they’re different and the sooner RA opens its coffers up and buys me a G1, the faster I can unlock it and test it against an iPhone right here in real America/keep it for myself.

And you’ll be damn sure I won’t be using any pinko websites to test the loading speeds. Country First loads as fast as freedom on this and any computer.

[Cheerio CNET]

Nerds everywhere shit their pants with joy today, as G1 — Google’s first attempt at phone-making and latest attempt at world domination — hit stores. Lines at T-Mobile locations, Google’s slightly-odd choice for the G1’s service provider, snaked around corners as overeager employees passed around trays of pastries to waiting patrons, who probably said things like “Fuck pastries, where is my phone?!”

Ironically, the phone’s release comes the same day that Apple said iTastic sales of the iPhone were responsible for its stellar fourth-quarter earnings. Profits jumped 26% as the iPhone 3G outsold leading smart-phone competitor Blackberry.

So the real question is — what are nerds to do? I picture this as the same sort of dilemma they would face if both Star Wars and Dune were playing on TV at the same time. (Although really, any self-respecting nerd would have all six Star Wars movies on special-edition DVD). Google has long been the purveyor of innovative search tools online, and things like GMail and Google Maps’ Street View have completely overhauled the way we think about the Internet. A true testament to the company’s technological prowess (and pop culture relevance), “Google” at some point became its own verb. Read More ›