Early screenshots of Android from 2007, released today during the Oracle-Google trial, are bringing to light just how far the operating system has come aesthetically since its beginnings.
As Google stated in its initial Android device specifications, “Touchscreens will be supported. However, the Product was designed with the presence of discrete physical buttons as an assumption, therefore a touchscreen cannot completely replace physical buttons.” The platform was designed with directional pads and QWERTY keyboards in mind, with much smaller screens than even the initial 3.2-inch touchscreen of the HTC G1.
But the fundamentals were all in place, including separate apps for Gmail, Camera, YouTube and more. Considering the Android that we know today, which supports exceptionally high resolution screens of seemingly infinite size, the team has done much to improve the situation in five short years.
Google also had lofty goals for its tablet sales, estimating that it would sell 10 million slabs in 2011, doubling that number in 2012. While those numbers were gross overestimates — we have tallies more in the realm of a couple million — its smartphone numbers were all too conservative. As Andy Rubin said in a post yesterday, Google has activated more than 300 million Android phones around the world, eclipsing its 2013 estimate of 220 million smartphones.
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