It all started with a slide-out keyboard. Long before camera notches, wireless charging, and all the features most phones have today, Android ran on a single device, the Google-HTC T-Mobile G1. It later became known as the HTC Dream, and we first saw it 10 years ago.
The first Android phone, released on September 23, 2008, had one goal: to challenge the iPhone, and it somehow succeeded. It was 1.7 centimeters thick, had a low screen resolution (320×480), and lacked a virtual keyboard, forcing users to type on the slide-out keyboard. Also, to navigate the Menu, the user had to use a trackball or physical buttons (not touch). Despite these strange features (based on our time), T-Mobile managed to sell more than 1 million G1s in 6 months.
But what made the G1 stand out wasn't its physical features, but its operating system. Designed by Andy Rubin and backed by Google, the first version of Android was a fact. Despite its many flaws at launch, it was the only "rival" of Apple's OS.
At launch, the G1 supported various chatting applications such as Google Talk, AOL, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger. The Play store was released 1 year after the device's launch, but there was the “Android Market” from which users could download free applications. The operating system went through many significant changes, and by the time it was first named Cupcake in version 1.5, it had already taken the path of an operating system that would be (almost) entirely touch-based.
Finally, an important feature that the first Android phone did not have is the audio jack. While in 2008 there was no standard for how to extract audio from mobile devices, 10 years later and after the widespread use of the audio jack by a number of manufacturers, it has begun to be removed from many modern devices.
