This is not photo. [LWN.net]

This is not photo.

Posted Oct 8, 2009 16:22 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Sorry, but no. by brouhaha
Parent article: Toward a freer Android

I can't find any photos of it, which isn't too surprising since Android was still in "stealth mode" at the time.

You can't find any photos if it because they don't exist. What I showed above is not even photo - it's default skin from the very first public release of Android SDK! Why it looks like that? Well - it's the render of actual developer device. Hundred of these or so were produced at the end 2006 (not 2007, but 2006!), but even if HTC produced them (and they even beed spotted in the wild eventually) HTC hated them. And so HTC developed Dream (aka G1) - with Google's guys help, of course, but it's not Google creation.

Later Android SDK stopped using this skin and switched to G1-like skin. Why? Google finally got sizable number of new HTC-developed devices and dropped support for it's own development platform and form-factor. First prototypes were ready by the middle of 2007, but developers got sizable number of them closer to the end of 2007. Public, of course, got them in 2008. That's the story and please don't try to rewrite it. If you are correct and initial creation was like Dream and later ones were like aforementioned developer platform,then how come we never got anything like the development platform? Why it was used by default in the very first release of the SDK and not in the later ones? Why all photos of the "later design" (by your interpretation) are shown with early versions of Android (ribbon-like interface was in the first release of SDK and in the first presentation video) and never with modern UI design? Facts just don't add up to your crazy story, sorry.

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