George Chen DOT COM

People are going gargar over the Droid font – which is part of the Google’s Android release. They never border to explain “Why” Google come up with their own font in the first place. Maybe it’s so obvious that they didn’t border to explain, but here’s why:

To have complete control of the UI when you are dealing with multiple handset manufactures, you’ll need your own font. Take a look at the Samsung, LG or even a Motorola phone and you’ll notice all the handset manufactures tends to use their own propietary font – and they all look different.
Funny enough, at Yahoo! we did the same thing with Yahoo! Go. When we develop the Yahoo! Go client last year, we commissioned Meta Design to create a set of bit map font that would look nice on 128, 176, and QVGA screens.

We needed the font since we want to make sure the user experience (of the software client) is identical no matter what handset you are using Yahoo! Go on. We never name the font officially, but it’s always called the Yahoo! Go font or YGo16 as an example (Yahoo! Go 16 pixel). I once proposed to name the font family Hamburg, but no one took me seriously. 😛

I suggested that since it’s a tradition (in the tech world anyway) to name bitmap font after city names (think Chicago, Cairo) plus the good majority of the development team of Yahoo! Go’s based out of Hamburg, Germany.

Back to the Droid font. It’s a very nice looking font, but one has to wonder how the font will hold up on a 128×160 tiny screen when you are trying to read a big chuck of text. But maybe we won’t if there’s no 126×160 screen size devices.
Droid font doesn’t seems too compress to me and I am not sure about that. I am not saying all mobile font has to be a compressed font, but compressed fonts tends to work better when you are dealing with the portrait mobile screens. The Series 60 San (Nokia) fonts family is a classic case of good mobile optimized font – and clearly the Droid font took a different direction. Things you took for granted working on the Web has to be re-fector. Isn’t mobile fun?

WF.com – Wells Fargo’s mobile banking site. Very minimal. Very functional. The surprising thing is the whole “WF” brand. Silmilar to WaMu I suppose.

BBC Podcast for the iPhone – This one is iPhone specific, but it’s a great show case of how a “big brand” can take advantage of the buzz of the iPhone and creating something that’s actually useful and with lasting appeal. The site also point to the weakness of the iPhone as well, the lack of 3G is really killing the multi-media side of the deal. iPhone needs to get 3G speed, like um, now.

Earthcomber Mobile – I don’t even remember how I found this. Another iPhone specific “mobile Web app” with a very attractive interface. If I am not using Yelp mobile, I like to play with this to find places to eat. Did I say, the UI is very attractive?

Spent a few hours playing around with Android SDK and here’s some quick find:

• Wurfl identifies the device as “SideKick II” (pretty interesting consider the Android folks are SideKick folks too), and Luca should have an update for Wurfl repository soon.
• Yahoo! GO 2.0 set the trend on Carousel. OpenWave copied. AOL copied. Now it’s Google’s turn. To be fair, Carousel is not such an “out-there” design so it’s great to see the Carousel UI is becoming popular.
• I am very happy to report the SDK and emulator setup is very quick and painless – compare with how I used to have set up jar files and jad files in the Symbian world… Granted, things are a lot more “rich” and complicated in the Symbian world. Like having 200 devices to deal with.
• The Android UI is a mix of super simplified Windows Mobile 6 + a little bit of OS X and then a few Palm like rounded corners here and there. There really isn’t a distinct visual style, and I am sure that’s intensional so it can be “skinned” easily by operators and handset makers.
• The built in Google Search is not the mobile version nor the full Google home page, although one can still access those 2 via the built in browser. The best way to describe the “built in Google Search” as a custom mobiles search page for Android.
• Although the UI is not full i18tn, but one can view double byte content easily (maybe because my host system already have the resource built in?)
• FlashLite is missing of course.

iPhone firmware 1.1.2 is coming soon enough with the promise (among many other new features) of Chinese input methods.

But if you have a jail-broke 1.1.1 iPhone around, and you are looking for Chinese input method, you should check this out….

Disclaimer: I’m just point out the link. Do it at your own risk. Of course, you better can read / write Chinese as you follow the link. 😉

1. While the announcement is all about “Phone”. Google is actually trying to creating the “ubiquitous mobile computing platform“. Lofty goal I’d say.
2. Mobile Designers and Developers will have one more OS to deal with – and that’s not necessary a good thing. Have to download yet another SDK and making sure yet another emulator running correctly on your dev system is not fun.
3. Fragmentation of the whole Mobile User Experience continues for the consumers. Android is not going to fix that.
4. Android is clearly a part of Google’s 700MHz strategy (in the US). First real Android (hardware) will be out by 2nd half of 2008, and 6 months later (2009) just in time where we’ll see 700MHz goes live. Perfect timing as far as Google is concern.
5. Google did not demo any prototype, yet. That means “things are not ready” in the most literal sense.
6. General consumers expectations and hype are WAY high, and that’s a bad thing for Google. Android better live up to the hype.
7. It takes years for S60, Windows Mobile, RIM etc. to get to where they are at as far as their market standing is concern. It will take at least a few years for us to find out if GPhone will be successful. Apple is not a good reference point of comparison since they worked on the first gen. iPhone for 2.5 years and have both the hardware and software controlled tightly. Android is a very different animal.
8. Motorola, LG, and Samsung of the world are not likely to switch their entire platfrom to the Android. If Google’s lucky, they might get a major manufacturer to produce 5 handset types for the year, and that trickle down to, say, 2-3 Android enabled handset from your friendly local carrier. Not to mention, the carriers are tier 2 or tier 3 players (in the US). I don’t see “iPhone Phenomenon” on Day One.

Extra Credit Reading: Gizmodo’s Analysis by Wilson Rothman. Nice quote, “Why will Android succeed where Symbian, Palm OS and Windows Mobile have failed?”. I don’t think those OSses totally failed but it’s certainly something interesting to watch.