Android. Why it feels so awesome?

A Cellphone. We used to dial some digits on it and talk. Well, then started to send msgs. Ok, some music there too. What you mean, we got a camera also? Phew, look he is opening the damned bookmyshow on his cell! 2002 to 2010. 8 years. A dozen or more phones. None as beautiful as this one. This one awesome powerful lean mean machine of a mobile - the world knows as Android.

To set the context, everyone who started using a cellphone a few years after the start of the millennium, knows where we used to be, and where we are. An ugly box full of nokia sh*t (read crappy tunes, an awesome 15-msg storage, and 1 sq inch of mono display) was all that was there in 2002. For a majestic 10k bucks that i still remember, i got my first fricking cell phone. It was good to make and receive calls. Period. No music, no videos, no cam, not even mms, nothing extra. I remember coding creepy alphabets to create a tune that remotely resembled "hotel california" thing! Don't recall the model no. but it was 8250 by the best guess. And it was supposed to be a hot one in market :). This was my first phone and it cud warm my pockets for free ;)

Without wasting pages on my rest of mobile flirtings, i straight way zoom to 2005. I had a phone which had it all - a 1.3 mp camera, music space for 50 songs, played videos, sent mmses (which were hot in this time :p) - but did all this theoretically. Nokia decided that the living souls of 2005 are only worth a symbian - a mobile operating system which could even put a Windows ME to shame (windows ME was a crappy release of windows even by microsoft standards). So, this symbian thing used to respond to a button click after maybe 3 seconds. If you wanted to scroll thru your list of music files and play one of selected ones, you should start good 60 seconds before you want it to listen. And video - well just imagine a tiny nano running over a speedbreaker every 10 meters. So the overall experience was slow and jittery! And forget browsing the net on this thing - you could be lucky if you would get a Y of Yahoo shown on your screen without the connection or the browser hanging up. Data speeds, as usual with india, were slow and the symbian's browser did its best to kill the experience totally. Okay, there might be a few better phones out there, but either they were too costly or too dorkish. Nokia ruled these mediocre times!!

2010. A lot of things change in 5 years. One of them is that it is a good amount of time for a research-driven, agile and "we-live-to-innovate" company to produce a mobile OS that worked - that just frickin' worked as wow. No creeps. No gaps. No shortcuts. The company was Google - and the OS it came out with - Android. Dictionaries throw all kind of meanings for this word, but mine says just one - Awesome! (For mobile manufacturers, it has another meaning - "free":) )

So today, after like 8 yrs of holding my first cell in hand, i can say am free of cells now - i have a mobile computer in my hands that actually works some, if not all, of a comp's fantacies...i do net on it all the time...i ask it for directions thru its supercool GPS on delhi roads...i make it count my beats as i jog...i scan barcodes too :p....i have a wonderful pics and video gallery...which actually plays glitch-lessly...all in all - it does things for me on the move, which others tried hard to - but never did it so well.

Yes, iPhone showed the way, but unlike Microsoft who are the masters of the copying universe, Google actually got inspired to bring out something beautiful, utterly usable and powerful. Did i mention cool?

Recently wrote something on my FB, which i will put here as well (its an original writeup afterall):

main aur mera Android...aksar ye baatein karte hain...Microsoft tujhe banata to tu aisa banta ...waisa banta...kabhi

hang hota kabhi rota...kabhi khud hi restart hota ya kabhi start hi nahi hota...kabhi blue kabhi yellow screen dikhata...kabhi ek word doc kholne me 5 min lagata...aur jis din kabhi flawlessly chalta bhi to...ek virus aake sab f#*% kar deta...and then, as i turn my phone to its back, i read these golden words ..."created by Google"...n i thank God :)

And God wud say..."Thank Google baba!"