HTC Dream

HTC Dream
Slogan	Amazing Possibilities. Exceptional Experiences.
Manufacturer	HTC
Available	October 22, 2008 (US)
Screen	3.2 in (81 mm) HVGA (480×320) (180 ppi) 65K color capacitive touchscreen
Camera	3.2 megapixel with auto focus
Operating system	Android 1.1
Input	Capacitive touchscreen, sliding QWERTY Keyboard, Trackball
CPU	Qualcomm MSM7201A ARM11 @ 528MHz
Memory	192 MB DDR SDRAM 256 MB Flash
Memory card	microSD
Networks	Quad band GSM / GPRS / EDGE: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 Dual band UMTS / HSDPA / HSUPA: UMTS 1700 / 2100 (US/Europe) (7.2/2 Mbit/s)
Connectivity	Bluetooth 2.0, IEEE 802.11 b/g
Battery	1150 mAh
Physical size	117.7 mm x 55.7 mm x 17.1 mm (4.60 in x 2.16 in x 0.62 in)
Weight	158g w/ battery
Successor	HTC Magic

The HTC Dream (also marketed as T-Mobile G1 in Europe and the US) is an Internet-enabled smartphone with an operating system designed by Google and hardware designed by HTC. It was the first phone to the market that uses the Android mobile device platform.The phone is part of an open standards effort of the Open Handset Alliance.

It was released in the US on October 22, 2008, in the UK on October 30, 2008, and has begun being available in other European countries including Austria, Netherlands, France and the Czech Republic in early 2009. It was released in Germany in February 2009 with a QWERTZ keyboard.As of March 10, 2009 it is available in Poland under a local mobile brand affiliated with T-Mobile as Era G1.

In the US, it is priced starting at $179.99 for new and existing T-Mobile customers if purchased with a two-year T-Mobile voice and data plan, and $399 without a contract.Contrary to claims made by T-Mobile representatives, the handset does not need the data plan to work, however, the Access Point Name (APN) settings need to be changed to make the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS-Picture Messages) work. The Dream comes in black, bronze (not in the UK), or white.

On 23 April 2009, T-Mobile US announced it had sold one million G1s since the device's launch.

On 5 February 2009, the phone was released through Optus in Australia, as the HTC Dream. On 21 February 2009, Singapore became the first country in Asia to introduce the phone. It was sold by SingTel between $25 – $159 under various contracts. Telefonica will also launch a version of the phone in Spain on 20 April 2009^[15][16] with slightly modified control buttons.

Hardware

• Display: 3.2 in (8.1 cm) TFT-LCD flat glass touch-sensitive HVGA screen with 480 X 320 pixel resolution. The capacitive touchscreen makes it unnecessary (and impossible) to use a stylus. The display switches from portrait to landscape mode when the keyboard is opened. Users can interact to bring up or move content with a finger touch, tapping or touch-drag motion. The touchscreen hardware is capable of multitouch gestures, but Android does not currently support it.

• CPU: The MSM7201A is an ARM-based, dual-core CPU/GPU from Qualcomm and contains many built in features including 3G and a GPU capable of up to 4 million triangles/sec. It has hardware acceleration for Java, but this does not accelerate execution of Android applications, as they are targeted to the Dalvik VM, not the Java VM.

• Keyboard: The HTC Dream has a sliding full 5 row QWERTY keyboard. It also comes with a set of 6 navigation buttons:
  • phone (green, black in UK) – make outbound calls, receive incoming calls, or open the dialer.
  • home (black) – displays home screen with shortcut icons for some applications and a drawer containing all applications on the phone.
  • trackball – navigate among items on the screen or scroll in text fields.
  • back (black) – return to the previous screen.
  • phone (red, black in UK) – end currently active call or put phone into sleep mode.
  • menu (black) – display the contextual menu for the current screen.
  • a touchscreen keyboard is scheduled for Q1 2009.

• Side controls: A pair of volume buttons is located on the left side of the phone, and a camera button on the right side.

• Audio: In place of a headphone jack, the Dream (like many HTC smartphones) has a mini-USB-compatible ExtUSB jack that carries audio signals alongside the regular USB signals, and can be converted with a dongle (now shipped with the phone) to support any standard 3.5 mm headphone. The standard headset includes a clip-on microphone and call answer/hangup button. The Dream supports audio files in MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, MPEG4, WAV, MIDI, and Ogg formats.

• Camera: The HTC Dream has 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus functionality.The Dream can play H.264, streaming, 3GPP, MPEG4, and Codec 3GP files.There is no light ("flash") for the camera in low light conditions. Video recording is scheduled for release in 2009.

• Storage: The HTC Dream has a microSD card slot and comes with a 1GB memory card (2GB in UK). It has been confirmed to work with capacities up to 16GB, and may work with even larger cards. When the USB cable is connected to a computer this computer can access the card without removing it from the HTC Dream. The phone can access media files arranged in folders, but the folders have to be created from the computer.

• Battery: The HTC Dream has a user-replaceable, rechargeable battery stated to offer up to 130 hours of standby power.

• Orientation and location: The HTC Dream provides an accelerometer for sensing movement and which way up it is. It also has a digital compass, giving it complete orientation data. The Dream includes a GPS receiver for fine-grained positioning, and can use cellular or wifi networks for coarse-grained positioning.

• Case: three different colors are available: black, bronze, white.

Software

The HTC Dream runs the Android Operating System. Most Android software developers write their applications in Java, but since Android does not directly run Java bytecode, they need to be compiled first to a unique non-Java bytecode before they can be executed on an Android-powered phone. The Home screen allows the user to place icons for applications, contacts, and other items on three virtual desktops. It also supports widgets, although third-party applications may not yet install their own widgets. It comes with a web browser powered by the WebKit rendering engine, the same one used by the Safari and Chrome web browsers.

Pre-installed software applications provide access to many Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Talk, and a YouTube video player.Included with the device is the Android Market application that allows users to download new software applications from third-party developers.

Google maps

The Google Maps application supports map, satellite, traffic, and street view. Street View uses the accelerometer and digital compass to align the view on the screen with the actual orientation of the phone. In the United States, the Dream also comes with an application for accessing the Amazon MP3 music store, allowing users to browse and legally purchase DRM-free songs.

Location information

The HTC Dream offers two different sources of location information for applications such as Google Maps: a GPS receiver built-in to the chipset, and radio-tower location based on a database of mobile phone tower locations. In addition, the Dream includes a digital compass; it allows one to turn the phone showing the local map to orient it correctly (the map is not turned on the screen, North is always up).

Viewing and editing text

To open a sideloaded text file, additional software has to be acquired. Instead one can store text in Gmail as draft message. One can modify a text while also preserving the old version by first copying the text (see below) to another draft message.

Documents in Google Docs can be viewed, but not edited. However, spreadsheets in Google Docs (including the texts in them) can be edited.

Clipboard

A clipboard allows copying, cutting and pasting, but copying is only possible from editable text areas, not from e.g. rendered text of a webpage.

Navigation within a large webpage

For webpages a magnifying window provides simultaneous 2D-scrolling, thus allowing quick approximate access to any part of even a very long (or wide) webpage. However, this does not work in scrollable text in a subwindow, such as in the case of a long Gmail text.

Developer Edition

On December 5, 2008, Google announced the Android Dev Phone 1, a hardware unlocked version of the HTC Dream. With this version, the user is not only able to use any carrier, but also has complete superuser access to the device which is not found in the retail version. The advantages to this version is that it gives full access to the internal files of the phone, in particular changing and re-flashing the bootloader and operating system. This version also has pre-installed developer programs to aid in the development of Android apps. This version is sold for US$399 and is only available to registered members of the Android community which is open to all developers for a US$25 fee. Depending on the country, the additional shipping charges (which include tariff and tax) may amount to a substantial fraction of the base price; for example, shipping charges to United Kingdom are $128.25, to Germany are US$134.31 and to Poland US$162.

"Rooting"

Upon the launch of the T-Mobile G1, one concern among developers was that limitations were present in its build of Android that blocked Superuser access to the phone. However, a severe vulnerability was soon discovered in early versions of the firmware - everything typed into the phone's keyboard was being interpreted as commands in a root shell. This process, dubbed "rooting" by the community, allowed users to gain Superuser access and perform actions previously impossible without root access, such as installing custom builds of Android, running Debian, and installing custom themes. Although Google and T-Mobile were quick to patch this vulnerability with update RC30, a file from HTC was later leaked allowing users to downgrade to an older firmware with the bug. The Android Dev Phone 1 comes with Superuser access officially integrated into its firmware.

Rooting also allows the use of modified images to run on the G1 through the original vulnerability i.e. a leaked HTC magic (Android 1.5) OS to run on the device. This enables functionality such as video recording, stereo bluetooth and an on-screen keyboard that the current G1 OS is lacking.