Android in early 2007 looked very different than it does today

By Chris Ziegler on April 25, 2012 04:15 pm @zpower 225Comments

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When Google was in the thick of Android's development in 2006 and 2007 — long before the platform ever reached retail — it was a very different product, almost unrecognizable compared to the products we used today. Documents dated May of 2007 and made public during the course of Oracle's lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android show off a number of those preliminary user interface elements, prominently marked "subject to change," and you can see how this used to be a product focused on landscape QWERTY devices: every single screen shot is in a landscape orientation, and it's clear to see how nearly everything could be operated with a directional pad alone. Even compared to the QWERTY prototype demoed at Mobile World Congress in early 2008, a lot had changed. (Notably, at one time, Google included a simple Notes application in Android — something it still lacks in production devices to this day.)

Unfortunately, the quality of the shots in the documents isn't very high, but they're good enough to get a sense of what Google had in mind. And is it just us, or are there some odd similarities to Microsoft's scrapped Windows Mobile 7 UI mixed in here?