Consider it a consequence of Moore’s law: technology keeps moving forward without missing a beat. Of course, just because your current phone is faster than your last doesn’t mean every feature, tool, or ability survived generations. Think about how many devices — fax machines and beepers and MP3 players — that have been replaced or rendered obsolete as consumer electronics continued to evolve.

The same is true of smartphones. In the fifteen years since Android became a consumer product, we’ve seen all sorts of features come and go from Android — some good, some bad. Think about the Facebook button on the HTC Salsa (what a name), the replaceable modules of Motorola’s Z-series or LG’s “Friends,” or the squeezable sides of the Pixel 2. Some good ideas, some bad, but all elements that came through the evolution (and re-evolution) of Android.

With the T-Mobile G1 turning 15 on September 23rd, it’s as good a time as any to look back on what the G1 offered buyers in 2008. Former AP editor Ryne Hager already explored how that phone held up as a daily driver a decade later — I cannot believe it’s been five years since that piece — but what about the features that disappeared from Android phones as we know them? Here are the 10 things standard on the G1 that you won’t find on any of today’s best Android phones.

1 Physical navigation buttons

At first glance, the T-Mobile G1 — also called the HTC Dream — has more than a few dated elements to it, but none of them are quite as eye-catchingly out of place as the lineup of buttons emblazoned on its chin. While physical navigation buttons would remain an Android mainstay for years to come, it’s rare to see this many on the front of the device. The home, back, and menu keys were here from the jump, but they were far from alone — or, indeed, in the order you might’ve expected.

In addition to those three, the very first Android phone used physical buttons for answering and ending calls, with the latter pulling double-duty as a power switch. Using the end call button for power options was par for the course fifteen years ago, but on a smartphone with as much of a legacy as this, it’s unexpected. The menu button also gets a weird placement, taking up more space than any other button above the main row.

All of these various buttons stand out as a rudimentary exercise in what would eventually morph into a fairly standard layout (you know, before the move to on-screen buttons and, eventually, gestures). But one physical key here stands out among the rest, enough to earn its own section.

2 Clickable trackball

If anything on the G1 cements its status as a dated piece of hardware fifteen years on, it’s the trackball. Straight out of the BlackBerry playbook — and perhaps a remnant of Android’s earliest status as a direct BlackBerry rival — the clickable trackball that made scrolling through web pages or endless emails a hell of a lot easier. And while this wouldn’t be the only time we’d see this tool appear on Android devices (it’s also smack dab in the middle of the Nexus One), it wasn’t a feature that made much of an impact on Google’s mobile OS.

As much as I think something like this would make navigating today’s enormous displays a little more manageable, there’s really no space for something like a trackball with modern smartphone design. And while that might seem like a bummer, at the end of the day, trackballs were simply of their time. These days, you’re better off relying on something like a stylus for getting stuff done with precision accuracy.

3 Replaceable battery

This one’s an easy one. Like most phones at the time that didn’t feature fruit iconography, the G1 had a replaceable 1,150mAh battery. That’s practically miniscule by today’s standards, where a battery more than three times its size can be criticized when shoved in a clamshell foldable, but at the time, it was par for the course for mid-2000s smartphones. But hey, if you miss replaceable batteries, I have great news for you. Whether by choice or by governmental pressure, it might not be long until this long-dead feature makes its grand return.

4 Slider QWERTY keyboard

Everyone knows the T-Mobile G1 had a QWERTY keyboard — it was one of the main differentiators between it and the slab that was the iPhone 3G. QWERTY keyboards defined the earliest days of Android. The Motorola Droid, after all, cemented the OS as the next mobile juggernaut just one year later. What you might not know (or remember, at least) is that Android launched without any kind of virtual keyboard, leaving this slider as the only way to communicate on the go.

Considering how popular Gboard is on Android — and how vital virtual keyboard tools like Emoji Kitchen became — it seems almost unfeasible that this OS arrived on the scene without the building blocks for any of it. Support for these keyboards — both official and third-party — came with Android 1.5 Cupcake in April of 2009, six months after the G1 landed in the palms of early adopters. Meanwhile, phones with physical keyboards have been relegated to niche communities online. I bet you can’t even remember the last time you saw one in public.

5 Pocket-friendly display

The T-Mobile G1 used a 3.2-inch display. Think about that. That’s not just smaller than the iPhone 3G’s screen — it’s smaller than the weird Palm Phone launched by Verizon a few years ago, and that device was designed to be as tiny as possible. These days, the smallest screen you’ll find on mainstream phones is the 4.7-inch panel Apple’s using on the iPhone SE. On the Android side, the Zenfone 10 and Galaxy S23 might be your two best bets — and both of those screens are 5.9-inches and 6.1-inches, respectively. How times change.

6 Expandable storage

You knew this was coming. MicroSD card slots were an easy addition in 2008, making the limited storage feel a whole lot more expansive. The G1 came with just 256 megabytes of storage, a far cry from the 8 gigabytes included in the base iPhone 3G model. But it didn’t matter, because, with the G1’s microSD card slot, your options were endless.

Or, well, endless up to 16GB. That’s the largest card the G1 supported, though that wasn’t unheard of in 2008. Expandable storage remained an Android mainstay for about a decade after the G1 arrived, and even today, phones with microSD card slots aren’t unheard of. But these days, you’re usually limited to whatever space your device ships with. At least it’s almost always more than 16GB.

7 Android Market — and a partnership with Amazon

It’s easy to forget that the Play Store wasn’t always, you know, the Play Store. Google renamed Android’s app store in the spring of 2012, but for the three and a half years prior to that, it was known as the Android Market. The base experience was basically the same — you downloaded apps and games, some free and some paid — and, in fact, an outdated version of the Market remains listed on the Play Store, advertising support for tablets running Honeycomb.

But if you really want to talk about a relic, the T-Mobile G1 shipped with Amazon’s MP3 store for buying and downloading songs. Without a store of its own, Google partnered with the same company that would eventually spin Android off into its own fork, complete with a rival app store of its own. But 2008 was years before this fight would break out — not to mention well before the rise of Spotify and other rival music apps. If you wanted to listen to music, Amazon MP3 was the easiest way.

8 Camera button

It’s there. Just look closer.

While everyone — myself included — is excited about the new Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro (and is not-so-secretly hoping it spurs a revival of extra buttons on Android phones), the G1 had Apple and everyone else beat to the punch… sort of. While it wasn’t a programmable button per se, the ability to quick-launch into the camera, complete with a shutter button, was a nice (if not uncommon for the time) touch.

Later Android phones would drop this sort of key for a double-tap shortcut assigned to the power button, but personally, I’m still fighting the good fight. Bring back physical shortcut keys, you cowards.

9 Soft touch matte finish

These days, basically every smartphone is a familiar sandwich of glass and metal. Sure, the core materials might change — look at Apple’s use of titanium — but really, any company willing to put some extra effort into their look or feel is bound to get the tech press excited. In 2008, the mobile scene felt a little more Wild West, and boy, can that be seen with the T-Mobile G1.

In addition to its weird chin and the odd sliding mechanism for the keyboard, the soft touch matte plastic is something increasingly rare on 2023 smartphones. But considering how heavy glass and metal can feel these days — not to mention how frustrating it is if you drop one of these behemoths — it’s easy to miss the friendly feel of the G1. Matte finishes like this still exist, of course; check out the Zenfone 10’s soft touch finish if you haven’t. But largely speaking, I’d love to see materials (or, at least, finishes) like this make a big comeback this decade.

10 Headphone jack… not

Yeah, this is a fakeout. You probably thought the T-Mobile G1 had a 3.5mm headphone jack, because, well, why wouldn’t it? But HTC, Google, and T-Mobile launched the very first Android phone without a headphone jack, leaving buyers reliant on — you guessed it — a dongle.

Of course, we were far from the relative heydays of USB-C. Instead, HTC relied on a proprietary port called ExtUSB that was basically just Mini-USB with a different shape. While you’d find a dongle in the box for listening to your wired headphones — really the only choice at the time, and certainly the only choice you’d want to use — it’s funny to think about the very first Android phone shipping without a headphone jack, something that would be the norm just ten years later.

Reading reviews from 2008, the reaction to the G1’s missing port sounds a lot like what we’d hear from critics of the iPhone (and all of the Android devices that followed) a decade later. Check out this blurb from Engadget:

Something tells us that if you’re buying a phone that’s supposed to “do everything,” having to fiddle with some janky piece of plastic just to connect your earbuds is going to get real old, real fast. Of course, a set of buds is included with the device, and they sound about how you’d expect — if you care about audio at all, you’ll want to trade up… and you’ll be annoyed with the jack. This is definitely a mark against the phone, and a perplexing choice for all companies involved. If this was a ploy to sell accessories, it’s likely going to backfire.

Turns out HTC was just ahead of its time.

Android has come a long way since its earliest days

Looking over what’s missing from current phones that you could’ve found on the G1, it’s clear a lot has changed in the world of Android. But while I’m as sad as anyone to see camera buttons, expandable storage slots, and smaller displays largely disappear from the scene, it’s tough to be too mad when many of the advancements that took their place are, for the most part, better.

It’s easy to be nostalgic for yesterday’s gadgets — I’d kill for a second-gen iPod nano that supported Apple Music, frankly — but looking at what we have on the mobile scene today, I think it’s fair to say the T-Mobile G1 served its purpose well. While Android wouldn’t be what we know it as today without the advancements first made with this phone, Google’s first commercial Android hardware remains more of a stepping stone than something worth returning to.