How Many Google Phone Engineers Does It Take to Tell the Time?

So here I was, all excited about Android. Not because the G1's physical design is specially attractive. In fact, it's a gray design with no soul. Not because of the user interface, which at first glance reminded me of a mash-up between the Nintendo DS and a '90s Windows desktop manager. No, I was excited because this is the first post-iPhone smartphone that could be a serious challenger to Apple's mounting dominance. Then I looked closely at this image and realized the G1 will not pose a threat to Apple at all.

The problem in this promotional mock-up image is obvious: The analog clock says it's 9:10 but the digital clock says it's 2:47.

I know. It seems like a dumb problem. But it is an obvious one. This is one of their main promotional images—which incidentally shows a T-Mobile G1 with a screen that seems to be broken, something which is bad enough on its own—and they failed to get it right. The problem with the clocks would have never escaped Apple's ferocious attention to detail, but it is not the image itself that's so troubling. It is what it symbolizes, what is missing at Android's most fundamental level: Attention to detail.