This is what the first Android phone could have looked like: co-founder shares render

All along we were working on 2 phones, Sooner, more blackberry-like & Dream, touchscreen based. After the iPhone launch we did cancel Sooner to focus on Dream (eventually the Google G1) but its design changed little from this rendering made 5 months before the iPhone launched. pic.twitter.com/lC8m0WolgE

— Rich Miner (@richminer) October 31, 2022

The render shared by Miner shows that the black and neon phone looks akin to the original HTC Dream, but it has a sling keyboard and physical button. The leaked device had more punch than the HTC Dream’s understated final look, standing out with its neon green keyboard.

There’s a Google logo on the display’s upper left corner, which is also neon. It also had a jog wheel, which could have been used for navigation. Instead, the HTC Dream received a trackball.

The phone’s design includes a lot more buttons overall the places. There’s an email and the “@” symbol keys, alongside answering, declining, going home, and going back keys, on the bottom of the handset. The HTC Dream, on the other hand, had only five buttons.

Miner says they were working on two phones at the time: “Sooner,” a Blackberry-like handset, and “Dream.” However, after the launch of the iPhone, the company sunset “Sooner” and double downs on developing “Dream.”