Today we reach a bit of a milestone. You see, today is the 7th anniversary of the first post on Ausdroid, which makes today our birthday! On this day, seven years ago, Buzz wrote the first story for what would become Ausdroid, detailing the arrival of the original HTC Desire on Telstra.
The HTC Desire, it’s probably fair to say, is what gave rise to what became Ausdroid, out of a competition of sorts that was run by Telstra. Dubbed the ‘HTC Desire Social Review’, a number of prominent (and no so prominent) tech minds around Sydney and Melbourne were given one of HTC’s new phones and encouraged to review them over a period of a couple of weeks, and that’s how I first ran into Buzz — we both ‘won’ the competition as it was, and participated in the social review project.
You can read some of Buzz’ early impressions on the HTC Desire on Ausdroid, in fact, and it was my writings about the Desire (which have since disappeared on some other website) which led to my interest in the platform, and eventually joining Ausdroid a few months later to review handsets with Buzz.
Well, that was seven years ago, and we’ve had a lot of faces come and go since. Of course, Dan, Jason, Phil, Scott, Duncan and Alex are still with us today, but a lot of other people have contributed to making Ausdroid great over the last seven years as well, including the likes of Matt and Irwin, Geoff and Graham, James and Michaela, Tia and Jamie and many more. Not everyone wants to write forever, and while many have moved on to other projects or things to do with their time, their contributions have helped shape Ausdroid into what it is today.
Over the seven years, we’ve hit lots of milestones; we’ve gone from covering events and trade shows from live streams to going to these things and covering them on the ground. We’ve gone from watching CES from afar to going to CES, and the same can be said of other events like Google I/O, IFA, Mobile World Congress, and other events throughout the year. We’ve even won some awards in 2015 and in 2016 for what we do .. something we’re rather proud of.
We have a couple of interesting projects coming up, including one which is bound to be of interest to many of our readers, which we’ll share a bit more about in a week or two.
Longer term, Ausdroid will be at Google I/O this year, and we’ll also be attending CES Asia for the first time, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Association, which is sponsoring our attendance after a successful turn at CES in Las Vegas in January. Looking further ahead, we’ve got IFA coming up again, and our plan is to approach it the same way we did with MWC, and get a couple of our team members over to cover the announcements out of Berlin.
Until then, thanks for continuing to read, and here’s hoping the next seven years hold even more interesting developments and fun for us all.
