G1 phones in stores now...

About 150 people lined up outside a T-Mobile store in San Francisco on Tuesday night to cop one of the first G1 (Google "Android") phones. The G1 starts at $180 with a two-year contract. If you wanna get it without it'll cost you $400.

I went to check it out on Thursday and was pleasantly surprised. It's better than the photos suggest. The build quality is solid (I'm mean don't drop it under a bus?!), the keyboard slider is smooth. The touchscreen, although a bit small compared to the iPhone, is good and the UI was intuitive, and I love the trackball, three-homepages and the dedicated number keys. I didn't get too lost just picking the G1 up and playing with it. Here's a more indepth demo.



I didn't put my name down to buy one. There are 20-30 Android phones coming out by Q2 2009...Moto, possibly a secret Nokia and more from HTC fo'sure! So the best is yet to come I think. And let's see how the Android Marketplace takes off now that Google has said it'll give 70% of revs to the developers and share the remaining money with services providers.

And, this week, AT&T announced November 4th for the Blackberry Bold. And Verizon countered with the Blackberry Storm on November xx (rumored to be 15, 16 or 20th)...but are they serious... I heard $699?! I know it has a unique dual network (CDMA and GSM) feature which makes it ultra expensive...but subsidize that mutha 'cause Verizon's data plans are killer expensive too! Still, it looks dope!

Google's Android = T-Mobile G1

Today, HTC's Dream mobile phone got unveiled as the T-Mobile G1 (what a name...?!). Why the spotlight? Well, it's the first commercial mobile using Google's open platform called Android which is expected to make waves in the mobile phone world.

Since Apple launched the iPhone there's been nothing that's fresh and new to challenge it. The Koreans have produced some nice distractions like the LG Glide, Samsung Instinct. Blackberry has got its Bold coming out in the US soon after launching in Europe, but that's just a UI revamp. Palm has nothing until late 2009 when its Nova OS gets revealed. And Symbian and Microsoft seem noticably absent. That Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 doesn't look like it'll do anything with its animated top menu.

So, folks are hoping that Google can drive phone manufacturers and software developers to go wild with Android. Being open platform means that the OS will cost less, be developed quicker by the community and generally build a ground swell of support. Or so the theory goes.

The announcement of Android in November 2007 was enough to accelerate Symbian/Nokia's plan to make itself open source 7 months later in June 2008.