After all the hype and waiting, the new Google phone, the G1 from T-Mobile has been introduced in the US, and chances are it will hit the UK by Christmas. Photos and videos on the T-Mobile web site show it to be a curious combination ‘ a touch screen control like the Apple iPhone, with a full Qwerty keyboard underneath for’ well we’re not quite sure just yet.
The handset is powered by a Qualcomm’s MSM7201A – dual-core single chip and Qualcomm said it also working with other OEMs to develop Android devices.
T-Mobile in the USA will be offering the phone for $179 (around £100) as long as you take a two-year voice and data agreement, and will start delivering it to people on October 22. The device is made, as we have said before, by Taiwan’s HTC and based on Google’s Android operating environment, itself based on a form of Linux and it is a 3G phone (as in European 3G).
The phone comes with GPS, wi-fi, multimedia messaging and a 3-megapixel camera, and naturally a browser that can view full web pages and promises ‘one click access’ to the internet, and plenty of Google applications topped off with Google Maps, with its impressive ‘street view’ so you can walk along with a 3D photorealistic image of the city and street you are in. It also has access to Gmail (well any web browser would give you that), YouTube (ditto), Calendar (you’d expect it) and Google Talk instant messaging, as well as drag and drop re-configurability.
But perhaps the biggest surprise is a bundled music player with a direct link to the Amazon MP3 store. Again anyone with a browser could talk to the store ‘ the idea is that a pre-configured icon takes you right there, you buy what you want through the 3G network, and download it over wi-fi when you are next in reach of a hotspot or your home or work wi-fi. The G1 comes with a 1GB memory card to store music, photos and other files. This ability to purchase through the network is supposed to give the G1 an edge over Apple’s iPhone which only sideloads from iTunes.
Google also announced the release of the Android 1.0 Software Development Kit (SDK), pointing out that 1,700 applications have been written with it, and can be acquired through the Android Market, the Google equivalent of the Apple App Store, which were mostly developed due to the competition Google triggered called the Android Developer Challenge. We can’t vouch or just how useful they all are, but being able to select your own applications is definitely a novelty that it catching on since Apple threw it at the world.
T-Mobile USA is currently accepting web pre-orders for the G1 and the device should at least be announced here (UK) next month, though delivery is likely to be behind the US and depend upon how well it sells there and if stocks last. The rest of Europe will get it early next year.
Now they can see the G1 in the cold light of day US analysts reckon it will give the iPhone a run for its money, and outsell it in the early ramp up. The truth is that Qwerty Keyboards are tough to integrate into mobile usage, and most handsets with them get it horribly wrong, and the ease of use, and marketing is unlikely to have that Apple design edge. It might do better outside the US than the iPhone, but only once there are more and more devices with Android on board, as this device on its own will mostly appeal we think to existing T-Mobile customers.