Google aims to take a bit out of Apple with the new G1 phone

Comapny unveils its first mobile in New York
Search giant's handset designed to rival iPhone
Richard Wray - New York

Google is taking on the might of Apple and the world's largest mobile phone maker Nokia in a three-way battle for the Christmas market with its first handset, the G1.
Launched in the US yesterday and coming to the UK with T-Mobile in November, the G1 is larger than the iPhone but has a touchscreen which flips out to reveal a full keypad. Its launch comes after a prepay version of the iPhone - aimed at the festive market - and just days before Nokia unveils its first touchscreen phone.
While the iPhone has the looks and the new Nokia phone is expected to come with access to unlimited music tracks for a year, the G1 has Goggle's Android operating system inside it. Android is open for anyone to use, which the search engine giant hopes will lead to the creation of hundreds of applicaitions - or widgets - which G1 owners will be able to download from a dedicated online marketplace.
Google's hope is that making it easy for consumers to use their mobile phone to get on to the internet - whether through the phone's browser or through one of the downloaded applications - will lead them to use it to look for information, products and locations. Carrying out more internet searches will generate more revenue.
Google co-founder Larry Page, who got to the G1 launch in New York with fellow founder, Sergey Brin, on rollerblades, said: "You always have your phone on you but you do no always have your laptop with you7, it is quite difficult to carry it all the time, especially if you are roller-blading... being able to do a search with all the flexibility that you are used to haveing on a laptop is really, really worthwhile and we are really excited about it."
The mobile phone is likely to be the next battleground for web companies. A quarter of a century after the introduction of the personal computer there are about a billion around the world. That many mobile phones are sold every year.
"We do clearly think that the mobile internet is the dominant force in our industry going forward," said Christopher Schlaffer, from Google's excclusive network partner for the G1, T-Mobile. "The G1 is a milestone in bringing the open mobile internet to the mass market."
While Americans will have to pay $179 (£97) for a handset, it is expected to be free in the UK for anyone willing to sign up to a £40-a-month contract. To get the basic 8GB version of the iPhone free from O2 customers must sign up to a £45-a-month contract. The pay-as-you-go version of the phone costs £349.99.
The G1 handset will be "locked" to the T-Mobile network but hackers are likely to start prising open the phone when it goes on sale in the US on October 22. The iPhone was also locked when it was launched by AT&T in the US and O2 in the UK but the internet is stuffed with advice on how to prise it from the grip of a particular network and put a different sim card into it. T-Mobile is subsidising the cost of the handset to make it cheaper for its customers, in the hope that it will get that cash back of the lenth of the customer's contract. Google is also rumoured to have helped subsidise the cost of the phone.

Review

Innovations for tech-heads but it lacks the wow factor

Anyone picking up a G1 when it comes to the UK in November will immediately compare it with the iPhone. Firstly, the G1 looks more like a phone - it has the traditional red and green call buttons plus helpful back and home buttons if you make a mistake. It also has a track ball like a Blackberry which can be used as a mouse for anyone who finds touchscreens too confusing.
The biggest difference, however, is the full qwerty keypad that appears when the screen is slid to one side. The buttons look tiny but are remarkably responsive and generate fewer mistakes than the iPhone's virtual keypad. But the G1 is heavier and bulkier than the Apple device and, frankly, just not as physically attractive.
The technology is at least as good if not in some cases better - the G1 is certainly faster at downloading from the internet and its camera is better - but it lacks the wow factor of the apple device. The G1's touchscreen is as responsive as the iPhone's and the G1 has some clever innovations such as press and hold, to drag icons and photos around the device and a useful magnifying glass that can be dragged across web pages to raise the size of the individual portions of the screen. But the ability to enlarge pages by just pressing two finers on the screen adn moving them apart as far as you can on an iPhone is, for want of a better work, cooler.
Users can make calls, send emails and texts, chat on instant messenger, surf the web, use contacts and calendars. It has a music player which will take MP3 files as well as tracks from iTunes. When it launches in the UK the phone will boast a removeable 2GB memory card, which should be able to store several hundred songs.
The real difference between the two devices, however, is likely to come from the openness of Google's operating system, Android, which allows tech-heads to design "widgets" for the phone. There is a button on the G1 that takes the user to an application marketplace where they can download anything, from a virtual compass to a barcode reader that uses the phone's camera to read barcodes and then connects to the internet to find the cheapest price for them.
As the name shows, the G1 is the first phone that uses Android and it is a very good effort. But for the time being the iPhone still seems to have the advantage.
Richard Wray

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/g1-android-phon.html

Just get a damn iphone and unlock/jailbreak it.

What I think of this "awesomeness"... its fail.