The T-Mobile G1 phone, also known as the “Google phone”, will be released soon. It is the HTC Dream phone, running Google’s new mobile phone operating system “Android“. Google founded the Open Handset Alliance in 2007 with other big companies like HTC, Samsung, Nvidia and T-Mobile, in order to develop an open source platform and applications for mobile devices. Android is an open-source project, based on the Linux kernel, which can easily be extend it with open source applications.

The G1will be available from October 22, 2008, for about 180US$ with 2-year T-Mobile plan and 400US$ without.
It has a 3.2″ touch screen with a resolution of 480×320 pixels. There is no need to use a pen for the touchscreen, tapping and dragging with the fingers is enough.
The phone is equipped with 1GB internal memory, and can be extended with a microSD card (up to 8GB).
When the phone is slid open, it has a full QWERTY keyboard, and six more navigation buttons. The camera can take photos with 3 mega pixels, but isn’t able to record videos. Also, a video playback application is missing, you can only watch YouTube-videos with the built-in browser.

Preinstalled applications are many popular Google applications like Maps, GMail, Calendar and Google Talk, a GPS navigation software and a music player with ability to purchase and download new songs.
Other applications can be downloaded from the AndroidMarket.

I am very anxious to try Android on a real phone – the emulator for computers included in the Android SDK looks very interesting. Many people critizise the missing earphone jack and the missing video player, but hey! its the first phone released with Android, and many more will follow. I think soon there will be a better candidate, which is better, cheaper and more innovative than the iPhone, and not later than then I will get such a phone. I think it’s worth it!