Reportedly Magical Android G1 Phone Turns Out To Actually Be...Just a Pretty Cool Phone

I am tired of breathlessness on new phone announcements. C'mon people, they're just phones. They can be cool, they can be eminently useful, but ultimately, they are phones. Well, perhaps that is not exactly correct. They are actually a cross between a phone and a PC. But you get the point.

We've lived through a couple of months of iPhone 3G mania, and now here's Google's answer to it.

So just to clarify a couple of things, this is an android and is magically remarkable:



And this is the Android phone (photo from this ReadWriteWeb post.) which is a pretty cool phone.



(Note, the icons don't actually float out of the phone. THAT would be pretty magical. But it doesn't happen, so we are back to pretty cool.)

RWW points to the following feature set:

Features Demoed In The Promo Video:

Touchscreen - You can swipe across the screen, use a long press to access more features, drag-and-drop
Music - one-click ordering from Amazon confirmed
Music player is built in - one long press lets you access more features, like song options
Gtalk IM included
Address book can take you right into Google Maps
Google Maps: Directions/Traffic View/Street View; can do panning in Street View thanks to the touch screen
In "Compass Mode" the scene moves as you do
In the web browser, there are onscreen controls to zoom in
You can open multiple web pages in Google's browser
There's a search button on keyboard
A long press lets you share a link (URL) from within the web browser
For apps, there's the Android Market, complete with user ratings and OTA downloads
Pacman!



It's a TMobile phone, so the 3-G footprint is less developed than ATT's for iPhone.

Hey, I am not rapping the phone. But I do want to gently point out that it is just a cool phone. Just like iPhone 3G was a cool phone. Choose your flava, people, because from where I sit they seem pretty similar! Though I do like the bona fide qwerty keyboard. Bona fide meaning actual keys. I don't like the iPhone one.

And at $179, it's a bit cheaper with that 2 year contract. Preorders have begun!

Oh wait, you better read this first, from the TMobile site:

"If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less. Your data session, plan, or service may be suspended, terminated, or restricted for significant roaming or if you use your service in a way that interferes with our network or ability to provide quality service to other users."

So you can watch A LITTLE BIT of YouTube, but don't expect to actually...entertain yourself every day... ;-)

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.