T Mobile G1 “GooglePhone”
The iPhone has dominated the smartphone landscape for more than a year. But now, Apple is about to meet a challenger in Google that could halt — or slow — its progress.
The T-Mobile G1 is the first smartphone to use the Android platform announced last year by Google and a number of other partners. Based on Linux, Android is an open source project that has hundreds of developers who work on different applications any phone utilizing Android can use.
T-Mobile and Google have partnered to bring us the Andriod handset, but the G1 integrates Google’s online services into the operation of the handset, which will probably pose a direct challenge to both Windows Smartphones and the Apple iPhone.
The G1 is being made by HTC, who has a long history in the market of Windows Mobile devices and has had partnerships with T-Mobile and several other carriers.
The G1 is very similar to a typical Windows smartphone in terms of specification – there’s a large 3.2″ 320 x 480 pixel touchscreen display, a 3.2 megapixel fixed-focus camera, 3G and 3.5G support, WiFi, GPS (plus a digital compass), microSD expandable memory, Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity.
The main functions are controlled with a trackball (a little like modern BlackBerry devices), plus there’s a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Annoyingly, the T-Mobile G1 has one of HTC’s combined USB/audio sockets which means that you cannot use a standard headset without an adaptor. It’s quite a heavy device at 158 grams.
The processing power of the G1 clocks in at 528Mhz and features a Qualcomm MSM7201A which has 192MB of RAM. This specification is very similar to HTC’s other Windows devices.
The G1 also support GPRS and EDGE data, and has both 802.11 b and g WiFi. The expected maximum talk time on 3G is around the 6 hour mark and has a whopping 16 day stand by time, partly due to the large 1150 mAh battery.
Written by martin on September 28th, 2008 with
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