14 DAY TRIAL // T-Mobile's G1 seems to be a phone that is on many people’s wish-list. Almost 1.5 million of them, to be more exact. On October 6, we were telling you how T-Mobile had tripled the number of phones initially available for delivery on October 22. Well, all those phones are pre-ordered now. T-Mobile will have to get even more units, in order to satisfy people’s hunger for G1. All in all, the way things are turning out seems to be really favorable to both T-Mobile and Google.
T-Mobile's HTC G1 is the first phone that runs on the Google Android platform. Android is an open source mobile platform, so this means that everybody can use and modify the code as they wish, and all this for free. This is somehow a revolutionary process, since all the mobile OSes released so far were not open source, and manufacturers had to pay in order to give the phone an OS. Not with Android, they don’t.
The G1 seems to be a serious competitor to Apple's iPhone, since it delivers almost the same goodies but at a lower price. Also the correspondent of the Apple App Store, Android Market will offer tons of applications for the G1, with an extra something for developers in that Android Market will allow them to keep all the money they make off the sale of their apps, while the App Store keeps 30% of it. This means good news for users as well, since a lower price for apps is to be expected in this case.
Come to think of it, HTC, the manufacturer of G1 said that it planned to sell over 2 million phones, out of which 500,000 until the end of the year. Clearly, initial expectations were far exceeded since T-Mobile already pre-sold almost 1,5 million phones, with future plans of moving another 2 million in retail stores. That 10 million units that Apple sold with its iPhone 3G seems a figure achievable for the G1 as well, and who knows, we might be looking at the future of smartphones.