Google's G1: Android is Finally Coming to town

Google's G1:Android is finally coming to town, and hopefully it will hit the shelves here in Asia by December! :-D

Android is the name of the software that google has been developing to power their new mobile phone. The hardware is manufactured by one of todays leading PDA/Mobile phone manufacturer, HTC, famous for there Windows Mobile Devices. The name of the device will be G1 (I think it means, Google 1)

Bluetooth, GPS, Accelorometer, 3.0 Mega Pixel, track ball similar to blackberry. These are just some of Google's G1 Mobile contraption.

Here is a demo of the software in action:


android is open source, like linux. Here is the development site:
http://code.google.com/android/

Industry Braces for Google G1 on Android
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on 22 September 2008, 18:21
by Lalee Sadighi

T-Mobile on Tuesday will release the first mobile phone to use Android, Google’s mobile operating system, in a launch that could win the search giant 4 percent of the smartphone market.

The T-Mobile/Google phone, dubbed the G1, is the newest agitator in a fast-moving U.S. smartphone market so far dominated by Research In Motion with 16 million BlackBerry subscribers, followed by newcomer Apple, who in 15 months has already sold over 10 million iPhones.

“T-Mobile could sell 400,000 phones this year, giving Google about 4 percent of the U.S. market for "smart" phones,” research firm Strategy Analytics wrote in a report earlier this month.

The G1, which is expected to retail for $199 and carry the Google brand, should be available for sale in a few weeks. Details are scarce--other than the obvious web browsing and e-mail capabilities--but the phone is expected to be an iPhone/BlackBerry hybrid of some sort, with a touch screen and a full tactile keyboard.

The release comes less than a year after Google lifted the veil on Android--an announcement that pushed Google’s stock to a record $747.24.

In a then unique move, Google had announced a free software platform and operating system for mobile devices based on Linux, which would be available to mobile carriers under the Apache free-software and open-source license. The Android OS now has the muscle of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of 34 software, hardware, and telecommunications companies.

The enthusiasm for Google's mobile plans was evident and analysts predicted that the Mountain View, California-based company would use the platform to dominate the world of mobile advertising, just like it had with web advertising. It also came as the search player was making moves at FCC spectrum auctions to open up a swath of airwaves for new rivals.

"Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in November of last year when the company applied for the FCC auction.

That same month an analysts at Oppenheimer & Co predicted that Google would make nearly $5 billion in revenue from the mobile market within three years after Android's debut and stuck a whopping price target of $850 on the company’s stock. A few weeks before the release of the first Android phone, the search king’s stock is languishing at $430.14.

But since Google started its Android effort the industry has seen the launch of two other free, open-source mobile software platforms, heating up the competition for web advertising domination.

Symbian, the world's largest supplier of software for smartphones--with 57 percent market share--was bought by Nokia in June, and like Google the Finnish company decided to make the software available to other phone makers for free.

Mobile Linux developer LiMo is another Google rival. The LiMo alliance counts founding partners Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone. In May, Verizon Wireless said that starting next year LiMo, would be the software of choice for its phones.

But Google remains the undisputed king of web advertising, a precious advantage over any rival, and it already counts T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel on its side.

AT&T, the leading U.S. phone carrier and distributor of the iPhone--which runs on Apple's operating system--remains undecided if it will sign up an open-source mobile operating system.

Waiting for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to offer an open-source version of his operating system and license it to others might be a long wait.

Taken from here