T-Mobile Google Phone Event Produces UK/US Launch Dates, Rollerblades
The T-Mobile G1 launch in New York was a pretty exciting affair, complete with a guest appearance from Mr. and Mr. Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page)…on rollerblades! They so crazy!
Bigwigs from T-Mobile, Google and HTC all sat together to tell us how the G1 was very open and would change the game with their third party app strategy.
In all honesty, the event was pretty much in line with earlier rumours, the G1 will be released on October 22nd, and cost $179 on a T-Mobile contract, which is an impressively cheap price point. The UK launch is earmarked for November, whilst the rest of Europe will have to wait until 2009… The UK’s pricing structure was not revealed, however.
They made no bones about marketing the handset as a device for consumers rather than the business user, a truth borne out by the lack of support for Microsoft e-mail client Exchange, and a focus on Instant Messaging between phone contacts on a variety of programs including Google Talk.
The G1 will be locked to T-Mobile, which is how they are going to swallow that super low subsidy price, and be available mainly in areas which can take advantage of the 3G networks T-Mobile provide. No great shakes for us on this side of the pond, but 3G is still in relative infancy for the US, meaning some will go without until the infrastructure supports it.
Amazon MP3 hook ups were played down a lot more than expected (probably because the story broke just soon before the launch), and a lot was made of the openness of Android, and also how much the G1 can go onto the interweb. And connect to the internet. And go online to connect. Okay, it’s made by Google, we understand the online side of things will be tidy!
HTC’s boss man Peter Chow was there to talk up the lengthy, yet enjoyable development process, going as far as to say that Android was the best a nice platform to work on. Don’t burn those WinMo bridges, Mr. Chow!
How much advertising will the man on the street see, though? T-Mobile CFO Andy Rubin was clear: “This will be the largest marketing launch for a single handset in T-Mobile’s history.” No doubt, especially with Google writing the cheques to the ad agency…
Much talking up of third party app development was made, including a show reel featuring the devs 
behind barcode reading comparison app Shop Savvy and carbon footprint counter EcoRio. Cue more references to the “continuous stream of innovation” that an open source platform provides. Let’s hope it doesn’t just become an App Store with more nudity… What we’ve seen so far is good, so keep it up everyone!
Then the Google boys came in and brought their anarchy brand of anarchy to an otherwise staid launch, riding in on rollerskates and bigging up the future of Android. Sergey’s talking of being a geek, knocking up a ‘throwing the phone in the air’ app (a sly way of mentioning the existence of an accelerometer) and having a G1 before the suits onstage was funny. It was all a bit cool, I grudgingly admit!
That was it, hopefully we will get a looky look at an actual handset now all the grainy shots and conjecture are out of the way and the phone is out there! Keep checking the official site for more info regarding the G1!
Cheers to Gizmodo for the amusing liveblog and coupla images!
