... guess it will be HTC's usual build quality which is frankly awefull. Shame, they do such a good job of packing in the tech, they forget how to QA the physical hardware.

On the flip side, I am looking forward to this to help push the user experience in the way the JesusPhone has. Windows Mobile devices are being challenged and thats a good thing - look at the Touch Diamond for example, the Omnia and the soon to be Asus Glaxy7. None of these would be as "good" as they are without the JesusPhone pushing them. I hope Google can do some unique and interesting things as well!

(No I don't own an Iphone, I am a WinMob user through and through, I just think the Iphone has helped the market develope)

wow, she's a looker, huh?

Yep, that is one ugly phone! Looks like the iPhones ugly sibling!

Where are the "What?! No video? I couldn't possibly live without video! How can my ageing parent witness little Timmy's first go on the potty? I can with my Nokia/Sony ?other HTC phone... " There's no front mounted camera either. Google, what are you thinking? How can people at large be expected to cope without video calls? Let hope you remembered MMS... YAWN

It looks much better than the Fisher Price looking white/cream version we've seen so far.

Finger crossed it'll live up to the hype!?

I'm sure I'm due a hol to the States to go pick one up...

Wheres the Nokia fanboys, the Apple haters, the Bill Gates love children all bombarding this with abuse as they did to the iPhone??

I'm willing to bet this gets nowhere near the abuse despite clearly being a complete and utter rip off with a much uglier exterior and no doubt will have just as many teething issues.

And to re-iterate, boy is that a cheap and ugly looking phone.

Whilst Android might be of great interest to people like me, it's hardly going to make a good first impression on the masses encased in that ugly phone!

A major style injection required here!

I'd like it if it did have a 4.6" one, but given the form factor I think it would make the rest of the phone too large.

I've had a play with the iPhone, and while it might be really nice to use, it's way too large for me to carry around all the time.

I hope the gPhone give Apple a bit of serious competion over the next year. It might help Apple see the light and stop being such a bunch of arses about which apps to let in the app store. Remeber the G1 is just the first Android phone, there will be more to come from other manufacturers who will hopefully make it look significantly cuter.

Paul

(Paris, because she knows that size matters)

What? No Video? ... sorry, couldn't resist.

No, my comment is about the size. The iPhone screen is 3.5" and the G1 is 4.6", so thats at least another inch in your pocket (down boy!). iPhone IMHO is as large as you'd want to get - I carry mine in all sorts of pockets and I wouldn't want it to be any bigger than it is - plus bigger = heavier, right?

And why the buttons? Clearly there is a lot of interaction through the screen, so why add these buttons and why make them look so poxy?

I like the tech, I think Android has the potential to succeed, but this phone is like the one from the Carphone Warehouse adverts, it'll be going round with a paper bag over it...

Why do people care?

chop off those stupid buttons and give up on the hard keyboard. It has a touchscreen! use it!

There's not point in slagging it off. Like the iPhone, it's probably a reasonable, mid-range device with some good points and bad points. The difference with the iPhone is that this one doesn't seem to warrant adoring followers, whose belief appears to be based on faith rather than facts. The iPhone rubbed me up the wrong way right from the start, when the idiots at the presentation were cheering hysterically at everything Jobs said:

"It's a phone."

<cheers>

"It's GSM." [WTF? Like every other phone in the world? No shit?]

<wild cheers>

"Look, it's so shiny."

<hysteria>

I could be proved wrong. If the googlephone does, indeed, get launched with similar evangelism, I shall take an instant dislike to it, too.

Just found this for non-video fans, made me laugh...

http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=3509

Define:android--A robot or other artificial being made to resemble a human.

In this case, an artificial being made to resemble a smart phone/pda. Made to resemble, not actually succeeding there, is it now? Seriously, that is some bad design from a company that has made huge steps in phone design recently. It reminds me of linux. Packed with the ability to do anything you want to do on inferior hardware, but the software, hardware combo usually aren't all that pretty. Pretty wallpaper, but the rest of the home screen don't thrill me at all.

what a bunch you are - giving the poor phone a hard life

GET A LIFE - it's a phone and nothing else!

... is really how consumers see it.

Nokia sells stacks of devices, not becuase they have the S60 interface, but becuase 'when you press a button it does the right thing'. For techies yes, S 60, wu hu,.!!

But for my parents, my wife and the rest of the breathing world, who cares ?

If Android wins or looses is not about 'Android' it is about the deployment that the handset makes actually apply.

Nokia could make S60- suck, but it sings. So it wins.

MKD

ps : Don't know which icon I chose, but I quite like it. Clues anyone ?

I think that's the main reason you don't have the jPhone bashing happening here - there arn't any real google fanatics on the scale of apple fanboys, and people don't really care one way or the other about android, not really, there isn't an irritating ad campaign, or company adverts claiming it has features it doesn't... or just popping up in every single episode of How I Met Your Mother and other US tv.

I was looking forward to Android... then I found out it was going to be released by tmobile... now my experience with them is, they take a manufacturers working firmware, and f*ck it up as best they can, and now they are the first distributors for an OS that google hope will become popular. It might start out usable, quick and solidly built on google test devices, but I guaranty once tmobile have their way, it's gonna be annoying (company jingle for every action, and not optional), slow as hell (tzones this, webnwalk that, have a company screensaver & theme), and extremely buggy and crashy (we needed to control access to features on our network, honest gov).

I will wait for G2, and when tmobile get their sticky fingers off it.

Paris - because she's a tmobile fangirl... that sidekick whore!!

How come the home screen shows 2:47pm but the clock says 9:11? Nowhere in the world do those two times happen at the same time. Stupid phone! :D