Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
There’s a slide-out physical QWERTY keyboard which works with the phone going from a vertical position to a horizontal position, as with many large screen phones today, but instead of sliding up and down, there’s a minor “semi-circular” sliding motion that can be seen on the video.
Apparently the G1 will also come with a 3 megapixel camera, something that also beats the 2 megapixel camera in the iPhone and iPhone 3G.
Looking at the interface on the (as always) blurry video, it does look iPhone-esque to some degree, and while we can see some repeating tapping of an icon on the screen which doesn’t seem to want to activate immediately, there was no iPhone-like sliding, swiping or multi-touching, so just how smoothly the Android interface really performs is yet to be seen.
It’s also a 3G phone, as you’d demand of virtually any smartphone these days, and apparently you’ll need a Gmail account to get the phone working, but seeing as these are free and are actually very useful with many gigabytes of free storage (and growing), this is hardly a deal breaker.
Whether the phone has “UMA” or Wi-Fi is unknown, but TmoNews are promising “more information” soon, already suggesting that the September 17 pre-sale date will only last for 1 week, and that 3G will be heavily promoted.
As a Google Phone, we’d expect it to take full advantage of the many and varied Google services now available – why wouldn’t it, after all?
And, if the graphical user interface can match the niceties of the iPhone interface, something that HTC has itself achieved to some degree with its own HTC Touch Diamond devices, the low price of the HTC Dream G1 and its additional features could see Google become as massive a player in the mobile phone market as Apple has become, potentially in even faster time!
Of course this has already been predicted numerous times since news of the Google Android platform first became known, but with real hardware so close to being launched, the iPhone’s honeymoon period could truly soon be coming to an end, especially with reports of 3G reception problems that supposedly can’t be fixed with a firmware update.
Still, it’s hard to make a true judgement until the phones actually launch and people can see the results for themselves, but with the iPhone 3G, the Nokia N96, the upcoming 8 megapixel Sony Ericsson Cyber-Shot phone, other phones from Samsung, LG, others and the HTC Dream G1, 2008 has been the most exciting year for mobile phones, ever – with 2009 sure to blow us all away even more!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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