Casually stopping by T-Mobile, hoping to get some information on the G1 phone, we found out more than we could have hoped for… except for my original question, what is the monthly plan going to be? I guess I should mention I was with my friend Trevor so the use of we implies us, not my having multiple personalities… which I don’t… know of. The salesgirl, whose name shall not be… named, came over to help us. We asked a few questions and she basically said, “We won’t know anything about the phone until Sunday’s training session.” We continued to chat and after a bit she asked us, “do you want to see it?” Unsure at first what she was talking about, I said yes… she had snuck back to grab the G1! Yeah she lied about knowing nothing, but who could stay mad? She opened it up and we got to see many of its features and try the Android software. The phone felt very solid and light for its size. The flip-screen was awesome. I don’t think people will have to worry about that breaking off. It’s more likely to survive any accident than you or me.

The first application she opened up was the GPS/Google-Map navigator (sorry I don’t really know the names of these things). We played with this for 10 or 15 minutes. Well, it was like the video so I won’t go into detail there, but I can confirm it is just as fun and functional as you’d imagine from the snippets you have probably seen. I should also mention that the multi-touch does work very well.

The second application we tried was the SmartShopper… or something like that. I don’t remember if this application has been shown online, but what it does is it allows you to take a snapshot of a barcode and it will read the code, tell you the store you are at and how much the item is. I also believe it checks the stores online price. According to Trevor’s memory, the item we scanned was on sale online. This is great for price comparison and competitor price matching. I’m sure this feature alone is going to cover the cost of the phone and possibly the monthly fees.

Those were the only applications we messed around with, but I’ll go into a little more detail about the phone itself. The buttons are great, not so easy to press that you will accidentally hit them while doing whatever you are doing. Also, typing on a real keypad is 1000 times easier than on a touch-screen, another superior feature to the I-Phone. I am personally a fan of the larger phones because you can actually type and read what is on the screen. In addition, you can see everything you are typing so you really have at least twice as much viewable screen area as the I-Phone. It still fits in your pocket and you’re not very likely to forever lose it if you drop it like a super mini nano I-Pod.