Google’s G1 phone, featuring the new operating system “Android,” will be available on T-Mobile’s network this week.

The G1 is intended to compete with the iPhone and Blackberry on the smartphone market.

Though the G1 doesn’t beat the iPhone and Blackberry across the board, it does bring a few new ideas to the market that could easily shake things up.

Most noticeably on the aesthetic side, the G1’s screen slides over to reveal a real QWERTY keyboard. The G1’s keyboard is a relief compared to the crammed-together Blackberry Pearl’s keyboard and the touch-screen based keyboard on the iPhone.

Unfortunately, the keyboard comes at a sacrifice. The G1 does not feature the innovative multiple-point touch screen that the iPhone features, according to Popular Mechanics magazine.

However, no matter how pretty a phone looks or how comfortable it is to hold, the phone will fail if the software doesn’t function appropriately.

The G1’s most valuable asset actually comes from how it will handle applications differently from the other smartphones. The G1 is enabled to use open-source applications.

Open-source applications enable the user community to program and improve software to better suit the user’s experience. The web browser Firefox is an example of open-source success. The open-source community’s efforts made Firefox the second most used web browser – only behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – in April of this year, according to Net Applications.

If open-source development is even half as effective on the G1 as it has proved to be so far for Firefox, it could give the G1 the edge over the iPhone and Blackberry.


The Web site, http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1, contributed to this report.

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