The Google mobile phone has arrived

The G1 phone has today been officially unveiled in the United States and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were present at the launch.


Essentially a 3G phone that has been optimised for Google services like mail and maps it is available on the T-Mobile network and requires signing up for a two-year contract.

The phone will reportedly be free to UK buyers on a £40 monthly data plan and should be available from early November.

In a significant competitive move against Apple's iPhone, Amazon has confirmed that it has created a music retail application for the G1 that will let users search, buy, download and play music from the Amazon store - a catalogue of 6m songs from all four major labels.

Whilst first glance might suggest the G1 is a just less pretty version of the iPhone don't forget this is Google and they tend to get things right quite often.

It is the first mobile device to use the Android operating system which is effectively open source, meaning any developer can build apps for the phone and a Facebook style model is used to promote the most popular / highly rated apps.

The device also includes a QWERTY keyboard which is presumably intended to encourage blackberry and heavy mail users to switch to this device.

For Google's sake, let's hope the UK launch won't see a repeat of the problems that plagued the UK iPhone launch.