Cool. I would buy this but the hardware looks a bit crap. The iPhone hardware is so much nicer; if only Apple weren’t such control freaks.

It doesn’t look like Android will ever be on a phone with an on screen keyboard which is a shame. Those physical qwerty keyboards are stupid.

Posted at 4:11 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Tim

What’s with removing all the capitalisation? As they say, capitalisation is the difference between “I helped my uncle Jack [capital J] off a horse” and “I helped my uncle jack off a horse”.

Posted at 4:16 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Tim

Any news on what 3G bands this supports? Still just the T-Mob bands? I’d love for this to work with AT&T 3G, that would be reason enough to buy it, and the unlocking doesn’t do a lot of good for people interested in 3G, since i think T-Mob’s 3G bands are unique? Not sure on that. Anyway i know it’s unlikely, but it would sure be nice.
And tim, that’s funny, i helped my uncle Jack off a horse just yesterday!
-Taylor

Posted at 4:42 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Taylor Alexander

virtual keyboard is on the way soon

Posted at 5:47 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by bountyx

@taylor it only works on t-mobile’s 3G in the US and International 3G. AT&T’s 3G is not supported.

Posted at 5:59 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Eliot Phillips

Virtual keyboards suck. Damn near impossible to type on.
Best mobile keyboard I’ve ever used: The peek.
Worst: iPhone.

And no, they don’t just take some getting used to – I use my iPod touch’s keyboard several times a day. My peek I’ve only used a couple times, but I love it.

Posted at 6:03 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Urza9814

@urza9814 I humbly disagree. I’ve tried many virtual keyboards, and many thumb boards as well (treo, bberry, palm “add-on” thumb board).

While a hardware keyboard definitely is faster and more accurate, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the iphone kb. On screen keyboards without multitouch are a pain. I type quite a bit (ssh) on my iphone kb and it’s definitely usable, even with my huge hands.

Posted at 10:21 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by andrew

Agreed about the keyboards. Steve Jobs can pry the “buttons” out of my cold, dead hands.

Also agreed about the punctuation — the problem is the site’s stylesheet. I’d write a userscript to override it but I’m *just* lazy enough not to bother. CTRL-SHIFT-S (in Firefox, possibly with the Developer extension installed) turns off style sheets, which fixes it, if it matters to you.

Posted at 10:18 am on Dec 9th, 2008 by Coderer

ctrl-shift-s does nothing for me here (FF, Linux)

Besides, it’s a very small price to pay to not have to suffer the fanboy caps

Posted at 1:02 pm on Dec 9th, 2008 by liam

actually the best keybored out is on the sidekick lx, i have a lx A iphone and a G1 the iphone is the biggest pain to use try the lx then the iphone and the iphone is just a crappy phone it fills so boxed in the g1 fills so open, real keyboard any day

Posted at 6:47 pm on Dec 9th, 2008 by santaninja

Actually, they have an onscreen keyboard for the g1 that should be out shortly. you can find videos of it on the android forum or on youtube. Looks very promising.

Posted at 2:39 am on Dec 30th, 2008 by rayrar

i only recently got a review unit of the t-mobile g1, and was somewhat disappointed as well. the keyboard (which should one of the devices biggest advantages!) sucks totally, its backlight is way too weak.

i’ve compiled my first impressions here:

http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/2009/01/14/testdrive-t-mobile-g1-aka-google-phone-day-1/

Posted at 11:07 am on Jan 28th, 2009 by Michael Kamleitner