The T-Mobile G1, also known as the Google phone, after months of planning and speculation finally landed on U.S. store shelves Wednesday.
And while much of the excitement is focused on the G1's feature list and aesthetics, the critical tests for the first Android-powered phone will be its performance on T-Mobile’s 3G network and the robustness of Android, the phone's brand new operating system.
While the early G1 crowds have not rivaled the size or the enthusiasm of the initial iPhone crowds, more than 1.5 million G1 phones were pre-ordered and that pushed demand for the phone well past most analysts' projections.
About half of the T-Mobile customers who pre-ordered the G1 were doing so to trade up from basic handsets, according to T-Mobile, establishing the possibility that the G1 could help permanently shift smartphones into the mass-market consumer category.
Of concern is that T-Mobile's high-speed 3G coverage is limited to 95 U.S. cities, which is roughly a third of the reach of its major rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless. G1 customers in non-3G cities will have to make do with the carrier's EDGE service, which will limit the performance of content-heavy applications such as those running video.
The combination of the spottiness of T-Mobile's 3G coverage and the immaturity of Android could create some early problems for G1 users.
A T-Mobile G1 forum has already attracted a number of complaints ranging from POP mail client problems to frequent network disconnections and battery heat.
Nomura analyst Richard Windsor believes that it could be 12 to 18 months before Android works out its early kinks and finally matches the performance standards of mature rivals Symbian and Windows Mobile.
For phone makers, carriers, and mobile operating systems developers, the adjustment to 3G mobile broadband has been anything but graceful.
Apple, for example, has had a number of high-profile problems with the integration its iPhone 3G's hardware, software, and network connection, and the G1 could be on its way down that road.