T-Mobile Pre-Sells Over 1.5 Million Android G1 Phones

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Oct 12,2008

Earlier I wrote about the sellout of available pre-order G1 phones that T-Mobile had allocated — even after they tripled the manufacturing order to HTC.

According to Fool.com, those two sets of pre-orders add up to 1.5 million handsets, and that’s without even taking into account any retail sales that are bound to be racked up, or the second round of pre-orders that T-Mobile hopes to deliver in mid-November.

The phone hasn’t even hit the market and been seen by the public, yet they’ve already sold 1.5 million of them? Remember that in the first six months of this year Apple said it sold 2.4 million iPhones — and that was a model that had been seen, reviewed, and showed off.

The big negative on the phone is the T-Mobile network (as if criticism over the iPhone’s AT&T network wasn’t bad enough). But the big positive is the openness of the platform. While the iPhone’s App Store has led to a ton of software being written, the platform and the secretness around it hinders some development.

Android is open source, totally open, and there’s a possibility that an explosion of software will be written for it. But as Fool.com says, the G1 must be a hit:

Google needs the G1 to be a hit. Given all the hype around the Android platform, a weak or disappointing first example could turn a lot of prospective buyers off entirely: “Oh, that’s all? Gimme an iPhone!” That could be the end of the entire Android platform.

While it might not be the end of it, it certainly wouldn’t help. We’ll see as the phone hits the market and gets out into the hands of the public.