T-Mobile G1: $179 with a two year contract in the US

The T-Mobile G1 has officially been announced this morning at the T-Mobile event in New York. The G1 will cost $179 with a two year contract, and can be ordered online, starting today for existing customers. All others will have to wait until the official launch date, on October 27th 2008. The G1 will be available at selected T-Mobile Stores and dealers with two new data/messaging plans. The cheapest plan ($25/month) offers unlimited internet and some messages, while the slightly more expensive plan ($35/month) offers both unlimited data and messaging. The 100 million customers in Europe will have to wait: the UK will get the G1 early November while the rollout in the rest of Europe will happen in early 2009.

The price of $179 and the data plans are competitively priced against the iPhone 3G. In comparision, unlimited internet and some messaging will cost $30 on the AT&T network while unlimited internet and messaging is available for the iPhone for a monthly fee of $50. The price of $179 is also lower than the rumored $199 but remember that you’ll need a voice plan on top of the data plans.

There’s no Exchange compatibility out of the box. Google hopes that third party developers will be happy to provide that. Push mail is only available for Gmail – for other mail accounts (POP or IMAP) a manual pull operation is the only available option. The webbrowser is not based on Chrome, it is however based on the same Webkit engine as the Google Chrome browser.

The phone is a dualband UMTS and a quadband GSM, so it’ll work on almost any network in the world. A Skype client is not available yet, there’s no Bluetooth A2DP support and there’s also no support for iTunes. Amazon offers an on-device music store, and the T-Mobile G1 itself will play AAC, WMA, MP3 and other music standards. T-Mobile envisages the G1 as a consumer devices, but enterprise workers might want it as well. Also lacking: a desktop app for synchronisation. The T-Mobile G1 ill sync with all Google Apps, but only over the air. The sync happens in the background, across the network. Support for Word and Excel is lacking too – Google leaves that to third party developers. And last but not least: the T-Mobile G1 will be simlocked to the T-Mobile network.