Google Phone in India by March 2009

Google's new smartphone was unveiled Wednesday during a conference that offered the missing information about the gadget, after several details and features leaked on the Internet, leaving little to be discovered.

The Dream is scheduled to be released in the United States on October 22, followed by its launch in the United Kingdom later on in November. Since the mobile phone's development was done in English, it is currently available only in this language, HTC announcing that in non-English speaking countries, the Dream would hit the market the first quarter of next year. Moreover, a period of about six months is necessary for the smartphone to be made available in most of the other languages, High Tech Computer Corporation added.

The Taiwan-based company also stated there was no clear date for the G1's roll out in Asia or anywhere else outside the West.

Google's product's features include a touchscreen that can slide upwards revealing a QWERTY keyboard, free of charge Android Marketstore applications such as BreadCrumbz and TuneWiki and software that has been designed to work with Google Maps, Google Maps Street View and YouTube videos. In addition to offering users a navigation tool that focuses on the routes they themselves have created (BreadCrumbz) and a karaoke-like app that synchronizes lyrics to a video (TuneWiki), the search giant has partenered with Amazon, which enables consumers to purchase or browse music via the Amazon MP3 store. The latter is Apple's iTunes Store's opposite number, the service granting access to Amazon's Digital Rights Management-free music.

Furthermore, the company stated that the gadget aims at encouraging third-party developers to create programs to run on it, along with leaving the choice of what programs to use entirely up to them, thus catering for every whim they might have.

HTC's Dream is the first hadset to run on the Android operating system, a software platform based on the Linux OS that was unveiled on November 5, 2007, along with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a 34-companies consortium aimed at advancing open standards for mobile devices.

Priced at $179, which is $20 less that Apple's iPhone, T-Mobile's G1 is unfortunately rumored to limit data transfer at a monthly 1 gigabyte. The German mobile network operator has revealed the two data plans for the Android smartphone, a $25 plan including both limited access to the Internet and a limited number of messages and a $35 one that offers unlimited messages and Internet. Nevertheless, users are not to exceed the 1 GB cap, otherwise the company will dial back their access speed, from an estimated 1.8 megabit per second to no more than 50 Kilobits per second.

The Dream is expected to pose a threat on the smartphone market to both Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry.