The Way to Think about Android/GPhones
I discovered a nice and fairly extensive video: "G1 Android Walkthough" from Gizmodo. It demonstrates most if not all the features of the software and OS. The G1 has received generally positive, if mixed reviews from those who've used/seen it. And while people are mostly busy comparing the G1 to the iPhone, I think the more important discussion is how the G1 contributes to a growing smartphone market in the US and beyond.
For some context, here's AdMob data (August) on smartphone usage and traffic by handset/OS (from AdMob's network):
- Smartphones accounted for 25.8% of worldwide traffic in August, up 3.4% since May.
- The numbers were almost identical for the US: 23.7% of US traffic in August, up 3.5% since May 2008.
The charts are from AdMob:
Globally:
Compare Q4 global smartphone shipments (per Canalys): 
United States:
The important point is about the momentum that all these phones, now including Android, help build collectively for the smartphone segment. Apple and now Google are raising the profile in the US and abroad of smartphones (certainly Nokia is doing that too as the global market leader).
Smartphone owners use the mobile Internet with greater frequency and intensity than feature phone users (here's the comScore data slide I've now shown many times):
Source: comScore/M:Metrics (Q1, 2008)
While feature phone users are driving huge SMS volumes in the US and abroad, the future of the "mobile Internet" is on smartphones, which is the growth sector of the market. By creating more competition and better user experiences, Apple and Google are helping grow the entire sector.
The G1/GPhone vs. the iPhone story misses this larger point.
Comments
Another Point of Differentiation - Out-of-the Box Speech Rec
Greg's commentary is right on. While most commentary pits the G1 against the iPhone, it is a very different species. It costs less. It makes less of a fashion statement and it hasn't made religion out of MultiTouch. It strikes me as no accident that, months and thousands of applications after its introduction, there are really no speech-enabled applications for the iPhone. They simply don't get through the approval process. My suspicion is that they are destined to never be deemed elegant enough for the iPhone.
Meanwhile, I strongly recommend that applications developers for the Android make speech-enabled applications a high-profile differentiator. Among all the socially networked, location-based, personally tailored, search-oriented applications, we tend to forget that these are phones! You talk to them and through them.