Report: T-Mobile G2 Drops Keyboard To Better Battle iPhone
The next version of Google’s Android-based cell phone sold by T-Mobile opts to drop the keyboard in favor of a virtual version to better chase after iPhone fans, a report suggested Wednesday.
The G2, built by Taiwan’s HTC for U.S. carrier T-Mobile, will appear this Spring without a physical keyboard, according to gadget blog Gizmodo. Removing the keyboard in favor of a touch-screen version will better align the Android phone with handsets such as Apple’s iPhone.
The new phone, alleged pictures of which Gizmodo published, provides a “slimmer, rounded design,” wrote Macnn.
The report follows a note from Morgan Stanley that Apple’s iPhone outsold T-Mobile’s G1 by almost 6-to-1. T-Mobile sold nearly 300,000 of the handsets from October through Dec. 31. Meanwhile, Apple and carrier AT&T likely sold 1.75 million iPhones during the period, according to the investment firm.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
