The suspense is finally over! The long- and eagerly-awaited Google phone, the first smartphone on the market to be powered by the new Google Android mobile operating system has arrived. Manufactured by HTC (and once upon a rumor, thought to be dubbed the HTC Dream Phone), the first Google smartphone ever has everybody's curiosity stirred. Should the iPhone (or rather than Apple execs who made it) be shaking in their boots? Let's find out…

As you might expect, the G-1 (or G1 or Google Phone) has some advantages and some disadvantages over the iPhone.

Where the G-1 excels over the iPhone, for starters, is in having an actual, physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard in addition to a touch screen.

The cost of the G1 is more appealing than that of the iPhone too. It's only going to be $179 to Apple's $199 (min.), both requiring a 2-year contract. As well, the G1's T-Mobile broadband data service is a whole $20 per month cheaper than the iPhone's AT&T EDGE network ($70 to $90).
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In the way of digital cameras, the G-1's is superior to the iPhone's, with a higher resolution, though neither one is video-recording capable.
[Google G1 Phone]

Where the G-1 falls behind, however, starts with a serious dearth of onboard memory, just 1 GB to the iPhone's 8 GB or 16 GB (though the G-1 does have a card slot, and offers 8 gig cards for sale.

The G-1 also suffers from being offered exclusively on the T-Mobile network, which is far inferior in the range of supported cities than AT&T's. For one, it only provides 3G speeds in 21 different markets to AT&T and the iPhone's 200.

Other obstacles Google might have avoided setting in its own path were requiring customers to have a Google account to use the Google phone, the device is only compatible with other services offered by Google, and it does not support Microsoft MS Exchange.

Where the two competing handsets pretty much run neck and neck are an online service for downloading 3rd-party applications, a built-in GPS, Bluetooth support, MMS, and limited copy and paste capabilities. Both are 3G capable and have a color display with 320 x 480 pixel resolution.

More a matter of personal preference than across-the-board better or worse, in addition to the slideout keyboard, the G1 is controlled using a trackball and an enter button with point-and-tap capabilities on the touch-sensitive display screen; the iPhone, on the other hand, has a multi-touch capable screen, sensitive to a much wider array of finger movements.

In terms of how it feels in your hand, the G1 is smaller in length and height than the iPhone but it's also thicker and heavier. In terms of battery life, the G1 has more talk time than the iPhone in 3G mode (350 minutes to 300 minutes) but less in 2G mode (406 minutes to 600 minutes); it excels far above and beyond the iPhone in standby time though (402 hours in 3G and 319 hours in 2G to the iPhone's flat 300 hours).

It'll be interesting to see how the marketplace responds to the first Google smartphone, and how it fares against its chief competitor, the 3G iPhone.