Android: Take Me to Your Market Leader

The T-Mobile G1 won’t arrive at market until later this month and already the carrier is rumored to have presold 1.5 million of them (Neither T-Mobile, Google or handset manufacturer HTC has confirmed this report which first appeared on Motley Fool). “Given the great anticipation and the heavy presale demand for the T-Mobile G1 with Google (GOOG), we nearly tripled the number of phones initially available for delivery on our Oct. 22 launch date and have sold through them all,” T-Mobile (DT) said in a statement.

Clearly, demand for the handset, the first based on Google’s Android operating system, is far greater than anyone had expected. Earlier this month G1 manufacturer HTC estimated that T-Mobile would sell between 400,000 and 500,000 G1 handsets before the end of 2008. That the company may have already sold three times that amount to customers willing to buy the device without any real hands-on experience suggests the G1 may manage to hold its own against Apple’s iPhone. Apple (AAPL), as you may recall, sold one million iPhone 3Gs during the first weekend the device was on sale.