Whenever one country receives a highly anticipated piece of technology first, many other countries get jealous and find ways to illegally obtain that device. Currently, T-Mobile’s G1 was only released several days ago in America and hasn’t been released elsewhere at this time. Some Chinese are desperate to try out the first phone running Google’s Android and so they have begun buying G1s from American consumers for big bucks, or should I say big renminbi.
For about RMB 3,999, about $584, you can purchase your own G1. If you wish to purchase an unlocked G1, then it will cost an additional RMB 500, or $73. It looks like the price of the G1 will remain high, until T-Mobile officially introduces the G1 to China, even though China is receiving a lot of illegal phones.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of other countries began to follow suit. The G1 is such a hyped phone many people outside of the U.S. can’t wait to see how good it is and how Google’s open source Android works.
Read [Pacific Epoch] Via [mocoNews]
If the author of this article really think all people outside U.S. are desperate to see how good G1 is, he might be having tunnel vision. The maker of G1 – HTC (High Tech Company) actually is a Taiwanese company which has release another better version (also much prettier in design) – Diamond since summer 2008. Now you finally can get it from Bestbuy. I used Diamond before and it is a really awesome smartphone. It also comes with GPS system application. We Americans often think that we are on top of the world, however, we are still far behind in some appects of technology than some countries, even a very small one like Taiwan. I travel South Asia a lot for business trips and have my eyes wide open. G1 still has a lot of limitations and I would love to see any better ones to be released in coming future.
I have to apologize for the confusion I made. Actually the HTC Diamond Sprint releasing is somewhat different from the one I got from Asia. It may still have several key problems needed to be fixed.