T-Mobile Presold 1.5 Million G1 Android Phones
by
on October 12, 2008,
On September 23 T-Mobile officially presented the first phone powered with Google’s Android mobile operating system. The phone is scheduled to start shipping on October 22 and T-Mobile has invited existing subscribers to preorder the phone right after the presentation to have it delivered when it is available.
Now it looks like arranging for the preorders was exactly the right move as T-Mobile reports on 1.5 million phones already pre-ordered with 10 more days left until the official shipping date. The interesting thing is that this means that T-Mobile has actually managed to sell three times as many phones as it initially ordered from G1 manufacturer HTC - the carrier has already tripled its original request and all those phones are already presold. Actually that is much more than several hundred thousand devices that HTC itself was planning to deliver in 2008.
As Joe Wilcox mentions today on Apple Watch, it is definitely notable that it took Apple 75 days to sell 1 million iPhones for the first device and 3 days for the iPhone 3G. And while the three days may seem impressive, we should keep in mind the simple fact that consumers were already familiar with the device and some were planning the purchase - but refrained from it knowing they should expect the next generation iPhone launched. To the contrary, those people pre-ordering G1 phones from T-Mobile buy them after they merely saw the presentation - following their faith in Google more than anything else.
This is definitely an amazing thing to witness, I think - especially when everyone is so concerned about the recession on hand. Honestly, I did not expect such amazing sales but I guessed we should see some very positive results - simply after I watched tons of comments from very excited reader on my own posts about G1 presentation by T-Mobile, HTC, and Google. Now we get some numeric confirmation to the excitement we’ve seen.
