By Scott Moritz

NEW YORK – A brief hands-on experience with the Google (GOOG) G1 phone gives the impression that after a slew of touchscreen duds from other telcos, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone finally has a worthy rival.

The highly-anticipated HTC phone for T-Mobile (DT) was unveiled in New York Tuesday, and kiosks with technical experts were set up so media people could run the first Android-powered phone through some tricks. T-Mobile will start selling the phone Oct. 22 for $179 with a two-year contract.

The G1 has a large touchscreen, nearly the same size as the iPhone. But unlike the iPhone, there is a physical keyboard under the slide-open screen. People familiar with the iPhone will find the G1 a little lighter and thicker. The G1, for you ultra-thin fans, is about 3/4 of an inch thick, downright portly compared to the svelte half-inch iPhone.

Navigating the screen is fairly easy and there are several ways to move around. The touchscreen has a swipe capability that allows you to flick up and down or side to side. There is also a small trackball-type button at the bottom of the phone for scrolling.

The 3G network coverage at the show – only 16 cities currently have T-Mobile’s 3G networks – was fast. Google’s homepage loaded in five seconds and Google search results also popped up in five seconds. Sites like CNNMoney and Fortune took about 17 seconds to load. That is a fairly standard 3G speed.

Calls worked, and the sound was clear, for those considering the device as a phone primarily.

It is clear, however, that with Google’s support, Android and HTC have made a solid Internet device that combines web access with technology like GPS and software like Google Maps. Applications like Compass Mode, as Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt explains, gives you a 360-degree street view, a trick that has been limited to PCs until now.

The phone has so-called push e-mail through its Gmail service. As Fortune reported Monday, T-Mobile was considering a low-tier price plan that would give G1 users free e-mail without a data plan. T-Mobile technology chief Cole Brodman says the company looked at a few different pricing plans, but decided that the e-mail only data plan “doesn’t do the device justice.”

The G1 will have two monthly price options, $25 for data plan limited to 400 text messages or $35 for unlimited data. That’s compares with AT&T’s $30 and $45 data plans for the iPhone.

HTC’s touchscreen has some familiar features, like a shifting orientation if the user tips the phone on its side. It also has a zoom-in function that is done with plus and minus buttons on the screen rather than the two finger pinch or separate approach on the iPhone.

The G1 allows dragging and dropping of pictures and text, a feature the iPhone still lacks. The music player was easy to use and there is a direct link to Amazon’s music store.

Overall, and first impressions being what they are,  the G1 stands well above disappointing touchscreens like Verizon’s (VZ) LG Voyager or Sprint’s (S) Samsung Instinct. And until Research in Motion (RIMM) delivers its touchscreen Storm BlackBerry, T-Mobile’s G1 is the toughest competition yet to the iconic iPhone.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

Google has tussled with everyone from Microsoft to the telcos on Capitol Hill. Now it’s going after television broadcasters and cable companies.

The search king launched its first public advocacy campaign on Monday to encourage consumers to petition the Federal Communications Commission to “free the airwaves.” As the TV industry prepares to switch from analog to digital broadcasting in February, the FCC will decide what happens with the unused radio airwaves. Google wants to to open up the unlicensed airwaves, also known as “white spaces” left vacant by the switch to digital broadcasting.  Google has also lobbied for open-access airwaves for another band of wireless spectrum that the FCC recently auctioned off. The FCC could rule on what it plans to do with the “white spaces” as early as September.

Google (GOOG) is pushing for the FCC to open the unused airwaves to the public. Along with three public interest groups that support unlicensed broadband usage for rural areas and Native Americans, Google has a vested interest in fighting for free wireless spectrum because greater access to Wi-Fi and broadband Internet means more people surfing on Google from anywhere. “Google wants to promote any network that promotes high-speed Internet access,” said Richard Whitt, Google’s telecom and media legal counsel, on a conference call with reporters Monday.

That irks the National Association of Broadcasters, a powerful lobbying group that is backed by network TV companies, cable operators and national sports leagues. “This is a smoke and mirrors PR gimmick,” says Dennis Wharton, the NAB’s executive vice president. “Google wants you to think this about supporting broadband access in rural areas. But if they get what they want with handheld devices or whatever application devices, it could cause TV interference on a dramatic level in urban markets.”

The NAB is lobbying the FCC to police the unused airwaves through spectrum auctions. It fears that any device – whether it’s a portable video game console, a smartphone, or your garage door opener – will interfere with the digital TV airwaves and wreak havoc on the TV viewing – and ad-watching – experience. The FCC has been conducting field tests for the past year to see if Wi-Fi-equipped devices that use the white space will interfere with broadcast signals.

Google isn’t the only one fighting for unlicensed airwaves. Last year it joined the Wireless Innovation Alliance and the White Space coalition with other tech heavy hitters like Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ)  to support wireless broadband initiatives. Microsoft spokeswoman Ginny Terzano said in a statement that the company is “pleased to see many grassroots efforts take shape like this one.”

Google’s “Free the Airwaves” campaign is the company’s first attempt to reach the masses. Google’s policy team admits it’s facing an uphill battle since the majority of consumers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about wireless policy. Google has put up 14 YouTube videos from white space advocates on its site in hopes that it will encourage Internet users to e-mail their congressional representative or petition the FCC.

“Google’s done public campaigns for net neutratity and the C-block auction, but they’re taking this to a whole new level,” says Stifel Nicolaus telecom analyst Blair Levin. “From the beginning, this has been a difficult campaign because it requires a lot of technical expertise. Google’s latest move suggests that they need more than technical expertise to win this. They need political support.”

By Michal Lev-Ram

You know the feeling: You just ordered your caramel machiatto (extra foam), sat down at a table and opened up your laptop. You log on, hoping to quickly check your e-mail, when all of a sudden a screen pops up asking for your name and credit card information. That’s when you realize that hopping online won’t be as quick — or as cheap– as you’d hoped.

Say goodbye to all of that. On Monday Starbucks (SBUX) announced it was dropping T-Mobile’s (DT)’ s $6-an-hour Wi-Fi service for AT&T, which will provide coffee- house customers with two free hours of Internet access a day. With about 7,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, that’s a major boon for AT&T (T). Now the question is, how long will hotels, airports and other venues be able to continue charging sky-high fees for a service that many people see as essential as running water and electricity.

“This is something that people want,” says Morningstar analyst John Owens. “I think customers will embrace this move.”

Of course, Starbucks’ hopes free Wi-Fi will convince coffee drinkers to not only opt for Starbucks but also to stick around longer and buy more lattes. To log onto the company’s new Internet service, customers will need to have an active Starbucks card.

“This is what customers have been asking for,” says Starbucks spokeswoman Sonja Gould. She says a typical Starbucks Internet customer uses one hour of Wi-Fi a day. The company will begin rolling out the new service at select locations this spring. By end of 2008, it will be available at all Starbucks’ U.S. stores.

When Starbucks first introduced its fee-based Wi-Fi service in 2002, it seemed like a novel idea. But today, when many consumers have become accustomed to getting their Wi-Fi for free, the model seems outdated. Last October the Seattle-based coffee chain began providing free Wi-Fi access for iPhone users to buy music on iTunes.

Put simply, people don’t want to pay for Wi-Fi — let alone deal with signing up for it. That’s why JetBlue (JBLU) has begun testing a free in-flight Wi-Fi service that gives limited online access to its passengers.

Jupiter Research analyst Julie Ask says the Wi-Fi offered in hotels, restaurants, airplanes and coffee shops like Starbucks never needs to be completely unlimited and free. But most consumers — who just want to check e-mail or get a quick read of the news — do expect some form of free access.

“It’s a tool that builds loyalty for companies,” says Ask.

Many of Starbucks’ competitors already offer limited free Wi-Fi. Minneapolis-based Caribou Coffee gives customers a free hour a day. Those who don’t will probably need to if they want to compete.

By Michael V. Copeland

If you want a hint at where innovation in the gadget world is headed, talk to the chip guys. These nuggets of insanely complex silicon that companies like Intel, AMD (AMD), Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell (MRVL) are creating today will end up in the phones, laptops, televisions and mobile video/music/Internet devices of tomorrow.

We all know that Intel is dead-set on making WiMax — wireless access measured in square miles — a reality. When they start shipping WiMax PC cards in laptops is another matter (Intel (INTC) said it’ll be around the middle of the year), but when they do, your laptop might start acting and looking more like the tidy mobile device it should be. Think about a sub-subnotebook machine, always connected to a broadband signal — it might make video calls via VoIP, stream movies, take photos and send them wirelessly back home or to the office. I want one now, but it doesn’t happen without the chipset (and the network infrastructure to go along with it). That’s a ways in the future for most of us, especially in the United States. But the capability is coming soon, and a raft of new gadgets that take advantage of it will follow.

One of the most interesting chip trends I saw last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was encapsulated in a little device called the Eye-Fi. Here’s a gadget that exists today, but has lots of implications for tomorrow. What the Eye-Fi does is automatically stream photos from your digital camera via your Wi-Fi network to your PC or an online photo service. What the Eye-Fi team has done essentially is wrap a service around a common flash memory card and a low-power Wi-Fi chip from Atheros (ATHR). It’s these lower power Wi-Fi chips that are extremely interesting, when you start thinking about other services they enable.

All the manufacturers in that realm of the chip business are working on prototypes that are as power efficient and powerful as possible. But think about all the things that can happen if you can put Wi-Fi into all sorts of mobile and fixed devices and connect them to either the Internet or a private network. Gadgets get smart and can receive, send and potentially respond to whatever information they are set up to handle.

It could be smarter light switches that turn off and on via an e-mail or text message, or LCD picture frames that stream your e-mail to your bedside and upload a recipe to the kitchen screen every day before dinner. Or maybe some slick mini-display that scrolls updates from your Facebook friends on one side, reads you the news on the other, and does any number of other things that you find important or entertaining.

Who knows? The possibilities are numerous, but it begins with these chips now starting to ship. It also calls into question the future of other wireless standards like Bluetooth and Zigbee. Zigbee, a low-power wireless technology, has never really taken off. Bluetooth has, but combining Bluetooth with Wi-Fi in devices is much more of a headache than engineers would like it to be. Low-power Wi-Fi plays nicely with its full-power brethren and has the potential to sweep both other wireless standards away.

In the Broadcom (BRCM) booth at CES I got a demonstration of a lower power chip now ready to ship that allowed for high-definition video, graphics and audio in such a small package that you can already see all the little video devices/phones it will spawn. One very cool potential application combined that low power HD video chip with a motion control chip that Broadcom builds for the Wii controller and another very popular music device/phone that begins with the letter “i.” Basically, you get a handheld Wii, which, I would bet you’ll be seeing sometime in the near future.