The G1, the first phone to run Google's Android software, goes on sale Oct. 22 from T-Mobile. If users can get past the hardware shortcomings, the software on the G1 and its openness might just convince some people to choose it over the iPhone.

It's hard to critique the G1 without comparing it to the iPhone, the benchmark against which any new touch-screen phone gets compared. The G1 hardware is just ho-hum, where the iPhone is really stellar. Viewing the same video on both phones starkly shows the difference in screen quality. The iPhone's is sharp, smooth and bigger. The G1's is blurry, a bit pixelated and smaller.

While I prefer a real keyboard like the G1's over a touch-screen keyboard like the iPhone, the G1 has issues there too. To get your right thumb onto the keyboard, you have to awkwardly reach it over a hump on the end of the phone that has the home and power buttons on it.

The touch screen works decently, although sometimes I had to hit a link on a Web page over and over to get it to open. The G1 introduces a new concept: the long press. Holding your finger on the home screen, for example, opens a menu of applications, shortcuts, widgets and wallpapers that can be added to the home screen.

Another hardware shortcoming in the G1 is the camera -- it stinks. Even in broad daylight the photos I took were always too dark. Forget about taking a picture in your living room at night with just your normal lights on. Almost nothing at all shows up. If there's a setting that can correct that, I couldn't find it. T-Mobile has played up the fact that the phone has a 3-megapixel camera, compared to the iPhone's 2 megapixels, but if the light sensitivity is so poor, it doesn't make any difference.

Still, for the most part the G1 hardware is no worse than most smartphones out there, and the software stands out enough that some people might prefer it over any of the competition.

When I first started playing around with the phone, I got the sense that it's infinitely customizable. The home screen stretches beyond the boundaries of the phone's display -- swiping the screen horizontally with your finger reveals a screen to the left or right of the central screen. With the long press, I added a couple of photograph widgets on one of the pages, arranging them where I liked.