F*CK the TP2, by the way. It’s all about the iPhone, baby!

That said, the G1 hasn’t even been out for a year yet (I know, I was late to the party but had to wait for upgrade pricing). It’s still being sold to this day (albiet at clearance pricing). With all that said, I somewhat expect continued support and upgrades for a while longer … especially through Donut since that pretty much puts it at the 1 year release date.

No, I don’t expect them to keep this up forever, but when you make a purchase, you have a reasonable expectation of the life of the product. With one year contracts pretty much being required to make first-generation G1’s worth the risk, the life cycle of the G1 should be, at least, a minimum of one year.

I also offer a comparable example:

For the past couple of months, in anticipation of Windows 7, computer makes have been selling the wares with free upgrades to Windows 7 when it is released.

The opearting system in that case (Windows 7) has been in development for months and months (if not years), so there was at least basic knowledge of what equipment would be required to run Win7 and computer makes planned accordingly so that computer purchases didn’t become obsolete within a couple of months of purchase.

Likewise, HTC/Google/T-Mobile knew a long time ago that they were pushing the limits of the G1 the day it was released. The cries for lack of storage and A2SD began immediately. Thanks to XDA developers, we at least got that. I pity the folks that remain with stock firmware and can’t even install more than a few of the newer and larger apps without having to do the app shuffle of delete, install, delete, re-install, delete again of apps on an as-need basis.

Google is not to blame for this fiasco. They are providing an open source OS. T-Mobile and HTC are the one’s that share the blame. T-Mobile for bloating up the software and locking it down … HTC for their continued lack of foresight in almost always cutting corners on every phone they produce.

Yes, we were early adopters of this new phone and new OS and most of us knew what we were getting into. That still doesn’t relieve our carrier from making efforts to secure us all a decent and working phone for a reasonable amount of time. Considering the battery issues, the headphone issues, and now this tidbit of potential bad news, they should definitely be in the boardroom first thing in the morning trying to decide what they can do to appease the million or so G1 users they currently have. The last thing a fledging operating system (’iPhone killer’) needs is a strong backlash from the existing userbase crying foul all over the internet. Google needs to jump into the frey as well to protect their OS from getting a bad name.

It’s not unreasonable to expect the life-cycle of the G1 to be at least 12-18 months. All of the planners involved (HTC, Google, G1, Qualcomm, etc) knew well in advance the Android roadmap. They should have planned accordingly. Since they didn’t, it’s not too much to ask for a steep discount on a second generation Android phone/device.

And it would also be a good idea for T-Mo to yank all existing G1 phones off the shelves right now. Someone buying one a G1 this late in the game and finding out in just a couple of months that their phone can’t install the new apps coming for 2.0 (or whatever) will certainly have the right to be pissed.

The companies involved share part of the blame, us early-adopters share part too. There needs to be a compromise … but we don’t need to be abandoned.

Were not seeing any G1v2 anytime soon, we havent even began to see spy shots yet. Time will tell, but dont look forward to it right now.

That’s why you have a 1 year contract option if those things bother you.

Hell what about the people paying 350 bucks for a new phone when you only paid 179.99 or less?