> Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends.
Not dead ends, just a bit too expensive for the cut-throat competitive market. I loved the keyboard and trackball and I still miss them in modern phones.
It was obvious at the time. G1 used a hw keyboard because Android was under incredible pressure to ship to meet the iPhone head on, but it had been originally designed for a Blackberry form factor. When the decision was made to switch to a full screen smartphone form factor there wasn't enough resourcing or time to develop a soft keyboard (which is a somewhat complex project), so they went with HW. It was just a scheduling and prioritisation issue.
Aren't those The Thing though? I was in the peripheral Nokia/Symbian world at the time, had been working on smartphones for a few years, and... the G1 was amazing. Straightforward SDK vs. the insane embedded toolchains prevalent at the time (remember: there was no iOS SDK at all yet!), hardware specs similar to the iPhone... I mean, this thing was a breath of fresh air.
Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends. But none of that seems to have been obvious at the time.
Now, it's true that in terms of market share the G1 itself didn't do very much: it wasn't until Samsung launched all the Galaxy S variants ~2 years later running Eclair that Android took off as a platform. But I don't see much of that as an indictment of the G1.