Vallywag reports Google shipped specially branded G1s to their employees as an holiday gift - and instead of the traditional cash bonus. Some employees were disappointed as Google’s bonuses sometimes reach as high as $20K, and some of the workers were actually counting on it.

In a letter sent to all employees it is stated that 85% of all employees will get the G1, except in several countries where legal issues could not have been solved. In those countries employees will get $400 cash bonus, the value of the device.

Here is some of the letter. You can read all of it on this VallyWag post.
Read more »

Two really nice interviews with seniors in the Mobile Games industry:

Smartphone.biz-news published an interview with Xavier Carrillo, CEO and founder of Digital Legends Entertaiment (DLE). Xavier talked with David Montgomery about how the iPhone changed the mobile games space, and about their game Kroll.

Interestingly, smartphones have become such attractive platforms for gaming almost as a by-product of the drive to create multi-media handsets.

The demand for more megapixels on cameras led to more RAM, the popularity of mobiles as music players required more storage capacity and the addition of TV functionality led to improved hardware accelerators.

For gamers, Carrillo said it means someone playing a game on a smartphone on the train to work can now expect a quality similar to that on their PS3 at home.

Another interesting interview is the one MocoNews’ Tricia Duryee held with Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft’s SVP of Worldwide Publishing.

During Glu’s Q3 conference call, the company mentioned that the adoption of smartphones is actually negatively impacting mobile game sales because they aren’t typically tied to a carrier’s deck, where games are sold. Are you seeing that, too?: “Yes, it depends on the carriers. With both AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile, you can download Blackberry games, but they [the carriers] were taken by surprise by the strong take-off of the smartphone content business—first the smartphone sales and then the content business. They are all taking care of that now, and will all be live by the end of the year. There are lost opportunities now, but all of this will be taken care of by the end of the year.”

Well, since it’s still 16 days away until the official US launch of the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream running Google’s Android), T-Mobile decided to throw the fans a bone and published a website covering the G1 and also provides an emulator where you can try the device.

The emulator itself is a bit frustrating. Most of the menu applications are not operatable and has a red textbox in the middle of the screen saying “This screen is not fully functional”. So all you’re left to do is stare at the screen as if it was an image.

The emulator does give the sence of the wider-than-screen desktop as you can drag it right and left and see how you can feel it with icons and widgets, and the notifications screen which needs to be dragged from the top to see latest notifications. Read more »

A video circulating on YouTube claims to show the Android working on HTC Dream (Codename G1, as Google 1). The video points to TmoNews.com, where Shawn wrote a post stating that the first Google phone is going to appear on schedule (contrary to rumors of it being delayed) and available on T-Mobile on Sept. 17, for a presale period of one week.

According to the post the G1 suppose to cost $399 for the public and $150 for T-Mobile customers, though T-Mobile is expected to require a more expensive data-plan than the ones they currently offer. The one-week presale period is for existing T-Mobile customers only starting Sept. 17 and 3G would be the feature in focus. Public launch is scheduled for October, according to the site.

Another interesting bit Shawn reports is that users might be required to own a Gmail account in order to use the device.

We bring you the video embedded here:

You could find more interesting videos on MobileGD YouTube Channel. Feel free to send us a message on youtube if you have an interesting video – we might contact you and feature it here.