While I like the fact that T-Mobile let us existing customers pre-order the T-Mobile G1 the day it was announced last month, the benefit of pre-ordering seems to have lost that huge advantage I was thinking we were gaining. If you were in the first batch of pre-orders then you should be getting your device today or Wednesday, with some reports that people started receiving them yesterday. The latest news from T-Mobile is that you will be able to pick up a G1, supplies are limited, at the San Francisco store at 3rd and Market starting at 6pm Pacific Time tonight, Tuesday, 21 October. Then on the 22nd of October T-Mobile will supposedly have stock of the G1 at retail stores within the 3G coverage zones. If you were thinking about ordering online today you may just want to head down to the store to pick up the device in person instead of waiting until some time in early November.

Read more on http://blogs.zdnet.com/cell-phones/?p=188

This semester 25 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will gather in a classroom with one particular purpose: playing with cell phones.

The students are taking a class geared around Android — the first fully open mobile operating system developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG). The class will cover the ins and outs of the Android platform and build applications to run on the operating system.

The class, which at least 50 students tried to enroll in, is being offered to students in the computer science major at MIT and is designed to give them an early edge in what could soon become a dominant platform among cell phone operating systems. As smart phones and cell phones with Web functions have grown in popularity, there is growing interest among computer science pupils to learn how to create and launch applications and software for mobile operating systems, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform coordinator for MIT.

“It’s definitely something that captures students’ interest,” he said. “Given the fact that they actually have the devices, they want to do something with it.”

[via Bizjournals]