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At last consumers looking for a cool mobile web experience are gaining more choices beyond the iPhone. The Google Android platform may be a work in progress, but the first handset to use it, the T-Mobile/HTC G1, is attracting high levels of interest, with queues forming outside UK stores at the launch last week. And future models, such as those promised by Motorola, promise to be optimized for key web applications like social networking.

This will be an important aspect of handset design in 2009 - just as smartphones have been competing on hardware features that support key apps like photography or video viewing, now they will be differentiated by software that supports a user's preferred mobile uses. An interesting device is on the horizon from 3, the most advanced of the European cellcos in understanding the integrated handset/web service experience. On the heels of phones designed around Skype, it is now promising a device centered on the YouTube video service (despite carriers' worries about the strain on networks that it creates).

3 will launch the Sony Ericsson product first in Italy. The handset will be co-branded between SE's Walkman and YouTube, with 3 a subsidiary logo - an increasingly common 3 tactic, and also echoing the software-dominated branding of the first Android phones. The product will allow users to upload video directly to the online site in three clicks - having shot the video, the user clicks 'send', 'YouTube', then 'upload'. They also get a text message with a direct link back to the clip, and there is a dedicated soft button on the handset with the YouTube logo that links directly to the site.

3 Italia claims its research indicates that usage of a mobile service increases by about one-third when direct access is supported. The operator will bring the YouTube product to the UK and other territories early next year, and is also planning a Facebook handset.

On the Android front, more than 30,000 people in the UK pre-registered with T-Mobile to purchase the G1 handset, and the cellco said its stores had seen far higher interest in the device than expected, with the phone likely to sell out within a few days, as in the US. Although hardly comparable to iPhone launches, the G1 is attracting strong interest, though there are some qualms about pricing and contract terms in the UK. In a survey of mobile web users by online site vnunet.com, 19% said they were considering signing up immediately for the G1, and 18% said they would like to adopt the G1 at the end of their current contract.

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