A black day for Microsoft and Windows Mobile … the Open Mobile Alliance did a great job in launching T-Mobile G1. For 3 years T-Mobile, Google and HTC worked on bringing the first handest of the Open Mobile Alliance to the market.

The features:

• Touchscreen
• Full slide out keyboard
• Multithreading
• Compass-Mode
• Android Market for new applications
• No out-of-the-box desktop-syncing … but the developer community will close that gap soon
• WiFi, 3G (UMTS dual band), GSM (quad band) – with GPRS/EDGE
• 3 Megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• GoogleTalk presence service implemented in the phone book
• SIM-locked to T-Mobile

Available in the US: October 26th 2008 – $179 for the G1 with a T-Mobile voice plan plus a data plan. Data plan with unlimited data and 400 messages for 25$ option or an unlimited data and messaging plan for 35$.

UK: Early November 2008 and rest of Europe in the first quarter of 2009.

This add’s a lot of competition to the mobile handset market where Apple speeded up the innovation circle with the iPhone. So, let’s get ready to rumble!

Source/Video: Pressconference T-Mobile, New York Sep. 22, 2008, Picture: T-Mobile

Today at 10:30 ETC (16:30 MEZ) we’ll be enlightened: At that time the T-Mobile press conference begins in New York. The first Android mobile phone should be announced there. Even here at the Google Developer Day in Munich there is nothing specific new and interesting about the Android roadmap – the only news: wait until 16:30

The Announcement of T-Mobile is one of the first fire tests of the young mobile platform, which received early praise for it’s Open-Source approach. Now, we’ll see whether a revolution is possible in the closed-source-loving mobile industry … because the best mobile platform is worth nothing, if there aren’t any handsets and mobile data rates that make sense!

The development team of popular open-source blog-software Wordpress just released the security update 2.6.2. It is highly recommended to install the update to eliminate some security issues within the Wordpress installation – especially for blogs with open registration.

The update fixes a security issue caused by the weak implementation of the php function mt_rand() in many popular php-distributions. The function is used for seeding the random number generator. It also addresses the security risk of MySQL and SQL column truncation vulnerabilities. Stefan Esser reported both security-issues which are probably relevant to a lot of other php-based open-source projects. Thanks, Stefan!

Beside the fix of security issues, the Wordpress version 2.6.2 also implements some minor bugfixes. Therefor the upgrade to the newest version of WP is highly recommendet to everybody using Wordpress.