I don't think 1998 is correct, this was my first Android phone and I used it in 2008 (a decade later than OP) which is what the wiki also says:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream#History

First released in September 2008, the Dream was the first commercially released device to use the Linux-based Android operating system

Android itself didn't start development until 5 years later than OP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History

Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White.

I also found this cool category for phones that came out in 1998. They're all Nokias. This was even a year before BlackBerry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phones_introduced_in_1998

1998?! Try 2008.

I feel like this design would work pretty well even for a modern phone. Just flatten the bottom-right menu section and extend the screen over it, and you'd get a regular full-size smartphone with a slide-out keyboard and some handy physical buttons!

It was very satisfying flipping and sliding phones like this. I wonder how it would be to transfer back to a tactile physical keyboard after all this time. I’m not sure if it’s just nostalgia but I almost feel like it would be better

I miss the days of android phones with physical keyboards. They were just better

i was in the root/rom community for a decade & anytime i see anything about classic android i get nostalgic af. while i was a bit too late to own an htc dream, i still boot up my lg optimus v running android 2.2 (well, it was on a 4.4 rom at one point but i flashed it back to stock) every few years. while i don't miss the horrible ui, bugginess, slowness & clunkiness of android before 4.x, at the same time... i also kinda do for whatever reason lol. not enough to actually go back to it, but still. something about that white status bar, square icons & the overall mismashed together ui made of gray headerbars on top of white & black feels pleasant in a way i can't explain.

That keyboard, though. 🤤

My first Android phone was my Motorola Cliq, which I got after my Blakcberry Pearl died. Good times with those phones.

Bring back unnecessary physical keyboards!!!!

Had one for less than a day. I was the designated driver, stopped to get gas after dropping everyone off. Put the phone on the car. Drove home… bye bye G1 😭

I had one back in the day got it in 09 which means I would immediately wind up with buyers remorse as t-mobile in my area was not great at the time and the motorolla droid would soon release and have just enough horsepower to do more.

Overall though the G1 had things about it that I absolutely love and things that made it objectively not great. 2nd gen androids would be a lot more usable.

The good:

The form factor was great. Pocketable, the keyboard was a good size for your hands, and although it looks like cheap gray/black plastic the material was actually fairly soft and nice to the touch. The device was also an absolute tank. I dropped my g1 so many times and like big drops on concrete and rolling down stairs bad. It still works! The keyboard was a joy to type on and I could walk around while not looking at my phone and type away to finish a chat, and the little track ball nubbin was possibly the greatest loss to history. It was so smooth and precise and satisfying to use.

You could get an extended battery and it would last all day. The rom support was also EXCELLENT since this was the first android and although everyone running anything higher than 1.6 was lying to themselves about how usable and fast it was, the fact that it got as many releases after being abandoned was amazing. Android was also so new and green that the roms were exciting and offered quite a bit on top of the vanilla experience. Things like using a swap partition on an sdcard or installing apps directly to a linux formatted partition on your sdcard to deal with the limited space. It was so cool.

The Bad:

While I have nothing but praise for the casing and it’s form factor, the hardware was not up to snuff for android. The resolution of the small screen was too low and it was only single touch. You couldnt even pinch zoom which is why android still has that double tap one finger zoom option. The cpu and ram were NOT up to snuff at all for the hardware and the g1 became so dated so quickly that despite being the original it could NOT handle android 2.0 and beyond. Which means a little over a year into it’s launch the first android device lost official software support.

The OS was also so forward thinking while also lacking some super important features. You had true unfettered access and background usage and there was no way to actually close programs if they didnt have “close” option in app. You needed a third party task killer. Not auto killer mind you but something that let you pull up what was running and close misbehaving programs or ones that just didnt have an close button. Ram was already tight on this device, and cpu limited but unfettered background apps could grind this phone to a hault. The upside to this is that using a third party rom with swap partition gave me better multitasking than any android phone I had since until I got a device with more than 6 gigs of ram. (Even then my g1 could run multiple browsers in different windows without them closing each other) .

The camera was awful. Like genuinely bad and even a slight shadow would cause your camera to be a noisy mess. It also didnt have a front facing camera so no selfies or video chatting.

The battery life was also bad. Easily fixed with a 3rd party replacement but it did turn your phone into a little brick and the back case that came with those batteries was always worse than original.

Oh also headphone jack fans should note this phone required a headphone to miniusb adapter.

Overall since I got a new phone I’ve always said if they would release a true g2 with same form factor and good hardware I would drop money on it in a heartbeat. Maybe make the screen slightly bigger. Other than that the phone was a flawed little thing. It was my first smartphone though and I absolutely loved using it.

Haha I had one of these phones. It's battery was terrible but it was super nifty

I did not have that phone, but my first Android phone was the HTC One V. A nifty little budget device that had some nice metal construction for the price I paid. The chin it had was a bit odd though.

I still have my G1 and my G2! The G2 was one of my favorite phones of all time and, sadly, the last I ever owned with a physical keyboard.

I had this phone. It was great. I really miss tactile keyboard keys.

I remember when I thought "I'd never get a phone without a keyboard"

I waited in line for one of these when they came out. It wasn't a super long line, but I wasn't the only one. I ended up showing a store employee how to access the SIM slot because I had done enough research to know every detail. I also brought mini donuts for the employees which they seemed to like.

I had a Cingular 8125 before switching to an iPhone 3G. That phone was THICK, had WiFi B, and ram windows mobile. But I loved the slide out keyboard.

https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/3455-image/Cingular8100-8125-3.webp

I still have mine! Sadly it’s bricked and I have no clue how to fix it. I thought the G2 was an improvement on this design in many ways but the G1 was pretty amazing (excluding the lack of headphone jack).

Ah so nostalgic... HTC making phones lol

On a serious note, I still think my HTC Desire Z was the bee's knees... except it didn't tolerate water that much and I live in a very wet and humid place. Feh.

Still, one of the best handhelds I've ever had. Gotta give it that.