Will There Be Video on the Google Phone?

I’m in New York, where this morning I was covering the crammed T-Mobile G1 launch event for GigaOM. The G1 is the first phone that will have Google’s open Android operating system. On the floor, I had a chance to ask Desmond Smith, a senior product engineer at T-Mobile, about the phone’s video capabilities. He said that video capture won’t be available at launch, but that it’s something the team is working hard to add as soon as possible, hopefully early next year. There is no hardware limitation that precludes it, he added.

The iPhone, by contrast, doesn’t offer video uploads. Its camera has been capable of taking video all along , but the only way to get it working is to unlock your phone and install a third-party video capture and encoding app. Above is a Flixwagon live video upload (from an N95) of Smith demoing the phone and its removable memory card, battery and SIM card.