SiliconBeat

T-Mobile myTouch 3G

Google and T-Mobile this morning showed off the myTouch 3G, the second phone in the United States to run on the search giant’s Android operating system.

The companies debuted the phone at a small press event in San Francisco. The event started with a panel discussion that focused on the new phone, Android and the evolving role of carriers in an era of increasingly open phone platforms.

I got some hands-on time with the new phone and got a fairly favorable impression of it. The big difference between the myTouch and the G1, the first T-Mobile Android phone, is that the myTouch lacks a keyboard. Thanks to that, it’s slimmer, sleeker and seemingly lighter than the G1.

The G1 felt to me like a compromise when I tested it out last year right after it launched. Although it has a touch-sensitive screen, you couldn’t use an on-screen keyboard, even when you might want to. Instead, if you wanted to type something, you had to slide out the physical keypad.

The myTouch, by contrast, is essentially touch-screen phone. So, you use an onscreen, virtual keyboard whenever you want to enter text. And most of the buttons you might  want to use are virtual ones on the screen. People who rely on physical keypads won’t like this, of course. But as someone who uses an iPhone all the time, I was happy to see a greater dedication and use of a touch screen by an Android phone.

One of the few physical buttons the myTouch does have is a search button. Click on and it pulls up a Google search box that you can use to search the Web. This is useful, but not as much as you might like. The search feature doesn’t search on the device, so you can’t use it to find a particular application or a contact in your address book or a particular e-mail.

That’s unfortunate, because universal search is starting to become a standard and essential feature on smartphones. The latest version of the iPhone operating system includes a universal search as does Palm’s WebOS that runs on its new Pre. With consumers loading increasing numbers of applications on their smartphones, the universal search feature is becoming a fast and easy way to find and launch a particular program without having to scroll through several screens worth of icons.

In my brief time with the myTouch, it seemed fairly fast both at loading Web pages and launching applications. Like the Palm Pre — but unlike the iPhone — you can run multiple third party applications on the MyTouch (and other Android phones). But the ability to switch between applications or close particular programs continues to be much clunkier than in Palm’s WebOS.

I’m hoping to get a MyTouch phone close to the actual launch of the device next month. Assuming I do, I’ll give a full review then.