No T-Mobile G1 for Neil Gaiman Because ‘It Won’t Do the Google Here’

The G1 sounds like a neat phone. If you haven’t played with it, you might want to, like Neil Gaman did. So he rolled to the nearest T-Mobile store to do so. But alas, he lives in a 3G desert, where T-Mobile isn’t stocking them. The strategy is sound: Using the G1 over straight-up EDGE blows Googley goats. But it’s apparently worse than we thought.

When Gaiman asked the lad behind the counter if he could play with a G1, the boy solemnly told Gaiman why that just wasn’t possible: “The G1 won’t work. It won’t do the Google here. So we aren’t allowed to sell it.” Google is negated so completely in these black holes of civilization, in fact, that these poor corner jockeys aren’t even allowed to know how much it costs, much less the technical specs of the machinations that drive this wunderfone. Moral of the story—I don’t really need to go on, do I? [Neil Gaiman]