Until this summer, U.S. consumers interested in owning an Android-powered cellphone were limited to T-Mobile’s G1. But the Google (GOOG) operating system is appearing in a slew of new handsets by HTC, Samsung, LG and Motorola (MOT).

The specs for Samsung’s newest Android phone, the I5700 Galaxy Lite, leaked in an online video that made its way around the Web Tuesday. The lower-cost, touch-screen device will have 1 GB of memory and a 3.2-megapixel camera. Its predecessor, the Galaxy I5700, also running Android, has 8 GB of memory and a five-megapixel camera. It launched in Europe over the summer.

Also Tuesday, HTC introduced its fourth Android mobile phone, the Tattoo, which will be available in Europe in October.

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The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

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Groans are issuing from the Googleplex over this year’s holiday bonus. In the past, the search engine paid cash–as much as $20,000 or $30,000 per Googler, we hear. This year? A cellphone.

Oh, but not just any cellphone: A version of the G1 currently sold for $179.99 by T-Mobile, which runs Google’s Android operating system. Android is the fruit of Google founders’ Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s strange obsession with the wireless market, launched in a fit of jealousy over the growing number of phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. (Imagine that: Google, jealous of Microsoft for a change.)

In an email, Google management blames the economic crisis and suggests that this is a great opportunity to “dogfood” the phones–an unappetizing tech-industry euphemism for testing products in-house. This is what has become of the company that was once deemed the best place in the world to work: Canceled bonuses and unpaid labor.

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I opened the Google (GOOG) window and found myself looking at an advert for a G1 phone. A couple of clicks later I was on the T-Mobile Web site, checking prices and thinking, “Well, I do need a new phone…”

But randomly buying a phone I haven’t even held seemed like, well, something that I couldn’t imagine myself doing. I wanted to hold it. I wanted to know the specs and such, so I put dog in the back of the car and drove to the local T-Mobile shop.

I knew I was in the right place because there were huge posters everywhere, some bigger than I was, all advertising the new T-Mobile G1.

“Hello,” I said, like a man entering a cheeseshop. “I’d like to play with a G1, please.”

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So T-Mobile’s G1 has been unveiled. It looks neat–and it looks like the most serious rival to the iPhone yet, though the BlackBerry Bold could be a contender once AT&T starts selling the darn thing. What the G1 doesn’t seem to be is transcendent–a phone that’s as impressive as the iPhone, but in different ways. And the world could use such a phone

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T-Mobile raised some eyebrows Tuesday when it disclosed that buyers of its highly touted new Internet phone, the HTC G1 that uses Google’s Android software, would face restrictions if they exceeded 1 gigabyte of cellular data a month. That’s no problem for people who simply check their email. But heavy users of photos and online video–just the sort of thing that the super fancy G1 is meant for–might find that limit a problem.

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To describe the segmentation of the mobile phone marketplace, analysts and industry professionals use a common lexicon to group similar devices by their relative features and capabilities. The majority of mobile phones that have graced retail shelves in recent years fall into two distinct categories: featurephones and smartphones. Lately, however, a new category has begun to emerge, that of the superphone.

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