T-Mobile pre-sells 1.5 million G1 phones - Rumor Mill Roundup

Verdict: WRONG

Why it went wrong:With this rumor, which bounced around the blogosphere in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 22 U.S. launch of the T-Mobile G1, faulty math skills on the part of most journalists and bloggers were to blame for the confusion. Besides the arithmetic that wound up being off, the number itself should have been a little too big to believe. On Oct. 6, T-Mobile USA announced that it was tripling the number of phones available for pre-order, but did not specify how many phones it had originally slated for pre-order. On Oct. 10, the news started buzzing around the web that that number stood at 1.5 million. However, as this helpful deconstruction of the rumor shows, what happened was that the original report that started the rumor, on the blog Motley Fool, cited a statistic of about 500,000 G1's that were expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2008, and then multiplied that by three to get the 1.5 million number. As it turned out, HTC, the company that makes the phone, the first running on Google's Android platform, wound up revising the number of G1's it expected to ship by the end of 2008 from the original estimate of 600,000 up to 1 million.      

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