T-Mobile officially announced its G2 smartphone Thursday, the first phone designed for its high-speed HSPA+ network and possibly the Googliest phone ever.

T-Mobile officially announced its G2 smartphone Thursday, the first phone designed for its high-speed HSPA+ network and possibly the Googliest phone ever.

Running the latest version of Google's Android, 2.2 "Froyo," the G2 is full of Google services, T-Mobile said. The sliding, QWERTY-keyboarded phone comes with Google Voice built-in, including the ability to transfer your current mobile number to the Google Voice system. Google's new , , and apparently every other Google thing that Google could come up with are also pre-loaded.

From a hardware perspective, the G2 is a gray phone whose 3.7-inch, 800-by-480 touch screen slide-flips back on an unusual hinge to reveal a four-row QWERTY keyboard. The unusual keyboard lacks a dedicated number row, but has a large space bar and a dedicated "www/com" key for typing in Web addresses. The phone runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon MSM7230 processor, which seems to trade some speed for long battery life; it's an 800-MHz processor rather than the 1-GHz we've seen in other Snapdragon devices.

Other specs include a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and 720p HD video recording, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, 4 G-bytes of internal storage and a pre-installed 8GB memory card. There's a 3.5-mm headset jack, Swype's virtual keyboard, and support for Adobe Flash 10.1 in the Web browser.

As the first HSPA+ phone, the G2 can download at speeds of up to 14.4 megabits per sec on T-Mobile's network. That's double the speed of T-Mobile's and AT&T's fastest previous phones, which operated at 7.2 Mbps - but it still doesn't reach the maximum speed of T-Mobile's network, which runs at theoretical speeds of up to 21 Mbps.

In real-life circumstances, we've gotten speeds more like 5 Mbps with USB modems on T-Mobile's HSPA+ system. That's the fastest 3G system where it's available, and it often matches Sprint's 4G WiMAX on speed. T-Mobile says the new network reaches 100 million people in 55 cities, and it plans to cover 200 million people this year.

The G2 will be the most powerful QWERTY-keyboarded smartphone in T-Mobile's lineup when it launches. In the carrier's overall lineup, it will compete with the , which only has HSPA 7.2 Internet speeds but runs a faster 1-GHz processor. We're looking forward to comparing the two Android smartphones.

T-Mobile didn't announce a price for the G2; it said it will be available "later this month," with the first pre-orders going to g2.tmobile.com.