Wednesday is the official launch day for the device, though customers who pre-ordered online have already begun receiving them at home.

T-Mobile representatives told me a few weeks ago they tripled output to meet the initial orders. The latest word from the company is that its G1 site has received five times the site traffic of any other major company product launch.

There's also a special early sale tonight in San Francisco at 6 p.m., a nod to the Bay Area origins of its Google-backed Android operating system.

Elsewhere T-Mobile stores will open early Wednesday, at 8 a.m.

A rep at the downtown Seattle store told me most stores are getting 60 units, except for the Issaquah store (near Costco), which will have a bunch more. They're expecting lines at the stores and to be sold out of their initial batches by 9:30 or so, after which they'll take orders.

About half the pre-orders so far are from people upgrading from a basic handset, "illustrating the leap many consumers are taking to a rich mobile Web experience,'' spokesman David Henderson said.

Feeling crafty? Perhaps you'd like to build your own. Google today open-sourced the Android software, making it available for anyone to download.

Here's T-Mobile's G1 site, my first take on the G1, a roundup of reviews and Monday's piece on 3G network service.

Speaking of the mobile Web experience, my G1 seemed much faster today when I was experimenting with the browser in downtown Seattle where there seemed to be good 3G coverage.

I repeated last Friday's "metrokc bus tracker" search experiment there and again back within eyesight of Google's Fremont office and the page loaded in less than a second; maybe they turned up the juice now that the device is launching?