T-Mobile is a user friendly device

In advance of the new Google phone, T-Mobile USA has changed the wording of the user agreement for its wireless data network and no longer claims the right to slow surfing to a crawl once a subscriber goes over a monthly usage limit.

The amendment was made late Wednesday, a day after T-Mobile revealed the G1, the first smart phone that will use the new network. The G1 is also the first phone to use Google Inc.'s mobile software platform.

Bloggers had spotted a 1-gigabyte monthly download limit in T-Mobile's user agreement and were concerned that it would apply to the G1. The phone comes with a Web browser, access to Google e-mail and songs from Amazon.com Inc., which could make a user quickly exceed a gigabyte of traffic.

In a statement, T-Mobile said that since the G1 doesn't go on sale until Oct. 22, the details of the plan were not final, but it had removed the limit anyway. It still reserves the right to slow down traffic for a "a small fraction of our customers who have excessive or disproportionate usage that interferes with our network performance."