I know you can get a developer phone but the new G2 looks pretty nice as well as the Samsung around the corner. I would assume however that it would be a better idea to be using a consumer phone if they are the target market for apps you wish to produce, especially for testing purposes.
Has anyone else had experience from this choice and provide any further illumination to the issue?
If you're just building consumer apps it doesn't matter. They all have debugging capabilities. The developer phone is mostly just beneficial if you're hacking on the OS since it isn't locked down by the carriers.
I've been using a G1 for months and had no problems. If you want the better camera and don't mind the lack of a keyboard then the Magic/Sapphire/myTouch/G2/whatever-they're-calling-it-now will be fine, they're otherwise identical.
G1. It is the only phone with a hard keyboard. When the keyboard is opened up you will get several events/activity relaunches that will not happen on the touch screen only phones. If you are doing apps it really doesn't matter if you get the dev version or retail one.
Going forward, you are probably going to need to get several phones as the hardware diverges. For example the samsung has a 5way instead of a trackball. Depending on how you are using the trackball, that could be a significant difference.
But as far as looks, get the samsung. It is by far the best looking android phone that I have seen so far.
You need to get the ADP2 device. Google gave some out at Google IO 2009 and wil give more out a dev conference or you can await to order it when it shows up on the Adp order pages.
Performance wise its a different hardware device than G1/Adp1.
It does matter you need an ADP device to do full debugging as you need full root access to do full debugging. Do not be fooled by the answers before me , ADP device required! The Device Debug bridge that integrate with IDEs requires root device access.