If you buy the G1 at a T-Mobile store or online, it will cost you $180. But if you buy the same phone, with the same plan, at Wal-Mart it will now cost you $150, a savings of $30. According to Dow Jones Newswires:

Wal-Mart will carry the Google Inc. G1 phone, sold through Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA, in 550 Wal-Mart stores at the reduced price of $148.88 for new customers, or existing customers eligible for an upgrade, who sign up for a two-year agreement, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien said.

Price, in large part, drives consumer purchase behavior, especially in a bad economy. However, it's not clear how many G1 prospects shop at Wal-Mart.

In a related bit of news, a recent Google-commissioned study found that handsets are driving more consumer decisions about whether to renew or defect from their existing operators. As summarized in AdAge:

What matters to wireless shoppers:

• Handset only: 24%
• Handset + carrier (read plan price and/or network quality): 28%
• Carrier only: 48%

The survey also looked at the online and offline site and resources that consumers use in making purchase decisions.

Given the rise of the mobile Internet and the emergence independent applications stores from Apple, Google/Android and Blackberry, carriers risk being marginalized. But that has been a threat they could see coming for years.

Operators will continue to see growth in data revenues over time, but they will be less and less central to the mobile user experience, unless they take some action in the near term. Short of creating their own competitive content, services and/or apps stores, it's not clear what they can do on the consumer side to avoid the "dumb pipe scenario" -- although data-plan pricing and service (network and customer) come to mind.

There are in fact a number of things they can do "on the back end" to participate in some of the mobile ad revenues to come. But that's a discussion for another time. 

The balance of power began to shift away from the carriers with the advent of the iPhone (and newer FCC "openness" rules) and that consumer trend continues with Android.