T-Mobile G1 review
Muthu Ramadoss
by Joshua Topolsky,
The hardware
Industrial design
The first thing that strikes you about the G1 design is its... well,
surprising lack of "design." In a world filled with shiny silver / black
sticks, and consumed by an unhealthy competition to be the absolute
thinnest, the G1 stands out with its decidedly trend-bucking, quirky
styling. That's not to say there's nothing to love here -- quite the
opposite. The device bares a kind of charming, retro-future look; like a
gadget in a 1970's sci-fi movie set in the year 2038. The smooth, round
edges make the phone seem eminently approachable, and HTC (and design
partner Google) forgo single-button simplicity for functionality,
dotting the phone with all manner of hardware controls. One thing that's
clear is that the phone isn't trying to break any dieting records -- but
while the G1 isn't super-thin, the thickness is by no means a deal
breaker. At 0.62 inches it hardly measures up to standards set by
similar devices like the iPhone 3G (0.48 inches) or not-so-similar (yet
venerable) RAZR V3 at 0.55 inches closed, but it won't have any trouble
sliding into your pocket. Getting it to slide into your heart, however,
is strictly going to be a matter of taste; this form factor definitely
inspires strong feelings.
Gallery: T-Mobile G1 review, part 1: hardware
In your hand, the soft-touch matte finish feels surprisingly warm, and
it fits in your palm with a reasonable heft. While it may not be the
lightest phone around (5.57 ounces), it's certainly not a brick. The
display is a flush, capacitive touchscreen LCD which runs nearly to
either edge of the device (we'll have more on that in a bit). Down along
the bottom of the phone -- the "chin" as it's being affectionately
referred to -- you'll find the trackball and five hard buttons; end /
power, back, home, send, and a long "menu" button at the top. The
placement of the far right and far left buttons seem awkward at first,
forcing you to bend your thumb in an uncomfortable position, though once
you get in the habit of changing up your hand position slightly, it's
not too bad. The trackball -- which is nearly identical to those found
on BlackBerry devices -- was a bit of a surprise to us. With a
touchscreen and a full keyboard, we didn't think we'd be going to the
ball very often, but it's actually a great help moving around pages with
a lot of links, or while you're editing text. You can use the rubbery
nub for navigation, and it's also clickable for making selections.
Flipping out the screen -- which slides along an odd, curved hinge --
reveals the keyboard. The mechanism the hinge is built on is fairly
robust, allowing you to whip the screen out and up when you nudge it
with your thumb. At first we felt like we were going to snap the thing
off, but it's clear that HTC intended this to be used quite roughly.
Overall the effect is positive, though when not in use the screen has a
little squeaky give, a looseness, that we found annoying -- it's
particularly noticeable when the phone vibrates and you get a little
rattle.
On the keyboard side, the physical layout here is generous to say the
least. Clearly a lot of thought went into making this QWERTY usable, and
usable it is. While the keys aren't especially raised against the
backing (in fact, they're nearly flush), they are fairly responsive and
widely spaced, making two-handed typing a breeze. The placement of the
"chin" does get in the way of speed typing at first, but once we figured
out how to avoid over-extending our right hand to get to certain keys,
it became less of a problem. Alternate key characters are distributed in
a reasonably sensible fashion, and you're provided with another "menu"
key on the left side, though we rarely found occasion to use it. We had
a little bit of re-learning to do going back to physical input after
using the iPhone, but once you get the hang of it, this keyboard makes
dealing with lots of email or IM sessions a breeze. Our biggest gripe on
input? The keyboard is the only way to interact with text on the phone.
If you need to send a quick SMS, you have to get the keyboard out. This
can be an incredible pain sometimes, and we're hoping that some
enterprising coder comes along and gives Android (and the G1) an
alternate virtual keyboard -- it would be a tremendously helpful
alternative.
On the left side of the phone is a volume toggle -- pretty standard fare
-- and on the lower right you've got a camera button. The ability to
flip right into camera mode is a nice touch, though certainly not
uncommon in phones of this type. Around back you'll find the lens and
speaker phone elegantly and angularly placed near the top of the device.
A small nub is located next to the camera, ostensibly to keep fingers
out of your shots, and it actually worked for us.
Along the bottom of the phone is HTC's totally meaningless ExtUSB port,
which actually can accept micro USB plugs. Why we're forced into this
odd connector type and denied a 3.5mm headphone jack is beyond us. We
were told at the phone's launch that there would be an adapter included
with devices (at some point) to allow regular headphone use, but
honestly, who wants another adapter to worry about? Something tells us
that if you're buying a phone that's supposed to "do everything," having
to fiddle with some janky piece of plastic just to connect your earbuds
is going to get real old, real fast. Of course, a set of buds is
included with the device, and they sound about how you'd expect -- if
you care about audio at all, you'll want to trade up... and you'll be
annoyed with the jack. This is definitely a mark against the phone, and
a perplexing choice for all companies involved. If this was a ploy to
sell accessories, it's likely going to backfire.
When you slide up the keyboard you get access to a little door for your
microSD card, and the entire back cover comes off to give you battery
and SIM access. Nothing notable about any of that (though the microSD
slot is incredibly hard to spot). Though it ships with a 1GB card, we
tested the device with microSDHC cards to 16GB, and we're happy to
report that they work wonderfully. If current price points we're hearing
are right, that means you can pick up a G1 under contract plus a 16GB
card for a few bucks less than the 16GB iPhone 3G.
Display
As we said above, the display is a capacitive LCD touchscreen. At 320 x
480, it's the same resolution as the iPhone, though the pixel density is
slightly tighter here due to the smaller size (3.2 inches). Overall we
found the screen to be outstanding. Colors are bright and vibrant and
both text and graphics display crisply, helped immensely by rich, deep
blacks. While at full brightness it's still not as stark as its nearest
competitor, that actually turns out to be a plus -- this strikes just
the right balance and is very easy on the eyes, even in low light. The
choice of capacitive touch is a godsend. We were worried HTC would punk
out and throw another resistive screen our way (hello Diamond and
non-capacitive-compatible Windows Mobile!), but they pulled out the
stops and it pays off big time. Finger-based navigation is easy, and the
screen leaps in response to even light touches. There may be a few
instances where it's actually too responsive -- say, browsing dense,
link-filled sites -- but overall it's a welcome change from the mushy,
unreliable resistive displays we see everywhere else. Android isn't
utilizing multi-touch, which is a kind of a downer, though it does put
extremely useful long-presses into play -- something you'll feel at home
with if you're a Windows Mobile user.
Outdoors, the display performed as well as can be expected in direct
sunlight, though it's not quite as clear as some other capacitive
touchscreen devices that we needn't mention.
Sound quality / reception
Overall, we felt somewhat ho-hum about the sound quality of the G1.
There's nothing particularly bad about it, but it's also not
breathtakingly good. The earpiece didn't give us any real problems,
though sound might have been a bit too hot in the mid-range.
Speakerphone performance was adequate, with enough volume to leave the
phone on a desk and have a conversation, though compared to a
BlackBerry, it's still not loud or clear enough to our ears. None of the
callers we spoke with complained of problems from our end.
Unfortunately, reception was another story. In both New York and San
Francisco, we found cell signal to be spotty at best, and 3G was in and
out like crazy. Admittedly, other testers in both SF and Chicago claimed
to get tremendous reception and 3G service, so we won't rule out the
possibility that it was our particular location, device, or just bad
karma. Still, we experienced no shortage of dropped calls, echoing /
delayed audio, and full-on signal loss. Data was even more maddening --
we had trouble getting a 3G signal, and when we did it was usually quite
weak. It wasn't that the drops occurred the majority of the time, it's
just that they came frequently enough to be irksome in the extreme.
On the other hand, when we latched onto a decent 3G signal, data and
voice performance were excellent. Downloading and sending emails was a
snap, and web pages seemed to load very quickly. That said, when put
side-by-side with the iPhone in a 3G speed test, the G1 delivered poor
-- almost shockingly poor -- results. You can see what that looks like
in the video below.
Of course, whether this is due to T-Mobile's 3G network, which is still
in its infancy, or to some problem with the phone or its software is
still an unanswered question. Generally speaking, however, we found the
3G download speeds adequate for most tasks.
When it came to the GPS, it's another story altogether. We had a
terrible time trying to find satellites, both indoors and out. Once they
came online, service was spotty, and more than once we lost data, GPS,
or both! If you're looking to take this out on the road, be wary -- our
experience is that neither T-Mobile's network, nor the GPS
implementation here is ready for primetime. We hope they'll tweak this
in future iterations of the software (if they can). We suggest fixing it
soon.
Camera
The built-in camera can take shots up to (and currently only) 3.2
megapixels. Not a stunning resolution, but certainly not bad. As we said
before, having that camera button is a nice touch, though starting up
the app seems to take a while to get into (as in, we weren't sure we'd
pressed the button... more than once). Once there, you're greeted with a
fairly low refresh rate, and almost no options for tweaking. Literally,
the only choice you're given is whether or not to include location data
in photos, and to disable the "save" prompt when you're done shooting.
As far as the hardware is concerned, the camera itself has some great
and not-so-great features. On the plus side, the lens actually focuses
and can snap fairly close shots, allowing for near-macro pictures
depending on conditions. It's a great touch that we found lots of use
for. On the other hand, due to that slow refresh and really, really
mushy quality of the camera button (as well as awkward placement along
the edges of the keyboard and body), it's hard to know what you're going
to get. We ended up with plenty of blurry and totally unusable pictures.
Additionally, performance in low light was abysmal, rendering grainy
shots that were practically useless. In good light performance was
greatly improved, but in comparison to other phones we had around, the
results were fairly disappointing overall. If you're looking for some
kind of digicam stand-in, forget about the G1... taking pictures is
definitely not the phone's strong suit.
Battery life
We haven't yet run an all-out, scorched-earth standby torture test, but
we can tell you that we got about 11 hours and 21 minutes of life
running the media player on shuffle while connected to a 3G network with
WiFi turned off. No calls were made or received during that time. In
other words, this puppy (the phone, not the one pictured above) is going
to give you a little more than a third of the iPhone 3G's numbers -- but
that's obviously subject to all sorts of things, like the distance to
your cell, temperature, device usage, and karma. And don't forget that
the G1 is getting pushed data from the cloud on an ongoing basis, so
that's going to take a toll on your juice.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/16/t-mobile-g1-review-part-1-hardware/
The software
Setup
Accurate or not, the phrase "it just works" has been closely tied to the
Apple camp for eons -- and obviously, the iPhone tries to ooze that
mantra from its every pore. Without ever having made a phone, though,
Google already had a leg up in delivering on this promise to handsets by
owning a service platform that virtually everyone uses in one capacity
or another. Sure, plenty of people use MobileMe, but it really doesn't
hold a candle to the Google juggernaut -- and even if it did, Apple
hadn't counted on making seamlessly integrated, synchronized services
part of its mobile platform from the get-go.
But what does that translate to in terms of usability? It's difficult to
accurately describe how utterly painless it is to set up and use the G1
for the first time: you just enter your Google account's username and
password and you're off to the races. If you don't have an account --
well, first of all, welcome to civilization. Second of all, no worries
-- you can create one in less than five minutes' time right from the
comfort of your phone. If you already actively use Google Calendar,
Contacts, and Gmail, your data just seamlessly appears after a couple
minutes of initial synchronization, quietly and with no fuss. Magic.
Problem is, most people that use Gmail aren't also actively using and
managing Google Contacts. The app regularly gets panned as a tacked-on
afterthought in Gmail, and we'll just say it straight out: it's truly
awful. If you've used it, you know what we're talking about -- it makes
managing contacts a laborious pain, and provides only the bare minimum
of tools to get your info in order. Like it or not, you're joined to it
at the hip the moment you make this platform a part of your life. If
you're not keeping on top of it, it'll automatically add entries for
anyone it decides you're emailing frequently, which means that over time
you end up with this massive, unruly, and essentially useless list of
email addresses. By default, this junk all gets transferred to your
phone, making for an intimidating, frustrating experience the first time
you open your little black book from the G1. It's easy to create a new
group of Android-specific contacts -- and smartly, the phone also allows
you to show only contacts that have phone number associated with them --
but we would've liked to have seen a wizard either on the web or phone
side that makes cleaning up your contact list a breeze.
Despite the shortcomings, Google has still managed to completely
eliminate one of the biggest pain points in the wireless world: changing
phones. Even with ActiveSync, iSync, Intellisync, WhateverSync, the
process of bringing a new phone online has usually been hairy at best,
largely because you're moving across heterogeneous platforms. Sometimes
the sync goes the wrong way and wipes out data on your PC, sometimes
data just flat-out refuses to transfer, and quite often, you've got to
physically connect the device to your computer to make it all happen.
If you're not using a smartphone, the situation's even worse; sometimes
your carrier offers a solution for transferring contacts, sometimes you
can get stuff where you need it to go over Bluetooth or the little chunk
of storage on your SIM, but any way you slice it, it's not pretty. With
Android, Google has the luxury of being able to take the monolithic
approach -- you're always precisely one login and about sixty seconds
away from having your entire world downloaded to you over the aether.
For end users, the benefits of storing data in the cloud are more
tangible than ever. That "cloud" just happens to belong to Google, and
once you're in the ecosystem, it's hard to get out. Google AdWord
revenue, secured.
User Interface
The G1's interface skin -- Android's default for touchscreens and only
released skin thus far -- is thoroughly modern and attractive, but its
high-contrast, almost cartoonish look might be a turn-off for some. In a
sick, twisted way, that dovetails nicely with the fact that Google's
stonewalling the enterprise market for the moment by leaving out support
for VPN, Microsoft Exchange, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server; it's just
a hip-looking, totally approachable UI that doesn't reek one bit of
corporate starch. We'd still like to see a ton more configurability
here, though. Google's own "Spare Parts" app, a free download from the
Market, gets the ball rolling by allowing you to change the system text
size -- something that clearly should've been including as part of
Android's standard build, especially considering accessibility concerns
and the fact that the default size is pretty freakin' huge. For example,
in its shipping configuration the Settings application can only show six
menu items at a time in the portrait orientation, and Gmail shows a
fraction of an email more than that. On a 3.2-inch 480 x 320 display,
that's just not enough for everyone. To add insult to injury, the
current version of Spare Parts is buggy -- if you change screen
orientation, text size reverts to the default.
Android's easy to use, but it's not always consistent. For folks coming
from other platforms (which we guess is everyone, since Android's brand
spanking new), that could be a little frustrating and make the learning
curve steeper than it has to be. Here's an example: to delete a contact,
you long-press their entry. The selection highlight will fade from
orange to white, and after a moment, a contextual pop-up menu will
appear, where you can choose "Delete contact." Okay, that's all well and
good -- but try using the same paradigm in the alarm clock. No dice,
right? Doesn't matter how long you hold your thumb on that alarm, sport,
it's not going to give you a pop-up menu. Here, you inexplicably have to
short-press the alarm, which takes you to another screen; once you're
here, you push the Menu button and choose "Delete alarm." It's not hard,
it's just needlessly different.
Speaking of long presses, we did have some problems with the G1 being
unable to distinguish between a long press and a scroll motion. The
instant the phone detects that your finger has moved, it kills the
notion of the long press in progress until you lift your finger off the
screen and try again. Theoretically that's not a problem, but it's
really easy to accidentally move your thumb just a millimeter too far
while waiting for a pop-up menu to appear, which triggers like a
one-pixel scroll of the list instead.
On the flipside, these same long presses we're complaining about enable
copy/paste between any two text fields in the system, so we've got to
give them their proper due. Granted, we frequently hear "I've never used
copy/paste on my phone in my life," but we think the root of that
attitude stems from the fact that many users are accustomed to phones
that don't support it or aren't powerful enough to make it worthwhile.
Android's at that level, though -- and with the G1 clearly taking the
so-called "Sidekick Pro" market head on, we think these same folks are
going to use it, like it, and refuse to go back to a platform that
doesn't support it. All it takes is a few copies of lengthy snippets
from an email to a note or a calendar for it to earn its keep, as far as
we're concerned.
It might seem like a minor point to make, but you'd be surprised at how
quickly this becomes a huge part of your G1 experience: Android's
notification system is world-class. In fact, it's the best we've ever
seen on any phone or any platform. The first piece of the puzzle is a
totally average-looking status bar that appears at the top of basically
every screen. To the right, you get the standard information every
self-respecting phone is going to provide you: time, battery charge,
signal strength, data network status, WiFi, and silent mode. To the left
side, though, is where things start to get interesting. Over here, any
app can place an icon to indicate that something interesting has
happened -- instant messages, emails, voicemails, schedule reminders,
and so on -- and optionally scroll a brief message (say, a snippet of a
received SMS). Already, you're looking at a system that beats Windows
Mobile and the iPhone, and we haven't even gotten to the good part.
That's just the start, though. The real prize is the pull-down curtain,
actuated with a downward drag of a finger from the top of the screen,
where notifications go to live on a more permanent basis until you
delete them. The great thing about this screen is that each notification
has room to stretch out and display plenty of details: who sent you the
text message, what did it say, who called you, when did they call you,
and so on. And because the curtain is part and parcel of the status bar,
it can be accessed from anywhere in the G1 that you can see the status
bar (which is basically everywhere). It's brilliantly executed, works
really well in practice, and makes Android the only platform that takes
alert organization seriously.
Portrait and landscape modes
Android does a fabulous job of managing the switch between portrait and
landscape modes, which is a good thing considering that you'll be making
that transition a lot. Too much, actually -- as we mentioned in the
hardware write-up, without an on-screen keyboard out of the box, there's
little option but to go from one-handed portrait mode to two-handed
landscape mode each and every time you encounter a text field. We
couldn't find a single screen anywhere on the device that didn't handle
the change in orientation gracefully; icons, buttons, fields, and
graphics all rejiggered themselves into logical places each and every
time. We found ourselves waiting as long as three-quarters of a second
or so on occasion for the transition to occur after we'd opened or
closed the keyboard, which we think falls shy of becoming an annoyance
(though just barely).
Home screen
One of Android's most endearing qualities -- and perhaps the first thing
new users will notice -- is the home screen. It's really attractive, but
that's pretty easy to pull off; more importantly, it's extremely
functional. First off, you can add shortcuts to applications, web
bookmarks, individual contacts, music playlists, and pretty much
anything else an app developer wants to expose. These all look just like
the icons you're used to seeing on your PC, and you can position them
wherever you like.
Down the road, the second part of this one-two punch will be widget
support, and we think this is where the home screen's true value lies.
It reminds us a little of Samsung's TouchWiz concept, but by the nature
of Android's extensibility, it'll be far more useful. Sadly, developers
can't build their own widgets in version 1.0 of the SDK, but Google says
support is on the way. Whether that'll happen tomorrow or a year from
now is anybody's guess.
Put simply, the widgets will turn your home screen into a destination.
After all, it's not just a place to launch apps -- that should be a
very, very small aspect of what the home screen does for you, and that's
a lesson that the iPhone and most dumbphones have yet to learn. You'll
come to the home screen to check the weather, news, sports scores, your
RSS feeds, run a couple web searches, and do pretty much anything else
the legion of Android developers can dream of cramming into a pretty
little space.
That all said, the home screen isn't without its faults. We're not sure
why Android restricts you to exactly three panels' worth of screen real
estate, for example -- it seems totally arbitrary. We suppose you'd need
an insane number of shortcuts and widgets displayed to run into a
problem there, but that's for the user to decide, not Android. Also, the
method for deleting items from the screen is totally out of left field
-- you drag them to the applications tab, which temporarily turns into a
trash can while you're dragging. Probably not the most obvious
technique.
Productivity apps: Calendar, Contacts, Gmail/Email, and IM
The G1 comes out of the box with mobile versions of Google's Calendar,
Contacts, Gmail, and Google Talk services. Forgetting for a moment how
good or bad each app is on its own, we can't emphasize enough: the
pervasive nature of your Google account throughout Android is an
absolute boon, and these apps are the central reason why. Your data's
just there without any fuss, and so far, we've had a hell of a lot fewer
hiccups with it than MobileMe did in its infancy.
Calendar is good, but not great. Going into it, we'd hoped it would be a
faithful replication of Calendar on your desktop browser -- but perhaps
that's asking too much. The feature most notably missing (as far as we
can tell) is that you can't add guests to events that are created on the
G1, which to be fair, probably won't affect most folks. In general, we
got the impression that Google intended the Calendar app on Android to
be primarily read-only with some in-case-of-emergency writability thrown
in as a precaution, and used purely as a mobile view of the schedule
you've set up through the web view, it's totally acceptable; you've got
agenda, day, week, and month views, you can see all the calendars you've
created and had shared to you, and the integration with Android's
notification system is perfect.
Like the iPhone, Android actually treats contacts as a part of the
Dialer rather than giving them their own dedicated application. That
works just fine, especially considering that it still gets its own
application icon for the tab in the home screen (in fact, you can create
a shortcut icon to an individual contact, if you're so inclined). We
like how contact data fields are treated -- different types of data are
offered to perform different activities. For example, if you assign a
phone number to a contact, you'll immediately see that number under both
"Dial number" and "Send SMS/MMS" headers in their details screen, which
makes it pretty easy to use Contacts as your jumping-off point for doing
a whole bunch of common social tasks on the phone.
Android's Gmail client is, for lack of a better word, amazing. Most
importantly, it offers push that's actually pushy enough to be called
"push" -- in some cases, we actually received new emails on the G1
before our web client. It's also designed to mimic all of the web
version's most important Gmail-specific features, like conversation
threading, archiving, and marking as spam. Naturally, it knows how to
integrate with your contacts, and like almost everything else here, it
makes expert use of the notification system.
One huge, painful drawback here is that popular attachment types -- PDF,
Office, and OpenOffice documents, specifically -- are only supported by
virtue of Google's automatic HTML conversion on the server side. Android
itself doesn't understand any of these, so it lets Google do the
conversion and simply shows the typically mucked-up results in its HTML
viewer. What's more, you can't save them to your device; you've got to
go back into Gmail and reload the attachment as HTML each and every
time. There's a huge third-party development opportunity here, and we're
hoping there are plenty of companies already cooking up solutions.
Unfortunately, not everyone uses Gmail, and depending on your situation,
you may not be able to switch. This is where it starts to get a little
hacky. The G1 actually features two completely different, completely
unrelated email apps: one for Gmail specifically, and one that's
considerably less cool for everything else. It's obvious that this is
Google's passive aggressive way of saying "if you want the Android
experience, you've got to drink all the Kool Aid," but they can't really
be faulted entirely. The world's garden-variety email servers -- of
which the G1's app supports the POP3 and IMAP varieties -- don't support
all of the goodies that Gmail specifically does, and to be fair, they've
tried to make the process a little less painful by automatically
detecting popular email types (Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, for example) and
configuring them without any user intervention. The app works well and
can load HTML-encoded emails with aplomb, but we're kind of weirded out
by just how different it looks from Gmail. What's with the black versus
white thing? Lots of users are going to be using both apps, so we
would've liked to have seen more consistency here. Oh, and that HTML
rendering we mentioned that Gmail uses for showing attachments? Yeah, no
go here -- you'll have to forward them to your Gmail account or wait
until you get back to your PC.
The IM app supports AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo!
Messenger within a single framework, which is a nice touch on Google's
part (we wouldn't have been surprised to see them just support Google
Talk) and saves you a few bucks that you might otherwise have to spend
on a decent third-party solution. Google Talk is automatically
configured and ready to go by virtue of your Google account being logged
in, and actually, it's automatically on and running in the background
from the moment you turn on the phone. Messages come in unobtrusively
via the notification system, and of course, you can sign out individual
accounts or all accounts at once if you need to.
Browser
First thing's first: no Flash support yet. Now that we have that out of
the way, the G1's WebKit-based browser does bang-up job of rendering
sites as faithfully as Mobile Safari (they're using the same rendering
engine, after all), but the user experience is decidedly different.
First, there's the issue of multi-touch -- the G1 doesn't support it at
this point. There's some disagreement on how much multi-touch ultimately
matters to the user experience, though, and let's put it this way: the
G1 offers hands-down the best single-touch experience for browsing that
you can find. Flick gestures work exactly as you hope they would,
continuing to move the page after your finger has left the screen and
slowing to a stop. Panning brings up zoom buttons at the bottom of the
screen, but your main tool might actually be the magnifying box, which
is called up by pressing an icon in the lower right of the app. The idea
is great -- it automatically zooms out the page, offers a small,
magnified box that you can drag around, and when you let go, you zoom
into that area -- but we found that it became hard to control on large
pages because even a small movement of your finger translates to a
significant amount of scroll on the zoomed-out preview. We could
definitely get used to it, though.
As we alluded to in the hardware section, page load times lagged way
behind the iPhone 3G when both devices were in 3G coverage, but once the
pages were loaded, scrolling was smoother on the G1. Actually, maybe
"smoother" isn't the right word here -- both devices scroll pages
smoothly -- but the G1 was able to do so without resorting to
temporarily filling your screen with a checkerboard pattern until it
could get around to re-rendering your view.
With the keyboard open, you can just start typing a URL or a search
term, and as long as you don't have your cursor in a text box on a web
page, the browser will know to pop open an address bar and let you do
your thing. Like Chrome, the app unifies addresses and searches into a
single box, which is great on a mobile device where you're always
looking for ways to minimize tapping. Unfortunately, even basic
navigation buttons like Back, Forward, and Bookmarks are hidden unless
you press Menu, which doesn't make much sense. In fact -- get this --
you actually have to press Menu, then More, then Back to navigate back
one page without moving your thumb way over to the physical back button
to the left of the screen. That sounds like an incredibly lazy thing to
say, but if you're a heavy on-the-go browser, it's going to get old
after a while. There's a keyboard shortcut for it, but frankly, that
(along with Forward and Bookmarks) is something we want on-screen at all
times, even if it costs us 30 or 50 pixels of real estate.
Messaging
We guess we can't really play the "whoa, threaded messaging!" card here
anymore, now that manufacturers have wised up to the fact that it
revolutionizes the SMS experience and have started bundling it as a
matter of course on modern smartphones. Android goes along with the
trend; no killer features here, per se, but it gets the job done and
nicely inlines SMS and MMS messages into the same thread. One nice touch
is that it'll let you take a picture or record audio in real time -- no
need to hop out to the Camera app when you want to send a quick snap of
what you're seeing. Sending messages to multiple recipients is a breeze,
too; in a rare show of consistency, the interface is nearly identical to
the email composition screen.
Music / AmazonMP3
Is AmazonMP3 the G1's killer app? Nah, Android itself is the G1's killer
app, but having access to Amazon's vast (and cheap) library of non-DRM
music on the go is a pretty comforting thought. We're a little surprised
that Google and Amazon decided to lock downloads to WiFi; it's a move
that doesn't really fall in with Android's free, open mentality, and
we're hoping it was concern for the user experience -- not T-Mobile
pressure -- that led them to make that call. It's not a pretty app by
any stretch, and it doesn't fall in line with the UI standards set fort
by the phone's other programs, but it doesn't need to be; it just needs
to work, and work it did. We had some problems with album artwork
occasionally not loading, but only made the whole affair even less
attractive. When we can get Coldplay's X&Y for $7.99 from the comfort of
our local Starbucks, we'll learn to live with it.
The music player is straight up bare-bones, and we're already pulling
for a few viable replacements sprouting up in the Market over time.
It'll show you album art, has a Party Shuffle mode, uses the
notification curtain to give you Now Playing details, and lets you
assign a song you're listening to as your ringtone in real time -- which
is kind of cool -- but it has no controls or track information visible
when the phone's locked and has literally zero audio adjustment
controls. It also doesn't play protected content -- but if you're
seriously considering Android as a platform, odds are good (well,
hopefully, anyhow) that you don't have much protected content to begin
with.
Assuming you're not buying all your music from AmazonMP3 over WiFi,
you'll probably be connecting your G1 to a computer at some point to
load tracks. We love that it doesn't try to get fancy -- you plug it in
with any old mini USB cable you have lying around and the phone's
microSD card just shows up as a mass storage device. The coolness ends
there, though, because the Pictures, Camera, and Music apps just totally
crap out once the drive is mounted to your PC on account of that whole
"can't mount the same drive from two places at the same time" conundrum
(it's kind of like the movie Timecop, if you're familiar). Going into
the cam, for example, tells you to insert an SD card -- which is
awesome, considering there's already one inserted. It's an annoyance,
and if they can't figure out how to keep the storage mounted internally
while it's connected to the PC, they should've at least bothered to
clean up the error messages.
YouTube
There are obvious parallels to the iPhone's YouTube app here, and
Android's version definitely holds its own. The gesture of swiping
horizontally to move through featured videos felt vaguely awkward, but
it's the freaking YouTube app we're talking about -- we've already said
too much. It's got all the same functionality that the iPhone cut brings
to the table with the added bonus of a category browser, a nice touch.
Video quality is about on par with what you can expect from the iPhone,
too, with plenty of degradation over EDGE or 3G. We've never been huge
fans of mobile YouTube to start, but unless you're a diehard
time-waster, we wouldn't bother here unless you have access to WiFi.
Android Market
We feel like we won't get an accurate picture of just how good the
Market is until it's out of beta mode and starts offering payment
collection for developers, but already, it's a destination that new G1
owners won't want to miss. There are plenty of great apps to explore
here, and thanks to Google's open attitude, we should see a ton more
added on an ongoing basis. Of course, the lack of oversight also means
the signal-to-noise ratio is lower, but the Market has a handful of
features to help users figure out what's good and what's not. For
starters, there's a Featured section at the beginning of the Market's
home screen that's maintained by Google (which uses that same weird
horizontal swipe gallery as YouTube, coincidentally), and each app
category can be sorted by popularity or date added -- good for finding
the best apps and the freshest ones, respectively.
Perhaps the coolest feature here, though, is the security warning for
each app you download. Android can determine what potentially sensitive
features of your phone the app will have access to, which should
theoretically help you make smarter decisions about the kinds of things
you're comfortable downloading (and by whom they're published). It gets
really in-depth, too -- it doesn't just tell you that the app has access
to your personal information, for example; it tells you that it can read
contacts and calendar entries. Really nicely done.
Wrap-up
The G1 isn't going to blow anyone's mind right out of the gate. Looking
only at the hardware, there's nothing here that's particularly
impressive, yet nothing that's particularly bad (though the GPS needs
some work). It's a fine, solidly designed device that has enough style
to please most users -- but it won't win a ton of beauty pageants. Think
of it this way: if it were running Windows Mobile, it'd be a footnote in
HTC's history.
At the end of the day, however, this isn't about the hardware, and
really never was. The story here is Android and what it promises...
though doesn't necessarily deliver on at first. Like any paradigm shift,
it's going to take time. There is tremendous potential for this OS on
mobile devices -- it truly realizes the open ideals laid out by Google
when they announced this project. The only problem seems to be the stuff
they either left on the back burner, cutting room floor, or hoped would
come from that exciting, untapped world of open source developers. While
there's plenty to praise in this phone, there's a lot more that's
missing -- and some of those missing elements are what we consider to be
core components of a device in the G1's class.
Shortcomings aside, though, you're still buying into one of the most
exiting developments in the mobile world in recent memory. When you put
the G1 up against, say, a Sidekick LX, it seems like a no-brainer for
T-Mobile customers looking for a powerful QWERTY device -- especially at
$20 less. You don't need to be a cutting-edge mobile geek or a pundit to
do that math. When facing off with platforms like the iPhone and Windows
Mobile devices, it holds its own, but has a lot of ground to cover
before it's really making the competition sweat. Still, if you're just
excited to be a part of a platform that's likely going to be around for
a very, very long time, the G1's a totally reasonable day-to-day device
to make it happen, and we expect some pretty great things from this
corner of the market down the road.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/16/t-mobile-g1-review-part-2-software-and-wrap-up/
--
Thanks.
Muthu Ramadoss
http://mobeegal.in - mobile search. redefined. (+91 9840348914)