REVIEW DATE: 09.24.08
Total posts: 2
$179.00
by Sascha Segan
Sure, it looks like an iPhone in a Sidekick body. But slightly awkward design aside, the T-Mobile G1 "Google Phone" establishes Android as a slick new entrant in the smartphone space. It promises to be a fun, powerful Web-centric handheld when it launches on Oct. 22.
SLIDESHOW (21)
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The G1 starts out looking like a somewhat chunky (4.6" x 2.1" x .62") PDA-phone, topped by a big 320x480 touch screen. The touch screen is wonderfully quick and responsive. Below the screen are five buttons and a small, slightly slippery track ball. Slide the screen to the right and turn the device 90 degrees, though, and it reveals a full QWERTY keyboard of slightly rubbery, nicely separated keys. There's a miniUSB charging port on the bottom, and a MicroSD memory card slips into a difficult-to-open slot to the right of the keyboard. (The phone comes with a 1GB card.) On the back, there's a 3-megapixel still camera.
The real news here, of course, is Android, Google's all-singing, all-dancing, all-open-source new operating system. It ran quickly and efficiently on the G1's 400 Mhz Qualcomm processor. Unlike with the iPhone, there seem to be several ways to accomplish any task. You can scroll through Web pages with your finger or with the trackball. To search contacts, you can swipe with your finger or start typing on the keyboard. To dial the phone, you can tap the Dialer icon or the physical Phone button.
There's something ideological about all these options. Apple makes it clear that there's one way to do things, Apple's way, and it's the best way. But Google says they're about openness, open source and open choices. That makes for an interface that's a little bit more confusing than the iPhone's (but still far, far easier than Windows Mobile) and more customizable for different tastes.
The G1 starts out with a desktop that's a lot like your PC desktop, with four standard application icons and a clock widget you can move around. You can flick left or right to find two more black desktops, or pop out the phone's full application menu from a tab on the right. The application menu looks a lot like the iPhone's home screen: big, clear icons for various apps. To dial the phone, you can either use the physical keyboard or a Dialer app with a virtual keyboard. We didn't feel any haptic force feedback on the touch screen, though that becomes a lot less important when you have a physical keyboard.
In our hands-on time, we couldn't test the G1's reception or phone calling ability. The G1 works on T-Mobile's 3G network, on foreign 3G networks, and on GSM EDGE networks all over the world, including in the US. The G1 also has Wi-Fi, though you can't use it for phone calls. We got 600-700 kbps on a speed test Web site using T-Mobile's 3G connection, which is a decent speed. You won't be able to use the G1 as a 3G modem for your PC, T-Mobile execs said at the G1's launch.
The G1 works with mono (but not stereo) Bluetooth headsets and has voice dialing on board. We couldn't find a dedicated wired headset jack; presumably, it'll use the USB port for wired headsets. T-Mobile says the phone has 130 hours standby time and up to 5 hours talk time, which is good for a 3G phone.—next: The G1 As a Smartphone
The G1 As a Smartphone
The G1's contacts, calendar and e-mail apps all sync with Google's online services, T-Mobile reps said. The calendar is sleek and simple. The contact book includes presence information on Google Talk, and lets you dial, e-mail or IM with a tap. In general, the PIM applications use large fonts and a lot of white space - they're easy to read, but they could stand to pack a little more information onto one screen.
SLIDESHOW (21)
Slideshow | All Shots
Android's browser, which T-Mobile reps described as "Chrome Lite," looks great. It had the best JavaScript performance of any mobile browser we've seen yet, popping down even complex JavaScript calendars that the iPhone struggles with. It's got a lot of nice little flourishes like autosuggesting URLs based on your history.
But instead of loading pages in zoomed-out mode, it loads them zoomed in, which makes it tough to get an initial overview of the page. You have to tap twice to zoom out, then you can scroll around the page using a 'magnifying glass' icon and zoom back in. Fonts and graphics look beautiful, but as with the iPhone, there's still no Flash.
There are separate Gmail and e-mail icons, though the e-mail program can also handle Gmail. It pushes Gmail and pulls IMAP accounts. The IM program handles AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live and Yahoo!. Once again, it prefers Google services - Google Talk online status is integrated into the contact book, but none of the other IM statuses are.
Instead of Apple's App Store, Android has the Market, which divides downloadable applications into "applications" and "games." At launch, the device had 23 applications and 8 games; we're sure that number will improve. There's about 50MB of free memory on the phone to load apps into; I wish there was more, but you can probably also load apps onto your MicroSD card.
The G1 doesn't seem to be equipped for business work. There's no Exchange syncing yet, and no way to edit Microsoft Office documents. The E-mail program can read Word, Excel and PDF documents, reps said at the phone's launch. But this doesn't seem to be threatening the Blackberry much yet.
The Google Maps app on the G1 is, as expected, the best of its kind. Not only does it load maps quickly and beautifully, it has a "compass mode" that shows Street View facing the direction you're facing at the moment. Cool. It also uses GPS, though not to any great extent yet. Presumably third party programs will come along with better GPS capabilities.
For music and video, there's a pretty standard-issue music player that seems to play all of the usual unprotected formats. The G1 won't come with any desktop syncing software, T-Mobile reps said at the launch. But it will come with a free app to download music directly from Amazon's MP3 store, over Wi-Fi networks to the phone.
Since this is a Google phone, of course it has a YouTube application. The YouTube app seems to show a subset of videos, just like Apple's YouTube app. When we loaded a video over 3G, it appeared in a window slightly smaller than the screen. It looked pixelated, and although it was smooth the frame rate felt low.
The G1 has a 3-megapixel still camera that we didn't get to test. It can't record video.
The T-Mobile G1 will sell for $179, with data plans costing $25 and $35/month on top of your voice plan. That's at least $5 more than T-Mobile charges for data on the rest of their smartphones, which is frustrating, but it's about what AT&T charges for iPhone data ($30). This looks like an exciting new device and we look forward to reviewing it in full before its retail launch on Oct. 22.
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