As we've really gone to great lengths to dissect the phone and OS, we're splitting the review into two, easy to digest parts. Enjoy!
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 right of the screen. It's not that big of a deal, but since the back button is in play elsewhere on the phone, it can get a little confusing (and it can back you out of the app). 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
Music / AmazonMP3
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.
YouTube
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.
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 exciting 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.
Source : http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/16/t-mobile-g1-review-part-1-software-and-wrap-up/
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