We're not in love with the design and would have liked some additional features; however, the Google Android platform has the potential to make smartphones more personal and powerful.
With rumours of an Australian release hot on everyone's lips, it's high-time we took a good, hard look at the world's first phone to run on Google's Android OS. The following is the review of the T-Mobile G1 published by our colleagues in the US.
Design
The T-Mobile G1 is manufactured by HTC and has a similar look and feel to the company's other Pocket PC smartphones, such as the HTC TyTN II and the HTC Touch Pro. Measuring 117mm tall by 53mm wide by 15mm deep and weighing 159g, the G1 is definitely not the sleekest device, and we certainly wouldn't call it sexy. Instead, the words "interesting" and "weird" come to mind, mostly because the bottom section of the phone juts out at a slight angle. In a battle of pure looks, the iPhone would win hands down.
That said, the G1 has a solid construction and features a soft-touch finish on the back with a rubber-like texture, making it easy to grip and comfortable to hold. Also, there's a good reason for G1's larger size: a full QWERTY keyboard. There are a number of users who are reluctant to switch to a full touchscreen smartphone because of the lack of a tactile keyboard, so the G1 is certainly an attractive option for such customers.
To access it, just push the screen to the right. The sliding mechanism is fairly interesting in that the screen actually swings out slightly to the left before snapping into place. The sliding motion is smooth, but after a few days of use, we started to notice a creaking sound whenever we nudged the screen — not good.
The keyboard itself is reminiscent of the Hiptop Slide, as many observers pointed out during our review period. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since we like the Slide's keyboard. The buttons are small, but overall the keyboard feels roomy enough and shouldn't give too many users problems. If anything, we wish the buttons were raised more — as is, they're set flush with the phone's surface. The bigger issue is that the bottom section of the G1 makes it awkward to hold the phone when typing messages.
When you slide open the phone, the screen orientation automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode. That's good, but the screen doesn't change when you physically rotate the phone in its closed state even though it has a motion sensor.
The actual display measures 3.2 inches diagonally and has a 320x480-pixel resolution. It's vibrant and sharp, and like the iPhone and RIM BlackBerry Storm, the touchscreen is capacitive, so it will only respond to the touch of your finger and not your fingernail or other objects like a stylus. The G1 provides haptic feedback, but only for certain actions and not with every touch. First, you'll feel a slight vibration when performing a long press on an icon. Overall, we thought this was fine, but there were times when the G1 didn't register our actions, so some kind of confirmation would have been nice.
The T-Mobile G1's interface is generally clean, fun and easy to use, and we like that you can customise the Home screen with your favourite apps very easily. We would even say that the touchscreen's responsiveness is on a par with that on the iPhone's. But the phone's overall interface isn't as intuitive. For example, as with most every other phone, dipping into the menu layout every time we wanted to access something can get clunky. Yes, it's possible to drag out your favourite applications as shortcuts, but that means you need to spend quite a bit of time setting it up.
Features
Below the display are tactile navigation controls, including Talk and End/Power buttons, a Home shortcut, back button, trackball navigator and Menu key. As with the touchscreen, the Menu button is contextual to the application you're in at the time. For example, if you're in the web browser and press Menu, you'll see options to open a new window, go to a URL, bookmark a page and so on.
The left spine holds a volume rocker and a microSD expansion slot. To access the latter, you have to push the screen open in order to remove the protective cover. On the right side, you'll find a camera activation/capture button, though you can also press the trackball to take pictures. We actually preferred this method, since the dedicated camera key is small. Plus, when holding the phone horizontally, it's easy to nudge the screen upwards while trying to take a picture.
On the bottom of the unit is a mini USB port where you connect the power charger. Sadly, this is also your only option for connecting a headset, as there's no dedicated headphone jack, 3.5mm or otherwise. Yes, there's a headset included in the box, but you don't get the same comfort and quality as you would with a nice pair of headphones. If you want the privilege of using your own 'phones, you'll have to spend extra money to buy an adapter. Last but not least, the camera lens — sans flash self-portrait mirror — is located on the back.
The first smartphone to run the Google Android operating system, the T-Mobile G1 delivers a number of basic core functions and tight integration with Google's products, including Gmail, Google Maps and Google Calendar. Wireless options and multimedia capabilities are also well represented on the G1, but there are some glaring omissions and restrictions that we'll get to later.
The quad-band G1 offers speakerphone, voice dialling, conference calling and speed dial. There's no support for visual voicemail, but one great convenience is that if you have Gmail, all your contacts will automatically be synchronised to the phone book. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo to a contact as well as a group ID and one of 33 polyphonic ringtones. There's even a setting to send a contact's phone call directly to voicemail every time.
Bluetooth is on-board but the supported profiles are limited to wireless headsets and hands-free kits. As with the iPhone 3G, there's no love for stereo Bluetooth or tethering, so you can't use it as a modem for your laptop. The latter is a lesser issue for us, but if we can't get a 3.5mm headphone jack, we'd at least like stereo Bluetooth support.
6%
1%
In your "bottomline" you say it has poor battery life. The specs say it has standby time of 400 hours. This seems reasonable to me? comparing the Nokia E71 which has a standby time of 105 hours (is that even correct, on your E71 review?) !
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