HTC G1 Cell Phone

The G1 phone from T-Mobile and HTC Corporation is a really interesting phone, but I can say for sure it’s not for everybody.  It’s very good for me, though, and in the not quite two months I’ve owned this device, I have to say I’m glad I chose it over the iPhone and its non-phone cousin, the iPod Touch.

How did I come to take the plunge and get the G1?  It goes back about 10 or 11 months to a discussion I had with a guy that worked in a cubicle on the other side of mine.  He and I follow tech trends and had mentioned something about the “Google phone.”  I took a look at a few prototype images on a tech blog and dismissed it.

In the meantime, I watched Palm’s technology continue to stagnate.  I had a Palm TX that I had purchased in January that, by October, had endured so much wear on its digitizer touchpad that I decided to send it back to Palm for repairs (just ahead of the one-year expiration on warranty service).  As much as I love stylus-based input, the constant scratching just wears out a screen and I wanted to try a finger-based touch-screen system that I knew would be gentler on the hardware. 

I was curious about the seemingly ubiquitous iPhone.  Here was a device in its second revision with no less than 8 GB of internal memory and a much-celebrated display and interface.  And yet, something held me back from buying one (and it wasn’t those arrogant Apple fanboys).  It was that the iPhone/iPod Touch development platform would have required a significant investment – there is no software development kit for the iPhone/iPod Touch that’s Windows-based (of course) so at the very least, a new machine would have been required.  And, to list a home-grown title would cost northwards of $100, from my research. 

By mid-October, the G1 was rolling out at T-Mobile stores.  Out of sheer curiosity, I strolled into a store and checked one out.  I liked the form factor – it’s a slimmer phone than most of the smartphones out on the market today.  Phones like the BlackBerry Pearl and the Palm Centro are a little wider than the G1; the G1 is a comfortably slim inch and a half wide.  (Don’t buy the critiques that the design is “uninspired”; I think it’s a nice-looking phone – simple and its body nicely hides fingerprints.) 

And then there’s the technology factor: the G1 is based on the new Android operating system, engineered by Google (the world’s largest search engine and one of the few large-scale developers out there actively pushing the envelope). 

After making a couple of visits to the T-Mobile store, I decided to pick up a G1.  Since it’s my philosophy not to make two-year commitments to any telecom, I went with a one-year commitment (as an upgrade to my Motorola W490 phone) at a cost of $300 plus tax.  If that sounds steep, remember that’s the one-year price.  The two-year price is a quite reasonable $180 (less than the iPhone), as long as you’re willing to stay happy and not break your contract.


FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The G1 package comes with the phone, a stereo mini-USB headset, a protective soft pouch, and documentation.  The T-Mobile associate took a few minutes to transfer my SIM card from my Motorola phone to the G1 and activation took a few moments.

The G1’s LCD is crisp and beautiful and that’s a good thing, too – its display is a little smaller than those of most smartphones (see my comment above about its slimmer profile).  But it is a very nice display.  And the display is chock-full of cute little tricks.  Sliding your finger across the main screen either way shifts the “desktop” (I’m not sure what else to call it).  Or you can do it with the miniature trackball underneath the Menu button.  Four other buttons on the unit front let you make phone calls, go to the home screen, go back one screen, or end a call.

It’s when you fold out the keyboard from underneath the LCD that you’ll start to be more impressed with the G1.  The keyboard is QWERTY-style and is illuminated!  (If it goes dark, simply move any key or the trackball to re-illuminate it.)  The keys occupy five rows with a full set of numbers on the top row, letters on the next three rows, and punctuation and the space bar on the bottom row.  There are left and right Shift and Alt keys, an Enter key, and a Delete (backspace) key.  The “@” sign is so commonly used these days that it has its own non-shift key on the bottom row of keys, a thoughtful touch.

To start an application, just tap once on the associated icon.  To stop one, either press the Home button to get back to the home screen or (in some cases) press the Back button.   The G1 and the Android operating system boast, as one of their features, that it’s able to multi-task applications.  This is different from the Palm platform which (although it can save data between runs of an application) can only run one application at a time. 


BUILT-IN APPLICATIONS

The G1 comes with several applications already built-in.

The Contacts manager is actually part of the phone application; it occupies a tab in it.  If you’ve saved contacts to your SIM card from a previous phone, the G1 can import all those entries (sparing you the tedium of having to re-enter them).  Editing a contact lets you save a phone number, an e-mail address, and a special ringtone.  A rather clever feature I really like is that there’s a “Send calls directly to voicemail” checkbox.  Put a check mark there and if you’re angry at someone you’ll never be interrupted with a phone call from them again. 

The Dialer is the main phone application.  While it’s visually appealing, one problem it has is that while a call is connecting, if you want to mute the phone or put on speaker phone, you have to press the Menu button to get those options; those options should remain “open” while the call is in progress.  On a second tab is a call log, showing all calls you made (latest at the top), along with the duration (in minutes and seconds) and how long ago the calls were made.  I can see that being a bit of an irritant to someone wanting to know the exact date and time a call was made, but some folks will probably consider this an improvement.  A fourth tab for Favorites shows (apparently) your most frequently called contacts (most popular ones at the top).

Then there’s the Calendar.  The Calendar has views for the day, week and month.  A button off the menu takes you to the current day.  But the Agenda view has a little problem – if you have no items scheduled for a particular day, the screen is completely black.  There’s no message to the effect of, “You have no items scheduled for today.”  Just remember that if you use the Agenda view.  I hope the Google folks fix that.

Now, all of these applications are (if you allow it) automatically backed up to your Google account.  Why?  Suppose you lose your G1 phone (heaven forbid) and you get a new one.  You can restore all your information from your Google account back to your phone.  (I do not know if that extends to all installed applications, photos, music, etc. or not.)  By the way – I would highly recommend taking out a loss insurance policy on the phone.  The deductible is $130 (!) but for a phone this loaded I’d protect it.  The cost is an additional $6 on your monthly T-Mobile bill and I can say from experience with a previous phone, Asurion, the company that provides the insurance, has excellent customer service.

Several other built-in applications are for entertainment.

The Browser is the web browser for surfing the World Wide Web.  This is a good browser (better than Opera, which I used on my Palm TX), and has never crashed on me.  You can view web pages in horizontal or vertical orientations and can zoom in or out to view portions of the page.  Tapping on links, even small ones, is surprisingly accurate.  One thing worth remembering – when you visit some of your favorite web sites, you may wind up looking at the “mobile” version of the site.  Mobile versions of web sites are usually smaller and formatted for smartphones and other devices with small displays.  If you want to see the full version of a page, you’ll need to know the URL for that page.

The YouTube application is unquestionably one of the coolest on the G1.  You can watch YouTube videos right on the G1’s display.  And this is not just going to the YouTube site, this is an actual direct connection to YouTube content.  Pretty slick.

If you like MP3 music, you can use the Amazon MP3 application to search for titles, purchase and download them.  As with the full web site, you can listen to music samples before you buy.  And the music you buy is DRM-free!  If you already have your own music titles, with a  USB cable you can copy them right to your phone.

If you’re a big MySpace maven, there’s a MySpace application which is attractive but a little slow.  I’m not sure if the issue is the application or MySpace’s constantly high volume.  Whatever the case, you’ll find the MySpace experience to be a little bit different if you use this.  (There is no application for Facebook; you can use the mobile version of their site in the Browser.)

The Music application is an MP3/WMA player.  You can view all the music in your G1 grouped by artist, album, or playlist.  Or you can view an alphabetical listing of all tunes on your device.  You can create a playlist of tune selections, or you can simply put your device on Shuffle and let it randomly choose music for you. 


INTERNET SUPPORT

The G1 can surf the Internet in one of two modes – either using T-Mobile’s network (requiring a $25 data plan you have to have to use the G1) or any wireless network within range.  I have found it helpful to have the choice, particularly when installing homegrown applications from a third-party web site – for some bizarre reason, installing using T-Mobile’s network doesn’t work reliably.  Installing using a wi-fi signal works more reliably (and even there, it’s not 100%).

Those accustomed to using their phones as modems, though, will be disappointed; the G1 cannot be used as a modem.  And the data plan does NOT include T-Mobile Hot Spots, either (that’s extra, too).  Since this phone is the closest thing to an actual laptop computer, though, this is less of a deal-breaker than it would be for an ordinary cell phone.

The G1 browser, like most others for the smartphone/PDA market, does not support Flash technology (meaning Flash movies show up as static placeholders only) and, to my knowledge, there is no plug-in for it.  (If Android developers ever come up with one, though, that would give the G1 a huge push.)

The G1’s recognition of taps on links, fields and buttons is pretty accurate, and the full keypad is very helpful when typing in web addresses.  Like other PC browsers, the G1’s Browser retains a clickable history of all pages you’ve visited, as well as a list of favorites.  Unlike other PDA browsers, though, the G1 supports multiple windows (a click of the Menu button and then the “Window” icon puts the screen in a nifty 4-up thumbnail mode where you can open a new window or swap between open ones.


DOWNLOADABLE APPLICATIONS – THE ANDROID MARKET

The Android Market is the functional equivalent of the iPhone App Store.  It’s a place where G1 users (and, later, other Android phone users) can download software for the G1.  At this point, many of the applications for the G1 are free but as the market for Android phones matures, I’m sure there will be applications for which you pay to use.  So enjoy the honeymoon right now.

The Android Market is accessed from the G1’s applications menu by tapping the “Market” icon (the cute little green robot man).  You are taken to what is essentially an electronic storefront.  You can view a list of applications by popularity or release date (latest first, so you can get what’s hot and new).

There’s a variety of applications as I write this (but that wasn’t the case when reviews on Android were written earlier this year).  To learn more about an application, simply tap the name of the application, and you’re shown a page indicating how “hot” the application is (by number of downloads), a summary of the application, and comments from other G1 users about it.  There are also links to view more applications from a particular developer, and to e-mail the developer directly (presumably with bug reports). 

For example, I downloaded The Weather Channel application.  The application lets you track the weather in any cities you enter, and gives you detailed forecasts (hourly, 36-hour, 10-day) and also lets you check radar activity using (surprise, surprise) Google Maps.  Radar data are superimposed over a map.  If you want to view a quickie video summary (similar to “Weather On The 8’s”), there’s an option for that, too – just amazing.  This is currently the most popular application and I can see why – if you want a weather forecast, you just pull out your G1 and tap an icon.  Now THAT’S instant weather!  (Take that, XM.)

Here is a list of titles currently (at the time of this writing) at the Android Market:

Listed by popularity: The Weather Channel, ShopSavvy, MySpace Mobile, US Yellow Pages Business Search, Free Dictionary, Ringdroid, Compare Everywhere, imeem Music, WikiMobile Encyclopedia, Bar Code Scanner, Video Player, Movies-Showtimes-IMDB Ratings, Daily Horoscope, Pro Football Live, AccuWeather, AK Notepad, Bartender (!), Translate, Stopwatch, and many  more.

Listed by date: nyt.flix, Currencies, MPG Calc, handyCalc, Thesaurus, NetMeter, Calories Calculator, and Metronome.


The quality of these applications varies widely, of course, because some are written by individuals and others are written by companies. 
If you’re more curious about the Android Market, visit their web site: http://www.android.com/market.  But remember that the selection of applications is only going to grow for the G1.


USER INTERFACE

The user interface for the G1 is fairly simple, but not always intuitive.  At the top of the LCD there’s a white bar that displays the time, battery power level, phone signal level, and the cellular network type (E, 3G, etc.).  As other options are activated, additional symbols appear or disappear from here. 

One nice feature of this bar is that it acts like a window shade.  If a special bulletin – called a notification – comes in, a green light flashes on the G1 (even if the display is off) and then you can open the window shade by taking your finger and dragging it open.  If there are multiple notifications (missed phone calls, new voice mail, new text messages, etc.), they’ll remain in the notifications queue until you clear or delete them.

For folks accustomed to Windows machines you’ll see a few similarities to a PC, but not that many.  I think that’s sort of a good thing – this is a mobile device we’re talking about, and its limited size means that some things can’t be the same.  For example, some short status messages – perhaps messages indicating a successfully saved file – appear and disappear without the user’s having to tap an “OK” button.  This is nice. 

But the Menu button may confound a few.  Unless an application reminds you, there’s no on-screen indication that there are menu options available, and if you forget to press that button, you probably won’t know about additional features.  Maybe the G1 and Android folks can put their heads together and find a way to resolve that issue.

Similar to most smartphones (like the Palm platform) a single tap on an icon starts an application.  In some applications, pressing and holding your finger on the screen will bring up a pop-up (or context) menu with options particular to a part of the application you’re using.

An item on the screen that has “focus” is almost always marked in orange.  You’ll especially notice this if you use the trackball.  If something has focus, you can use the keyboard’s Enter key to select it.  Or you may also just tap a link or button directly.  Most of the time, the touchpad detects the touch but there have been some occasions on which the tap doesn’t register.  I’m sure this will be fixed over time.

In many cases, options for programs are listed in a screen that scrolls vertically.  Unlike Windows’ Control Panel, most of these options are not marked with icons but you have to remember that we’re dealing with limited screen real estate here.  Still, some folks more accustomed to pictorial cues may feel a bit lost.

Your finger has a lot of power on the G1.  You can drag screens up and down, or left and right (depending on the design of the application).  For fans of the iPhone platform, no, there’s no two-finger “gestures” to make pictures bigger or smaller.  But your finger can still do a lot.  You can flick your finger up or down through a long list and the list will whiz by, allowing you to get down a long list of entries without having to scroll – a nice touch. (You can scroll with the trackball, of course, but whizzing is faster and much more fun! Wheeee!)

The home screen has, essentially, short cuts to your favorite applications (the ones you’ll use the most).  To add an application from the main folder to the home screen, you tap and hold the icon and then drop the icon on the main screen.  To delete an application from the main screen, you tap and hold the icon and then drag it into a trash can tab that appears  at the bottom of the screen.  It’s a little strange because it’s inconsistent; perhaps a context menu would have been better.

The equivalent of the Control Panel is called Settings, and is accessed by pressing the Menu button from the home screen.  The list of options under Settings is: wireless controls, call settings, sound & display, data synchronization (connection to Google), security & location, applications (for deleting them from the device, not just the icons), SD card & phone storage, date & time, text, and other general phone info (battery level, firmware level, etc.).  Incidentally, the battery level is shown on the notification bar at the top of the screen, but if you want to see a percentage from 0 to 100, you have to dig down through the Settings menus to find it.


REASONS TO BUY THE G1

Let’s get down to brass tacks.  Why should you buy the G1?  Here’s a list of considerations.

No AT&T or Sprint.  If you loathe AT&T like I do (they fouled up my local, long distance and DSL service at one swoop once and I swore never to do business with them again) you’ll enjoy the G1 and dealing with T-Mobile.  The G1 is exclusively available from T-Mobile, meaning you won’t have to endure Sprint’s crappy customer service or Verizon’s overpriced data plans.

Open source, free SDK, Java-based.   For those of you geeks out there like me, rejoice – the G1’s SDK (software development kit) is free and based on Eclipse, the open-source integrated development environment (who, interestingly enough, Palm also uses for their SDK).  After spending months struggling to get the basics of development for the Palm platform, I have to say that Android’s application programming environment is much easier and more consistent.  I’ve been able to accomplish with Android’s SDK in weeks what it took months to accomplish with Palm’s.

Removable storage (mini SD) and battery.  Can an iPhone say this?  The G1 lets you insert a mini SD card (with storage prices dropping all the time) and swap out batteries.  As I recall, iPhones have to be shipped back to Apple for battery service and cannot have additional storage added.

Real keyboard, not a virtual keypad.  For those of you also looking at the BlackBerry Storm, consider this: just because the LCD screen clicks, doesn’t mean your fingers will easily find those keys.  The G1 has real keys, including mini-tabs on the “F” and “J” keys so you can more easily find home positions.  Did I say the keyboard illuminates?

Good built-in applications.  The G1 includes a decent music player, YouTube, MySpace, calculator (with scientific functions!), Google Maps, and Amazon MP3.  For managing your personal information, there’s also a contact manager, calendar, and e-mail.

Good Internet browser.  The G1’s browser is simple to use and more true to a PC-based net surfing experience, fonts and all.  (No Flash support, though, but no one has that yet.)

Excellent text messaging support.  Threads are kept together with the G1’s scheme for managing text messages.  As mentioned before, there’s a full keyboard.  But fair warning: there’s no “T-9” text completion/predictive input feature.  You may find yourself actually typing more (unless you use abbreviations like “L8R”).

3-megapixel camera.  The camera does a good job as long as there’s enough light.  It’s a bit slow to focus, though.  Still – how many smartphones take 3-megapixel photos?

Bluetooth support and speaker phone with mute.  If you need to be able to use the G1 hands-free, there’s Bluetooth support for headsets.  If you don’t like Bluetooth, you can use the built-in speaker phone feature that also has mute control.

Well thought-out development platform.  The Android OS is vast but well thought-out.  The folks at Palm and BlackBerry may just want to take a look at what Android is doing, lest they become obsolete.  (Palm’s platform hasn’t had any major improvements in years.)

It’s the absolute coolest way of looking things up on the spot.  Just whip out your G1, tap the Browser icon, taking you to Google, and enter what you want to know.  Superb!

It’s a great device for helping pass the time in long lines.  Standing on a long line at the bank, post office, or grocer?  Pull out the G1 and surf the Web, catch up on your e-mail, or start a chat with a friend using IM.  The device makes it all very easy.


REASONS NOT TO GET THE G1

Let’s flip the coin.  While I think the G1 is a cool device, I can safely say it’s not for everybody.  Here are some reasons why.

Battery life needs improvement.  The most you’ll get out of the G1 – under normal use – is about two days.  I was a bit skeptical in the showroom when the T-Mobile sales associate told me talk time was about two hours; she turned out to be fairly close.  If you’re accustomed to the longer battery life of simpler phones and don’t want to have to keep a power charger cord handy, you might not dig the G1.  (A car charger is available, by the way.)

Non-standard headphone jack (mini USB).  I suppose if you consider the G1 an MP3 player that just happens to be able to make phone calls, you won’t like the G1’s mini-USB connector for headphones.  I was at an electronics superstore not long ago and asked the guy if there were other mini-USB headphones available or even adapters – he was lost.  You’ll have to use the one that comes with the phone, and forget about plugging speakers into it.  Stick with standards the next time, Google.

Occasional touch screen problems.  The touch screen works well about 98 percent of the time.  But sometimes it will take a second or third tap to get a selection recognized.  This may be the hardware or the Android software, but in either case it’s bothersome when it happens.  I hope it gets fixed in the coming months.  My advice in the meantime: don’t tap too quickly.

Can’t use the G1 as a modem.  The Bluetooth profile for the phone supports headsets and that’s about it.  It’s a good thing the G1 has a good browser, though.

Occasional problems downloading applications (from outside the Android Market only).  You can install non-Android applications to the G1 phone, particularly if you’re a developer of homegrown applications like me.  But I’ve noticed that it’s buggy.  I have had better success downloading applications using the G1’s built-in wi-fi receiver rather than going over T-Mobile’s 3G network.  I’m sure Google intends for folks to get their applications through the Android Market anyway, but for die-hard techies this will need to be cleaned up.  (If you’re developing your own applications and want to install them directly to the phone, there are options you must specify to copy them directly.)

Can’t search the entire device like on a Palm.  One reason why Palm is still a player in the PDA/smartphone game is that they knew what to add to their devices to make them more useful, and the Palm OS was designed specifically for their devices.  One of those helpful features was global search – being able to search all the internal databases for anything like a part of name or phone number.  To my knowledge, you can’t search the entire G1 device like that, at least not yet.  I hope either Google or some third-party developer finds a way to add this capability because I’d hate to be without it.

Can’t beam-share applications like Palm.  Got an application you like?  Want to share it?  You can’t infra-red beam it directly to another G1 phone.  That G1 user will either have to get it where you got it (likely the Android Market), or you’ll have to copy the Android executable somewhere else, and your friend will have install the application to their G1 phone from there (probably with the Android SDK for now; there’s no third-party desktop-based installer for applications). 

A few missing applications.  Why no voice recorder for quick reminder notes?  Why no video recorder; it has a great lens built-in on the back?  Why no global search (see above)?  The G1 designers could have added a few more useful utilities to this phone.

No accelerometer (hey, this isn’t an iPhone!).  The G1 is not, not, not a game machine.  It can play games but it wasn’t designed with a gaming device like an accelerometer.  (I know, I know – Apple users will take me to task by saying an accelerometer isn’t just for games, that it’s a screen orientation device.  That’s not what I’m seeing in Apple ads.  The accelerometer is being pushed for entertainment, for the “cool” factor.)

You’re a die-hard Apple fan.  Nothing without that logo will ever satisfy you, even if it’s as well thought-out and designed as the G1.


FINAL VERDICT

I personally feel the G1 is a great smartphone, but whether you agree with me will depend on the kind of user you are, so I must qualify this statement with the following.

If you are a game player bitten by the iPhone/iPod Touch bug – you’ll never really like the G1 even with the missteps Apple has had with it (activation problems, that first big discount that annoyed first-round buyers, etc.).  And without an Apple logo, forget it.

If you are a business user, you may like some of the features of the G1, but you’ll probably want to wait until the Android phone market matures, and the Android OS works out more of its bugs.  As of this writing, I read one tech blog that said that Motorola has said they’re looking at introducing an Android phone.  A second Android phone was recently rolled out in Australia, no doubt headed to these shores.  And the G1 can’t support “corporate e-mail” (whatever that means); those users will likely stick with BlackBerry anyway.  If you wind up buying a G1, it’ll be because you want it for your own personal use, not for the office (although, in some cases, you may be pleasantly surprised).

If you like MP3 players, media players and the like, you’ll enjoy the G1.  It plays music, video, games, and other neat stuff.  There’s lots of freeware out there for it, and new titles come online all the time.  Jump in.  This is a great device for folks that spend a lot of time waiting in line because it offers so much.  (Oh…and it makes phone calls, too.)

If you’re looking for a basic phone and are wondering if you should buy the G1, ask yourself if you’d enjoy all the other stuff.  Do you text message others much?  Do you want to be able to surf the Internet from your phone?  If the answer is yes, get the G1; if not, get a cheaper phone.

And, finally, if you’re a big tech geek like me or an early adopter of technology, go get a G1.  If you’re an experienced software developer you’ll have a bit of a rough time at first with the Android Java classes (because there’s no one central, authoritative resource for beginners) and because the Android OS is so incredibly vast.  But if you have a sharp mind, and know how to use search engines like Google to look things up, you should find enough information to start writing your own titles for the G1.

Now, if none of these are deterrents and you still want to get a G1, remember that you’ll have to go to a T-Mobile store (no one else carries it at the time of this writing, Dec. 2008) and that T-Mobile offers a 14-day money-back guarantee – you can return the phone in 14 days if you don’t like it.  But I think most folks that try it – particularly those not enamored of the iPhone – will keep it.

I close by (ironically) borrowing a bit of Apple’s advertising lingo from the past.  Despite oodles of folks having iPhones now, there are still a sizable number of others who, for reasons similar to my own, just couldn’t bite at the iPhone or iPod Touch.  The G1 phone is the phone “for the rest of us.”