10.21.08
T-Mobile G1 Android First Impressions
The T-Mobile G1 was the first effort at a mass market phone built on the Google operating system Android. Combining slick (if not current) hardware from HTC, Google’s web applications, and this new open mobile OS, it was meant to give the iPhone some competition while changing the landscape of mobile application development. I received mine today, and spent some time getting some first impressions.
You have to tie the phone to a Google account, so when starting it up, the first thing you have to do is add your Google account. For those with Google Apps For Your Domain: relax, you can use your Google Apps email address with no problem. This has some other complications, which I’ll go over later. This is great in the sense that you can store your data “in the cloud”. It is terrifying in that it puts a large amount of your personal data in the cloud. That, and you’re storing your data with one vendor. That concern is more than just data resiliency; it’s the fact that you’re giving someone else control over your access to that data. There have already been horror stories of people getting locked out of their Google account, so this is not an irrational fear. Most people are probably willing to take this risk, or are taking this risk already.
If you’re a first timer, you’re also going to want to dive into settings, and enable the GPS. I don’t know why they ship with it off; I’m guessing that half the folks breaking out this phone are going to do what I did: open the Map application and hit “My Location”, then be frustrated when it doesn’t work. Once done, the GPS is actually reasonably accurate — while driving down the street, it kept track of where I was pretty closely.
The hardware itself isn’t winning any beauty contests. It’s twice as thick as an iPhone, and has the aesthetic sensibility of a first generation Zune engineer. Well, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s definitely lacking polish. I drained a battery pretty quickly through a few hours of constant usage. While I probably wouldn’t be using it that extensively on an ongoing basis, it did run out rather alarmingly fast. (Perhaps that’s why the GPS is off by default.) The trackball is a familiar interface for me, coming from a Blackberry Pearl. In fact, the four button organization with trackball in the center was very reminiscent of working with a Blackberry — perhaps they’re setting up Android as a Blackberry killer? I love the full qwerty keyboard, but they recessed the keys far too much, leaving the whole keyboard feeling flat. I would have preferred raised buttons, like a Treo. Everyone complains about the lack of a standard headset jack, so I’ll throw in my complaint regarding that as well. They did include a set of headphones, but they’re not great.
The camera is kind of bunk. While on paper it sounds good, in practice, it’s rather hard to half-depress the tiny shutter button, and when taking a picture, it takes a bit for it to actually snap. This probably takes great pictures of still scenes; anything with action is bound to be extremely blurry.
Technical specs have been covered in pretty good detail on other sites; I seem to have no problems getting a signal so far, and being in the Boston area, 3G coverage is pretty decent. I still lean towards using wifi, of course, as that’s just faster.
Software-wise, Android works reasonably well. It’s not quite as intuitive as it should be, but it responds pretty snappily. While I can see myself getting quite used to it, I can see a lot of frustration for folks who are not as technically inclined and aren’t patient. In this vein, I can’t recommend an Android-based phone over an iPhone yet — the latter is just going to be a less frustrating experience overall. Opening and shutting the screen causes the display to flip between portrait and landscape, and it does this flawlessly. I would start loading a web page and immediately flip open the keyboard, and it’d switch over without missing a beat. This was rather pleasantly surprising.
However, unlike the iPhone, Android doesn’t have as much integration with other applications. Take the Amazon MP3 integration, for example. This is analogous to the iPhone with the iTunes Music Store. However, this application is clearly distinct from the Music system. I can pull up Amazon MP3, browse tunes, and buy a tune. However, I can’t immediately play the tune after purchasing, without switching applications and manually finding the song. Something Google and third party developers will need to do is really examine the UI flow, and clean up things like this — I should be able to go from buying a song to playing in a smooth flow, without having to hunt and peck. Unfortunately, this is quite a bit more difficult because more companies are involved, not to mention (soon) multiple hardware vendors.
There’s always been a little bit of confusion between Google’s regular web applications and the ones they package together as Google Apps. For instance, I can set up my email address on Google Apps, then go to regular Gmail, and try to sign in with it. Rather than taking me to Google Apps email, though, it prompts me to set up a regular @gmail address. This is true of Google Calendar as well. This has been the case for a while, and they haven’t really fixed it. The reason I mention this is that the browser defaults to a Google page, with links to these items. These links won’t work properly for Google Apps addresses for just this reason. The applications on the phone work just fine; just the start page links won’t work properly, which is rather odd. This is just going to get more confusing as more web applications end up in Google Apps. Also, what’s with the omission of Google Docs?
The Gmail application works about as you’d expect. You can’t open attachments, which is quite astounding, but then again, they didn’t include native Google Docs support, so what would you open it in. It works reasonably well and is effective for email. The Mail client, on the other hand, isn’t so good. If you have a lot of IMAP folders, it’s going to be quite painful. URLs aren’t clickable, and you can’t copy / paste them. In essence, the Mail client is roughly functional, but in need of a lot of work — hopefully someone will develop a better one in the Marketplace.
This brings us to the applications. They’re just not up to snuff yet, but as the G1 isn’t technically supposed to get released quite yet, perhaps that’ll change this week. Some of them are cool, some are bloated, some just don’t quite work. There’s also only a few dozen, so you’ll be able to review all of them briefly, until the market gets flooded. This also means that the more esoteric apps you might be looking for (say, an SSH client?) won’t be available just yet. Some of them have odd quirks — such as not quite mapping your starting point for directions or locations properly, resulting in not very good results. Some fine tuning is obviously needed for many applications. On the other hand, some, like the Weather.com application, though simple, are extremely well done.
I think I side with many other reviewers in noting that this is a good first attempt, and a quite nice phone. However, it lacks the polish and usability of Apple’s iPhone, as well as that extra bit of effort to make sure all of the apps are sharp. On the other hand, there is huge potential here: the Android operating system is quite capable, a lot of hardware vendors are developing new phones, and there’s a lot of time until their release to work out all of the bugs. I’m quite satisfied with picking up this phone, but still wouldn’t recommend it for people at large: there’s too much that needs to be cleaned up, and it’s still not intuitive enough for non-technical folks to prevent frustration. However, being an open platform, perhaps that may change quickly. I can’t wait.