Nerdy And Loving It

Hardware

What’s Good:

• The keyboard is great. It’s responsive.  I haven’t missed a key press yet.  My old phone, a Samsung i760, would miss key presses all the time.  I also love that they have dedicated number keys at the top of the keyboard.  You don’t have to push a function key to get access to numbers like on other phones.
• The search button. The keyboard has a dedicated search button that changes what it searches for depending on what you’re doing on the phone.  In the home screen it searches google.  In contacts it searches your contacts.  In Android marketplace it searches apps in the marketplace.
• The rest of the phone keys are simple and easy to understand. You have a green call key and red end call key, which also locks the phone if pressed once and turns off the phone when you hold it down.  You have a home key to go to the home screen and when held brings up the six latest programs that were opened so that you can either open up stuff that you opened recently or you can use it to switch between applications.  The back key is used to exit applications, exit a menu that you have entered, or to go back on a web page.  Like the search button, the back key changes what it does based on where you are at in the phone. There is also a menu key to bring up things like preferences for an application or setting for the phone.  The menu changes depending on where you are at in the phone.  The phone also has a scroll wheel like most new blackberry phones do.  It’s nice to have when you need more precision than your big finger to select stuff on the screen.  I find myself using it the most in the browser when selecting links and moving around in text.  It is much easier to scroll to the link you want than to zoom way in so that you don’t click on the wrong link with your (relatively) giant finger.
• Alt + scroll left/right. This is like your home and end key.  It’s nice to be able to move to the end of a line of text without having to scroll through every letter or poke the screen with your finger and interrupt your text entry.
• Mini USB charging/data port. This seems like it’s not that big of a deal, but to me it is.  I don’t ever have to buy some special data cable to connect my phone to my pc.  There are tons of devices out there that use mini usb, so odds are, that if I need to charge my phone and either my phone charger has died or I am staying over at a friend or family members house for the night, there will have a cable or charger available.  Also, if I want a car charger I can use the mini usb car adapter that came with my gps.  I wish more phones would standardize like this.

What’s not so good:

• The battery life is terrible. I haven’t had as much of a problem as I’ve heard other people have, but perhaps I don’t spend as much time online as they do.  I have tried all the tips I’ve found online like turning the brightness all the way down (something I normally do anyway), turning off the gps, turning off bluetooth, setting the screen timeout to the lowest setting, turning wifi off and I still have problems with the battery dying.  I just read today that T-Mobil might be sending out replacement batteries to G1 owners.  That would be nice.  It’s really too bad that this is such a big problem on the first Android phone.  It kind of takes away from the fact that Android is so awesome.
• The squeaking/creaking. When you slide the phone open to get access to the keyboard, you can hear a squeaking sound because of plastic rubbing together.  I’ve read on some comments and message boards online that some people are bothered by this, but it doesn’t really bother me.
• No 3.5″ headphone jack. In fact there isn’t even a 2.5″ headphone jack.  You have to use an adapter that comes with the phone that connects to the mini usb slot on the bottom of the phone.  This is rather annoying.

Software:

The T-Mobile G1 phone has the Android operating system from google on it.  It is open source software, which means it is free for anyone to use and modify.  It also means you can view all of the code yourself.  It also means you can easily create your own software for the phone, assuming you are a programmer already.

What’s good:

• Everything syncs with gmail. This could be considered a plus or a minus depending on who you ask.  I use gmail as my main email provider, so this is a good thing for me.  Not only is your mail synced, but so are you contacts and your calendar.  If you don’t use gmail, you are basically forced to switch.  Technically you could just create a dummy gmail account that you never use and then disable the ability of the phone to sync your contacts, calendar, and mail, but this seems like overkill to me for a phone that targets gmail users.  The nice thing about all of this is that you don’t have to backup your phone to your computer any more, unless you’re into that.  The downside is that you have to trust google with all your information.  Some people don’t like this idea, but it’s fine with me.
• No stylus needed. The entire operating system has been designed with your finger in mind as what’s going to be poking the screen.
• Android Market. It’s nice to have an app store like android market because then you don’t have to search all over the web to find good applications for your phone/organizer.  You can find some cool apps by simply sorting them by most popular.  If you need something specific you can search for it.  They have some really cool apps for the android like ShopSavvy, which allows you to l0ok up the prices online and stores nearby of any product by scanning its barcode using the camera on the phone.  There’s another one called SnapTell that will do the same using the front cover of a book, cd, dvd, or video game.  I also like one called 1337pwn which tells you when your friends are playing a game on their xbox 360 and also gives you most of their profile information, including their gamerscore, list of games with associated scores, personal info, and their avatar picture.  It also lists when they last played every game in their list.  All of this data is pulled from the xbox website.  There’s other silly stuff too like magic 8 ball or an Arnold soundboard.
• Drag down status bar. Whenever android needs to notify you of something like a text message, instant message, email, or missed call, it will display a small icon in the upper left of the screen.  To view these items, you simply drag the bar down with your finger and then select whatever you want or tap on the clear all messages button.
• Easy access to every program on your phone. On the home screen, there is a tab that can be tapped or dragged up to see a list of every application installed on your phone.
• The three desktops are great. There are three seperate desktop spaces on the home screen.  To switch between them, you simply drag you finger from left to right or right to left, depending on what screen you want.  The home screen always starts on the middle screen.  With three desktops you can reserve each for a different purpose.  I use the center desktop for my most used apps like gmail, calendar, instant messenger, and contacts.  I use the left desktop for games and goofy apps like the magic 8 ball.  I use the right desktop for web related stuff like links to facebook, myspace, wikipedia, and the like.
• It’s easy to add and remove shortcuts, widgets, and links to the desktop. If you tap and hold for a short while on the desktop a menu pops up, giving you the option to add a shortcut to any installed application, widget, or link to a webpage.  A widget, by the way, is something that sits on your desktop and does something special.  The widget that is on your desktop by default is an analog clock.  I removed it because I just use the digital clock.  To remove a shortcut, link, or widget you just tap and hold on it and then drag it down to the bottom of the screen where the trashcan icon has appeared.
• Scrolling is made easy. Like the iPhone, you just tap and drag up and down to scroll.  You can also scroll in any direction in some cases, like when viewing webpages.
• Fully functional browser. The Android browser was created using webkit, which is a collection of code that helps you make a great browser.  It’s actually called a framework, which you build off of to make the browser, but I won’t get too far into what that means for the sake of this review.  The Apple iPhone also uses webkit.  What all this means, is that things just work when you view the web.  It’s just like viewing the web from any browser on your pc, albeit from a relatively small screen.  You can zoom in and out using the magnifying glasses at the bottom of the screen.  Also, when drop down boxes, like the one on google images to select picture size, are tapped, a menu pops up with the options in large letters.  Overall the only downside to the browser is that it doesn’t support some flash websites like hulu.
• Integrated Youtube. There is a youtube application that will show full screen streaming video from youtube.  You can navigate around on the specially formatted site, looking at the popular videos, or you can search for your favorites.  The other nice thing is that you can open Youtube videos directly from the browser.
• Google Maps application. This isn’t that big to me, but it’s still nice.

What’s not so good:

• No PDF file support. That’s right kids, Android can’t open PDFs.  You can’t download any apps right now in the Android Marketplace either.  They have two demo apps that expire in a month or two and that’s it.  I looked this up online and the only solutions I could find were to save the pdf as a jpg file, to save it as an html file, or install a program called multireader.  I tried multireader, but it was so incredibly slow it for my 70 page document I was trying to open that I don’t consider it a solution.  I’m suprised that either Google or Adobe haven’t fixed this problem yet.  I just want to open my pdf on my phone.
• No word/excel file support. I would have thought that with their work on Google Docs, Google would have been able to add word and excel support to the phone, but apparently not.  Hopefully something is in the works.
• No notes application installed by default. This isn’t a big deal really since you can just install one of several notes programs, but I was surprised that google didn’t create their own and include it in the phone.  It is a standard in almost any pda device ever since palm first came around. My favorite notes app is AK Notes by the way.
• The instant messenger program could be better. My only main complaint is that you can’t rename your friends like you can on trillian, the program I use on my computer at home.  I like to see the person’s real name instead of happyfluffybunny5678… or whatever.  But, on top of that other IM apps that you can download have many more options that you can change that should be in the google IM app.  I use “Hello AIM!” as my IM app of choice.