T-Mobile G1 review we open up the new Google Android OS and

Home

7th April 2009 Author: - - Views:

Hardware design - Good

The first thing we consider when we test a touchscreen phone is whether the hardware can keep up with the interface design. In this regard, the T-Mobile G1 is perhaps the most responsive phone on the market. The touchscreen responds to the slightest flick and tap, and the screen was very quick in switching orientation from portrait to landscape mode when we opened the keyboard. The phone even bested the Apple iPhone 3G, our favorite touchscreen performer, in terms of screen response.

We’re not in love with the T-Mobile G1’s hardware design, though perhaps the clean, rounded corners speaks to the friendliness and simplicity of the interface beneath. It isn’t a cool looking phone, though it is a unique QWERTY slider in that only part of the top slides out and upwards. It doesn’t have a lot of dedicated shortcut keys, though it does have a dedicated “Menu” key that always opens up an application’s menu, and a “Home” key that will take you to the standby screens (short press) or open a box filled with recently used application icons (long press). Still, the phone just isn’t, dare we say, cool. When you whip out your T-Mobile G1, most people around you probably won’t recognize it for the Google phone, and even fewer will feel the desire to touch and hold it, as audiences often want to take hold of our Apple iPhone.

The keyboard will be a serious problem for many users. The buttons lay nearly flush against the bottom of the slide, with very little travel or tactile feel. We’d almost rather use a touchscreen keyboard, if the hidden QWERTY keys are going to be this difficult to manage. At least there were plenty of keys packed into the 5-row keyboard, which had its own number row and a full complement of symbol keys. Still, HTC hasn’t ported some of their best ideas, like the way the keys on the T-Mobile Wing (also an HTC device) will activate their respective symbols when you hold them down. On the T-Mobile G1, holding a key repeats the indicated letter ad nauseum, which is the silliest thing you could do on a handheld keyboard.

Interface - Very good

Google’s Android interface on the T-Mobile G1 is simply brilliant, with plenty of ideas that are new to smartphones. Almost every icon and indicator on the screen, even the background itself, can be tapped, held, pushed and pulled to some effect. When a new message comes in, instead of trying to tap a tiny icon in the status bar, as Windows Mobile and Palm OS will have you do, simply drag down the status bar itself and it creates a notification window, with a preview of incoming messages. Want to change the wallpaper? Just hold your finger on the phone’s desktop, and a menu pops up. Within applications, there was almost always a menu that would appear when we pressed the “Menu” key, and if our intended option wasn’t there, we simply held our finger down on whatever object we were manipulating, whether it was a song title, a contact name or e-mail subject, and the option presented itself. Overall, it was an intuitive and surprising experience, leaving us feeling that Android is truly the smartest of the smartphone operating systems.

It wasn’t completely perfect. Some times buttons included only some of the necessary text. For instance, can you guess what the “Change la…” button in Gmail does? Not until you press it do you realize it changes the label attached to an e-mail. Some apps, like the camera and the picture viewer, lack a menu, when they really need one. But in other ways the Android OS was very cool and fresh. The desktop, for instance, is backed up by a panoramic wallpaper, and as you switch the desktop screen left and right, you get to see a little more of the panorama on each side, creating a nice layered effect. We also liked how almost everything on the desktop could be dragged around easily, and an available third-party app, “Any Cut,” even let us create new desktop shortcuts that would jump to Web pages, speed dial contacts or a whole host of available options. The phone is not only intuitive, it feels infinitely extensible.

Calling - Good

If you thought there were problems with reception on the Apple iPhone 3G, remember that AT&T operates a much larger cellular footprint than T-Mobile, and be very afraid. We had serious reception issues everywhere we went, whether we were in New York City or the nearby New Jersey suburbs. We weren’t surprised to have trouble with T-Mobile’s nascent 3G HSDPA network, which isn’t even a year old, but we were shocked when we lost even simple cell phone reception in Morristown, a large suburban town 30 miles from New York. Call quality was fine. Though we did detect a slightly metallic tinge to voices, our callers reported no trouble hearing us. Still, reception was so bad that we had trouble running our battery tests, as the phone cut out numerous times in the 6 hours we spent trying to wear the battery down. Even that 6 hour number seems suspicious to us, and we’re sure that when HSDPA reception improves to the point of being reliable, we’ll see it drop by a couple hours.

For calling features, the Android OS is powerful and intuitve. Contacts were downloaded directly from our Gmail address book, and we count ourselves lucky that we’ve been maintaining a Gmail contact list for some time. Otherwise, there’s no way to synchronize contacts with a PC or other online address book until a third-party developer creates a way. Remember that mantra, it will come up often.

The phone packs all of our favorite calling features from the get-go. The speakerphone was loud, though not as overpowering as we like. Speaker-independent voice dialing was accurate in all of our tests, grabbing names easily from the address book or dialing numbers as we called them out. The T-Mobile G1 manages exceptional control over conference calls, allowing us to join and then splinter individual calls from the party as we saw fit.

Messaging - Very good

We’ve already hammered the T-Mobile G1’s keyboard enough (pun intended), so we won’t dwell on this problematic issue. Needless to say, though, that Apple hit the nail on the head when they realized that auto-correction is the way to go. Even for a hardware keyboard such as this one, we wish the T-Mobile G1 would do a better job fixing our mistakes as we make them. Still, the T-Mobile G1’s text editor can cut, copy and paste, while the Apple iPhone 3G cannot, so we’ll give credit where it’s due.

For e-mail and Instant Messaging, if you’re already a Google user, as we happen to be, you’re in luck, because the T-Mobile G1 sets up these accounts automatically as you complete the setup process. Even if you don’t use Gmail, though, the T-Mobile G1 will do a fine job setting up POP and IMAP accounts, and had no trouble with our Yahoo address. IM clients are also available for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, and the phone can maintain open chats in simultaneous protocols. SMS messaging was also very easy, and the phone had no trouble attaching our photos and sound files, or creating new audio recording to be sent immediately as an MMS message.

Music - Very good

The T-Mobile G1 comes packed with an Amazon MP3 store app, but Amazon holds no exclusivity over this phone. In fact, because the platform is so open, another MP3 store could open at any time, and we expect to see streaming media apps like Pandora make their way to the T-Mobile G1 soon. The Amazon store gave us some trouble and lacked real instructions or settings to adjust our Amazon one-click account, but we somehow managed to settle the problems on our desktops and got the store working smoothly. Once it works, the Amazon store offers full-bitrate, inexpensive and most-importantly unlocked music downloads, including full-album queues. It isn’t as pretty as the iTunes music store, but it offers a similar selection at a better price under much better terms.

The built-in music player is also pretty good, though not very advanced. The T-Mobile G1’s music app offers basic playback controls and playlist creation, but lacks a dedicated EQ or any cool features, like a visualizer or mood-sensing software. Still, as with every app on the phone, it wouldn’t be too difficult for a third-party developer to step in, and at the time of writing we’re already seeing apps like TuneWiki step up and offer more music playback features, in this case downloadable lyrics for songs. To its credit, we like the way the default player will jump to YouTube or the Amazon store if you hold your finger on a song title or artist name. It’s a nice bit of integration you won’t find on other smartphones.

Because these music options are so interesting, we’re especially perturbed that there is no headphone jack on the T-Mobile G1. Like the HTC Touch Diamond, the T-Mobile G1 only uses a mini-USB port. The included headphones do not offer an adapter to use your own cans, either, but instead simply pair a headphone and microphone combo with a mini-USB plug. Any HTC headphone adapter will work with the T-Mobile G1, but this means hunting down more accessories, and more awkward dongles. It’s a serious omission on HTC’s part, and we’re bothered that this seems to be the direction the company is taking in their recent smartphone designs.

Video - Mediocre

There is no video player on the T-Mobile G1, and even the available third-party option does not work. Let this sink in a moment, because this is a serious waste of the delightful 320 by 480 pixel screen, and it seems like simple laziness on the part of the phone’s creators. YouTube works very nicely in its own app, as it should since Google owns YouTube, but if you want to load your own files, you’re stuck. The third-party “Video Player” app is supposed to play video, obviously, but we tried myriad formats, including MPEG-4, DivX-encoded .AVI files and even Windows Mobile Videos. Occasionally, we would see a screen or two flicker by, but then the app would tell us the video couldn’t be played. Surely a third-party will come around soon to rescue this phone, but as it stands the lack of a video player is a serious disappointment.

Web browsing - Very good

The T-Mobile G1 isn’t using the new Google Chrome Web browser, but the browser on the phone is simple and effective nonetheless. Complicated pages, including our own image-heavy homepage, came through with no trouble, and the responsive touchscreen made browsing through pages a snap. Even better, Google has an accelerating mini-map that you can open to fly through extra-long pages, like the New York Times homepage, with ease. There weren’t any features on the T-Mobile G1’s browser that you won’t find elsewhere, so don’t expect Flash or even Google’s own Docs Web app to work properly. But for straight Web browsing, the T-Mobile G1 was a solid performer.

Location-based services - Very good

For GPS navigation, the T-Mobile G1 is just as bad as the Apple iPhone 3G, with no turn-by-turn directions yet available (though both companies claim such apps are not prohibited on their devices). With the G1, however, its easy to get the feeling that turn-by-turn directions are beside the point, as the phone has numerous other impressive tricks up its sleve. First there is the Google Street View. The T-Mobile G1 will not only load up a Street View image, it will also navigate the image using the built-in accelerometer. Lift the phone up above your head and the Street View image aims skyward. Even more unique is the built-in compass. In Street View this means that if you physically turn around with the phone in your hand, the view on the screen will match your action and actually turn around to show you the other side of the road. It’s an amazing effect. We’re not sure it’s useful, yet, but the feature is rife with possibilities.

Some of the location-based services already available from third-party developers are truly astounding. While the Apple iPhone seems content to offer nice social networking and dinner recommendations using that phone’s GPS, the T-Mobile G1 has some truly innovative apps available. Our favorite is probably Locale, which can remember your location and change the phone’s profile when you go there again. So, set the phone to recognize your local movie theater and it will automatically turn itself to silent mode so you don’t disturb your fellow patrons. Set it to recognize your office and it will change the alerts accordingly. It’s a simple but effective app.

Camera - Very good

Perhaps the biggest surprise for us with the T-Mobile G1 was with the quality of the phone’s camera. This is one of the best cameraphones we’ve ever used, and it produces images that are even better than many of the name-branded lenses attached to Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones. Colors were rich and vibrant, perhaps a bit too saturated but to a pleasant effect. The auto focus also helped significantly, and details seemed sharp in most images. We’re usually very critical of cameraphone imaging, but the T-Mobile G1 is the real deal, and it produces images with its 3-megapixel sensor that we can finally call print-worthy.

# Flowers

It wasn’t just the eye-popping red in this picture that impressed us. The individual petals are distinct and detailed, as well.

# Staring dog

The dog was unfortunately over-exposed in this bright daylight shot. But we’re almost willing to forgive, considering the detail in the blacktop road and the blades of grass.

# Self portrait

Colors looked great in this shot, though we were a bit blurry. Still, judging from the image, it looks as though the autofocus simply concentrated on the pine needles behind us, which came out more clear and distinct than we did. A self-portrait mirror would have helped. More camera settings would be even better.

# Fall foliage

# More fall foliage

Two foliage shots that show off just how much color the T-Mobile G1 manages to eke out of a scene. The blues in the sky are almost too rich, but we’ll take them, considering how sharp these images look.

Price and availability

The T-Mobile G1 is available now for $180.