The first thing I wanted to do when I got the new T-Mobile G1 Android Google Phone was turn it on. It shows a few nice animated tutorial screens that show you how to use your finger to scroll through things and access the notifications window shade. This is definitely good because those user interface elements are not as discoverable as they should be.
Next you’re forced to either sign in with a Gmail account or create a new one. Since I do have an unused Gmail account already, I tried to sign in. It gave me the error shown below. I tried again and again and again. Same error. Finally, I decided to go to the create new account option, since that was the only other thing I could do. Went there, then cancelled out of it. Tried again to log in with my regular Gmail account and that worked. Hurray! The G1 then dutifully downloaded all of the spam messages in my account as well as the contacts and calendar data of which there was none.
Of course, being a professional, I would want to sync with my business Exchange account, or at least Outlook on the desktop. Unfortunately this is not possible. You can ONLY sync with Google services. There is a way to export your contacts and calendar from Outlook to CSV files and then import those into Google, but you’ll lose some important things like contact photos, and recurring appointments. That kind of defeats the purpose of having an Exchange account anyway. I suppose if you only ever use Gmail and Google Calendar, this would be okay.
Originally published on Pocketnow on October 29, 2008. More Thought articles from the Pocketnow archive.