T-Mobile G1 Review – The original Android smartphone

Originally published at Pocketnow on 11/8/2008  – 1, 2, 3

INTRODUCTION

    As many of you may know, T-Mobile was the first carrier in the USA to release HTC’s first phone (the HTC Wallaby) which was also the first full touch screen smart phone available in North America. It was running Windows Mobile, then known as Pocket PC Phone Edition and, at the time, was the most powerful Smartphone around. That was six years ago.

    Now, T-Mobile has released HTC’s first phone that does not run Windows Mobile. The G1 runs the Open Handset Alliance and Google’s first attempt at a Smartphone operating system called Android.  The following review will primarily look at the G1’s offering from the perspective of a heavy user of Windows Mobile. Read on for the revealing review!

WHAT’S HOT

     The big thing about the T-Mobile G1 is that it runs a new operating system called Android, which is open-source and free. To the average consumer, that means practically nothing, so the other big thing about the G1 is that it syncs with Google’s services such as Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts.  It also supports Google Maps, and for the first time on a mobile device, Google Maps’ Street View.  So if you use Gmail and Google for everything, then you should be very excited about this phone.  In fact, it requires you to log in with (or sign up for) a Gmail account when you boot the phone.  You aren’t even allowed to use it without a Gmail account!  So don’t try to set it up in an area without a data connection, ’cause it won’t work and you can’t turn on WiFi from there, either.

    Just like Windows Mobile, developers are allowed to create any type of program they would like in order to enhance the smartphone experience on Android. However, there are supposedly no restrictions.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.  Open-source software has never become very popular in the public view, probably because giving it away doesn’t leave you much money for marketing.  Windows Mobile has had few restrictions for years and supports many many different types of devices. The bad news is that this type of model often leads to a difficulty for developers to create applications that can be supported on such a wide variety of hardware.  Currently, this is not a problem for Android since there is only one device that runs it on the market today.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX

    The T-Mobile G1 comes with a Mini-USB sync cable (same as other HTC devices), USB AC adapter, stereo headphones, and manuals.  There is no software CD for your desktop computer because there is no desktop syncing interface at all. 

Check out our unboxing video, and try to figure out where Wal-Mart is.

THE DEVICE

    Let’s talk specs. The G1 uses the same Qualcomm MSM7201A CPU clocking at 528MHz than does the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. The capacitive touchscreen is 3.2″ and has a resolution of 320×480, making for a pixel density of 180ppi (the Diamond has a 285ppi screen, and the iPhone has a 164ppi screen). Running on quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900) and dualband UMTS (1700/2100), the G1 packs 256MB ROM and 192MB of RAM. Also included is Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, WiFi (b & g), aGPS and microSD for memory expansion. The camera on back is 3.2MP and includes autofocus but no flash. Powering it all is a 1150mAh battery. For even more specs, check out PDAdb.net.

Here’s our hardware tour video of the G1.

    The device is a bit larger than what we’ve been used to lately, but it still feels good to hold. Unfortunately, the build quality is a bit lacking, and you can hear creaking sounds when squeezing the device between the battery cover and sliding screen piece. Even squeezing its sides will make a noise.

    When the screen is slid up to show the keyboard, you still have a big hump on the right side which may interfere with typing characters on the right side of the keyboard. However, it does give you a good grip and easy thumb-access to the trackball, menu button, home and back keys.

With full brightness on, the screen is still fairly usable outdoors during the day. There is no automatic brightness control.

The screen slides out in a loud arching motion to reveal the hardware keyboard. This is the only way you can enter text on the device.

The keyboards buttons are spaced out well, but they’re too flat and difficult to feel for.

The hardware buttons are very flat and difficult to feel with your fingers. The small trackball in the middle works quite well and seems to be more accurate than the Blackberries in everything except the web browser.

On the left side, there are volume up/down buttons

Here’s a close up of the volume up/down buttons. It’s just a simple rocker switch.

At the bottom, you’ll see a ExtUSB jack and microphone hole. I’ve come to love the ExtUSB jack instead of having separate audio/charging/sync jacks because now I only need to plug in one wire to perform all those functions at the same time.

The right side includes a camera button.

The top end is completely void of any hardware buttons or controls.

Here you see a view of the microSD slot. It’s a bit difficult to find if you don’t know where to look.

    On the back is the 3.2MP camera, along with the reflection mirror, the external speaker and a “with Google” logo.  Is that a complete sentence?  What is with Google?  There is some nice space to the left of that logo to place your own words as stickers. The battery cover here on the back is made of a rubbery “soft touch” material very similar to that which was introduced with the HTC Prophet (i-mate JAMin).

Behind the battery cover is the 1150mAh battery and SIM card slot.

Here you’ll see from left to right, the Touch Diamond, T-Mobile G1, Blackberry 8820, and Treo 800w. 

Here you can see a comparison of the thickness. From top to bottom you see the T-Mobile G1, HTC Touch Diamond, Palm Treo 800w, and Blackberry 8820.

Here is a hardware tour video.

Software

    The Home screen is very basic. If it wasn’t for the big clock widget, you’d think this was an old obsolete Macintosh. There are application icons on the desktop and they have labels under them. Nothing special here.  You can however swipe your finger horizontally to get 2 more desktop area panels to the left and right.  A tap-n-hold on the desktop will let you add more application icons, widgets or other shortcuts to the desktop.  This is the only visually user-customizable part of the G1’s operating system.  You can change the background image here and manually arrange the icons/widgets, but that’s it. There are no themes that will change the look and feel of the entire operating system like on Windows Mobile, so that means all of your other applications are not going to look nearly as pretty as your home screen.

    The big grey tab opens a drawer full of application icons. This is similar to the Windows Start Menu, except that it’s not labeled with a logo.  There are no settings to arrange the icons in a different order, list view, or smaller icons, however you can type the name of a program and this drawer area will filter the options to match what you typed. This is an excellent feature. Windows Mobile Pro has a similar function that jumps to the area of the list that you’ve typed, but I like Android’s filtering a lot too.

Here we see a tap-and-hold menu on the home screen’s desktop. This is what you use to add more shortcuts or widgets.

Here is a runthrough of the interface of the G1.

An Alarm clock is in the programs folder. Nothing special here, but it’s useful.

There’s an Amazon MP3 application where you can browse, preview, purchase and download DRM-free music. This is a nice feature and I wish there was an application like this for Windows Mobile.

    The web browser uses on-screen static zoom buttons to zoom in and out.  The 4 way arrow button in the bottom right will let you zoom out completely and move a magnification box around the page to find an area to zoom in on. Using only the keyboard and hardware buttons, it’s pretty difficult to get these buttons to appear. 

The browser also supports multiple windows that you can switch to in the Windows dialog found within the “Menu” menu. Opening too many windows will slow you down though, so try to keep it light.

Here is a runthrough of the browser.

The calculator is very basic, and has big finger-friendly buttons

The calendar has all the basic views and features you’d expect.  The month view shows small time-slot areas to the right of each day to indicate how busy you are that day.

The Calendar downloads multiple Google Calendars including Public ones. Oddly, the “Heroes” TV schedule calendar I added to my account did not show up, while the Solar-lunar one did.

    Contacts is a basic list of white on black type.  After you start moving the list with your finger, a large grey tab appears on the right. If you can catch it before it goes away, you can drag it up and down like a real scroll bar in order to get to different parts of the list. The letters appear in the middle as you scroll with the scroll bar tab.

The Favorites tab lets you save contacts that you call a lot.

The call log naturally lists what calls you’ve made. The only option in the menu here is to clear all calls. There are no filtering capabilities.

    When the keyboard is extended, the Dialer tab tells you to use the keyboard. Oddly typing letters on the keyboard in this mode enters numbers, and the letters represent numbers as if they were in a T9 layout. For example, E is 3, W is 9, etc. It’s very confusing. 

In portrait mode there are numeric buttons here, but pressing them does not auto-search your contacts using corresponding T9 letter assignments.

The email application is very basic. It connects to IMAP and POP3 accounts, and can attempt to auto-detect settings, but that didn’t work for my custom domain accounts.

    The folder view does not list the number of unread messages in each folder and you have to use the hardware Back button in order to get to the listing of accounts.  You can’t swipe the screen left or right with your finger like you can with TouchFLO enabled Windows Mobile devices.

When you open a message, you’ll see large buttons at the bottom.  There’s also a “Show pictures” button that will let you download images embedded in HTML emails.

And it does nicely support HTML email display.  The three buttons remain at the bottom of the screen at all times, and they tend to take up a lot of room.

There’s another separate email application for Gmail, it doesn’t work at all if there are data connection problems or you’re in Airplane mode. 

Conversations are collapsed into one item in the Inbox. You can star and label messages just as in web based Gmail.

Opening a conversation shows email messages in an instant-messenger-style thread that you can scroll through.

The instant messenger program lets you log into AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger. Google Talk is logged in automatically to your phone’s Gmail account. 

Google Maps is about the same as any other version of Google Maps on any other mobile phone except for its support for the digital compass and “Street View”.

    Notice the satellite dish icon in the status bar at the top. This indicates that Google Maps is using the GPS receiver to determine your location. You have to turn on the GPS in the Settings area of the phone before any applications are able to access GPS information. I was looking for the “Use GPS” command in Google Maps, and since it wasn’t there assumed that it was going to use GPS automatically when required (as many Windows Mobile programs do).  This is not so and it has to be turned on manually.  Also, the Maps application here is only capable of displaying your position on a downloaded map through the internet. It will not use voice-prompts to direct you to a chosen destination.  Eight years ago on Pocket PCs, that was the main reason we wanted GPS capabilities – to let the device tell us where to go.  Android’s Google Maps software is very limited in that respect and requires much more user interaction.

    The Android Market application is still in beta, but it allows you to browse a variety of Android compatible applications that you can easily download and install to your device. This makes extending your devices capabilities very simple.  Windows Mobile has many different ways of installing 3rd party software, and that makes it quite complicated.  On the other hand, the applications available on the Android Market right now are not terribly impressive or useful.  How many tip calculators and weather apps do you need? 

The Messages application is for SMS and MMS messages. It shows SMS conversations listed by the name of the person you’re talking to, just like Windows Mobile 6.1.

When you open a conversation of SMS messages, you see the threaded list like so. It only shows the time the message was received if it was received with the last day. That is not to say within the last 24 hours.

If you tap and hold on a message you can see some message details in order to figure out what time it was received.

The music application supports MP3, WMA, M4A, WAV, MIDI, OGG, and AMR audio files. There doesn’t appear to be any skinning or theme capabilities in this application either.

Here’s a look at multimedia.

Of course, T-Mobile’s MyFaves application is here. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

    The pictures application is nothing special. It shows thumbnails of pictures on your device, and you can tap them to enlarge. When you enlarge a photo, large left/right arrows appear above it along with the +/- zoom buttons at the bottom. There are not finger gestures supported here, but when you zoom in, you can pan around with your finger.

    The settings item in the programs folder gives you access to settings for Wireless controls, Call settings, Sound & display, Data synchronization, Security & Location, Applications (uninstall, shortcuts), SD card & Phone Storage, Date & Time, Text auto-correction, and About.

The YouTube application is pretty good. Videos play smoothly, you can email links to the videos from within the “menu” and you can even read comments.

    The voice dialer application lets you call contacts or phone numbers using voice recognition.  It does not require training, but it cannot be activated from a Bluetooth headset. It also does not support any of the other features found on Microsoft Voice Command such as text-to-speech reading of incoming emails, text messages, appointments, and caller ID. It also doesn’t support commands for playing music in your media library, asking about your schedule, launching programs, checking phone battery levels, time, setting flight-mode, etc.

The camera application is extremely basic and completely void of settings or features.  You can’t change the resolution, switch to video record mode, adjust colors, etc. None of that.

Here are the two options you have in the Camera settings.

The photo quality is just as bad as most of the camera phones out there other than the Touch Diamond/Pro and Nokia N95 that is. Click the image above to see a full resolution sample. 

Over the air system updates is great though. Windows Mobile does supposedly have this capability in its Windows Update application, but it has never been used.  Android’s has been used here, but it didn’t change anything noticable.

BATTERY

    The 1150mAh battery life is nothing special for a smartphone with so many functions.  Depending on how much you use the G1, you can expect to recharge the device at least once a day. The good news is that it seems to recharge very quickly.

HELP SUPPORT

       When you first boot the G1 it walks you through a mini tutorial about using the notifications bar and scrolling through lists with your finger. This is very useful and a nice touch for increasing the ease-of-learning factor.  You also get a very nicely designed full color manual. It’s worth a read too, since it will teach you some useful keyboard shortcuts. Furthermore, you can dial 611 from your T-Mobile phone at any time 24 hours a day 7 days a week to talk to some one about any problems you may have. You can also walk into any T-Mobile store for support.

BUGS AND WISHES

    It’s obvious from the G1 that Android is a very young and unrefined operating system. Let’s start with the software. 

• No on-screen keyboard, handwriting/character recognition, or any kind of input option other than the hardware keyboard.
• Voice Dialing cannot be activated by the Bluetooth headset.
• Bluetooth stack only supports the headset profile. No file transfer, no serial ports, no wireless stereo, no PAN, etc.
• No video recording capability.  No video emails or video MMS messaging.
• No task or To-Do list software.
• No note-taking software.
• No Exchange ActiveSync support (Even the Samsung Instinct’s email program can connect to OWA).
• No IMAP IDLE support.
• Can’t choose where sent messages get saved in IMAP folders.
• No predictive word/phrase completion.
• Hardware buttons required to access menu, and home screens (No touch screen navigation).
• Data connection to Google required at first boot.
• Voice recording capability only available for MMS messages.
• Can’t open or save PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint files from the Browser or via email.
• Can’t select multiple email/SMS messages for deletion.
• Data connection often disconnects itself and stays inaccessible for periods.
• No file manager included.
• Can’t use stylus for more accurate screen interaction.
• Security pattern can easily be guessed by looking at the finger grease trails on the screen.
• No “Real” GPS navigation software available.
• Cut/Copy/Paste only available in text fields.  You cannot copy content from other places like web pages.

When I first booted the G1, I was forced to log-in with a Gmail account, but even that wouldn’t work for the first 3 attempts.

3rd Party applications are not without problems.

Even the native IM application has issues sometimes.

There are some issues with the “Market” application as well.

In terms of hardware design, some of the problems are:

• Very large device. You’ll definitely notice it in your pocket.
• Device makes a lot of creaking noises when you squeeze it. Both the battery cover, and screen sliding mechanism make these creaking sounds.
• Sliding screen is very loud.

PURCHASING

    T-Mobile G1 costs $180 with a two-year service contract and is available from T-Mobile.com or any T-Mobile retail store.  A $35 monthly data plan is required and unlike Windows Mobile, the phone is barely functional without it.

PROS

• Completely navigable via hardware keys
• Includes Google Street View with Digital Compass
• Syncs with GMail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar
• Support for multiple and public Google Calendars
• Over the air system updates
• Trackball navigation
• Customizable program launching keyboard shortcut combinations
• Capacitive screen is very sensitive
• Hardware keyboard
• Interesting and innovative 3rd party application potential
• Less functional limitations than the iPhone

CONS

• Plethora of functional limitations compared to Windows Mobile and Symbian S60
• Large form factor
• Poor build quality
• No upcoming appointments listing on the home screen
• No T-Mobile HotSpot@Home support
• Can’t sync with Outlook 
• Can’t sync with Exchange 
• Can’t sync with anything except Google 
• No video recording 
• No tasks/to-do lists, notes, Office, PDF applications
• Can only use large inaccurate fingers on the touch screen
• Flat hardware buttons are tough to use

Value
Ease of Use
Features
Overall

What do these ratings mean?

OVERALL IMPRESSION

    It’s pretty easy to see right away that Android and the T-Mobile G1 are not targeted at all towards any type of power user or business smartphone user. It is squarely targeted to the consumer.  This is obvious by the lack of high-end software capabilities, lack of business related features, lack of security, and the plethora of consumer-oriented applications in the Android Market store.  The T-Mobile G1 and Android in general seem to be designed to get the iPhone-hype crowd on the mobile internet and more-specifically, onto Google’s services. 

    Many people think that Android’s promise is in its open-sourceness and programmers’ ability to do “anything” to the operating system and applications running on it. Well, maybe so, but so far I see a lot of very buggy, unimpressive applications in the Android Market.  There are a few interesting items, such as the app that can scan barcodes on products with the phone’s camera and then look up product information online while also offering price comparisons.  That’s great if you do a lot of shopping, but our economy isn’t exactly ripe for that just yet.  It’s also pretty easy to notice a huge fragmentation of consistency in user interface design in Android even at this early stage.  There’s no central theme/skinning capability so application developers just design whatever they feel like.

    So if you’re a big Gmail user and don’t care about many of the high-end features and business tools found on other platforms, then the T-Mobile G1 and Android may be a good fit.