Review: T-Mobile G1

Finger touch control on a smartphone is now the gold standard. Yet, what makes a phone remarkable is the underlying technology — the ability to quickly find your music, make a phone call, or look up an e-mail. The operating system allows a touch-screen phone to function, and allows you to add extra apps on a whim.

That’s what makes the T-Mobile G1 worth buying. It is not an exceptional hardware device, although it is still leagues above many smartphones: it has a touch-screen, a microSD slot, a proprietary headphone jack, and a bright and colourful display. It is an amazing software device, challenging even the venerable desktop PC. We’ll explain those OS perks in a moment, but let’s cover the hardware first.

Specs & info

Price: contract
Operating system: Android
Processor: Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 MHz
Memory: ROM: 256 MB RAM: 192 MB, MicroSD slot
Dimensions: 117.7 mm x 55.7 mm x 17.1 mm
Weight: 158 grams
Display size: 3.2
Display resolution: 320 x 480
Expansion slot: MicrosSD

Right out of the box, the G1 looks impressive. It has a curved end, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and finger-touch control to move up or down, and side to side (but not true gesture control as with the iPhone). There’s a tiny trackball you can use to make selections. Bluetooth and 802.11g Wi-Fi support is great for non-GSM connectivity, although your Bluetooth headset will not play stereo music.

The G1 feels hefty yet durable at 158 grams, and comes in black or white. Unfortunately, battery life is not that great — it only lasts one day of occasional use, or about 2 hours of continual use with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi disabled. The 3.2-inch TFT-LCD display runs in 320 x 480 resolution, a tad smaller than the iPhone, and — amazingly — there is no built-in video player on the G1 at all. There’s a GPS receiver on the phone — disabled by default for some reason — that works with Google Maps. The 3.2 megapixel camera takes average photos, with few shutter controls.

Really, we could yammer on about the hardware all day, but the G1 is not remarkably innovative compared to the Samsung Instinct or HTC’s Touch Pro. What is impressive: the Google Android operating system. First-time users notice the OS right away — you immediately start thinking about loading add-ons, and the Android Market makes it easy to do so. Apps are somewhat limited at launch: a contact manager, Gmail, a browser. You can add Pac Man, a Skype applet called iSkoot, a weather app, a location-tracking tool called LifeAware, and an IM program that works with Google Talk. Yet, the promise is for many more add-ons that let you find bus routes, or look up nearby friends to play online games, or maybe just type up long documents and beam them to a co-worker over Wi-Fi. The possibilities are endless, especially since developers can quickly add their app to the Market, and because other companies — e.g., Motorola and Asus — have already announced Android-compatible handsets. Right now, Android has all the momentum, even compared to the iPhone.

The OS itself has a clean look and is pretty intuitive. Although more than usable out of the box it would benefit from an update to iron out some of the interface inconsistencies that only really emerge on real world use, and to fix a couple of glaring ommissions. There is as yet no soft keyboard: even firing off a quick two word text message requires you to slide out the full qwerty.

So what’s the problem with the G1 compared to other “touch” smartphones? There’s no obvious detriment, and the G1 is a useful phone. Currently, Android is both a blessing and a curse. It is an amazing OS, yet it is still a work in progress and there are only a handful of useful apps. If you are already using a Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phone, you have many hundreds of apps to choose from, and the iPhone is also ahead of the game. But this is a revealing admission: if more innovative apps for Android start to appear over the next few months, guess which phone we’ll have on our belt clip?

Essential Verdict

Performance: 8/10
The battery is a disappointment, but the device runs smoothly

Design: 7/10
Not the most stylish, but functional and ergonomic

Features: 8/10
All expected hardware features are here; some software ommissions

Value for Money: 7/10
Look for a good package for this data-heavy device

Overall score: 7/10
A phone and platform with almost unlimited potential, but not yet the polished product

Review originally published in Smartphone & PDA Essentials. Words by John Brandon.

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