Renaissance Trophy Wife

Although I love tech gadgets, my wallet doesn’t love them as much, so I usually spend a fair amount of time in retail stores to test drive new toys before actually taking the plunge.  I previously wrote about another G1 that I’m lusting for… but now I’m going to have to put this one on my list as well!

The T-Mobile G1 (Android OS by Google) drew a lot of interest in its recent debut.  So, when I was offered a trial unit for a couple of weeks (thanks, Lori!), I jumped at the chance to get my hands on it– and am now presenting it for your viewing pleasure.  Have fun looking! (And try not to drool too much on the keyboard.)

Disclaimer:  While it would’ve been awesome to get a free G1, I did not receive any products or compensation in exchange for this review.  The phone was a trial unit and returned to the company at the end of the 2-week period.

On to the review!

First Impressions

Here’s what you get, straight out of the packaging:

Ready, Set, Go!

The G1 is easy to plug and play– just pop in your SIM card and charge.  The startup screen asks for your Google account info, and thereafter syncs your email, calendar, and contacts.  If you don’t have a gmail account already, it’ll only take a few extra minutes to set one up.

You also have the choice to enable or disable GPS on the phone, an option many people may appreciate.

The startup screen has 4 basic menu buttons; you can add more if you choose.

G1 startup screen

Use the touchscreen to scroll to the left or right; the left gets you a blank screen to populate with the icons of your choosing, while the right gets you a Google search bar.

G1 left-hand screen

G1 right-hand screen

The little gray tab at the bottom (consistent across all 3 screens), when scrolled upwards, displays the settings/options menu, allowing you to customize whatever screen you’re on.

G1 menu

Pressing the “menu” button also allows you access to customizable options:

Now, I realize I’ve only displayed shots of the phone in portrait mode.  The screen automatically shifts to landscape mode once the top screen is moved.  What I really like about this is the touchscreen functionality AND the tactile keyboard.  When compared to my cousin’s iPhone, I’m able to type much more quickly on the keyboard, a la BlackBerry.  Even with my tiny fingers, I keep making typos on the iPhone– and especially when using both thumbs.  Not so much a problem here.

The phone feels sturdy and more tactile/less slick than the iPhone.  Does that make sense? The body coating almost feels rubberized, rather than a smooth finish.  I liked it since it felt less likely to slip out of my hands when turning it from portrait to landscape or opening/closing it.  It really reminds me of the Give One, Get One laptop campaign– those laptops are rugged, meant to be played with and taken apart, then put back together.  The G1 has a similarly rugged feel– like the engineers made a conscious choice not to pretty up the aesthetics too much.

Keyboard buttons are amply spaced (better than the BlackBerry), but minor things like layout differences tripped me up a few times– ie, I kept hitting the “menu” key when I was trying to shift.  With more time, it shouldn’t be difficult to adapt to this layout, though.  The trackball scrolled smoothly and I liked how it functioned essentially as a mouse wheel when you’re browsing in landscape mode.  That’s a very ergonomic and intuitive piece of design.

Another note on the sturdy construction: watch out for your fingers when you close the phone!  They don’t mess around with the spring.

Size matters: the head-to-head

Officially, the G1’s dimensions are 4.60″ x 2.16″ x 0.62”, compared to the iPhone 3G: 4.5″ x 2.4″ x 0.48″ and the BlackBerry Curve: 4.2″ x 2.4″ x 0.6″.  Obviously for a full-screen experience it’s a little larger than the iPhone 3G– I just threw the BlackBerry stats in there since that’s what we had for comparison as well.

Here’s the visual:  (the iPhone’s screen is darker since my cousin is good about putting it on energy save…)

The 3 Musketeers (note: iPhone is on energy saving setting)

Just for fun: G1 vs toy RAZR (lifesize)

And you can see here the thickness compared to the iPhone:

Since the iPhone has curved, tapered edges and the G1 is more boxy, that may also make it feel a little larger in the hand.

Need for Speed

This will likely depend first and foremost on the strength of the network in your area.  I live in a large metro area with pretty good coverage from all the major providers, so I didn’t notice a difference between the G1 and the iPhone.  Phone service is good; I had nice crisp voice quality and no dropped calls, although I didn’t really spend much time talking on the G1.

I have an hour-long commute and used that time to play with the browser and addons–service was great and images loaded quickly.  No signal disruption occurred except when going through tunnels.  I did find that image-heavy sites loaded much faster on the G1 than on my Opera Mini browser on the BlackBerry (on a 3G network), but frankly I expected that.

The G1 also has WiFi capabilities, and picked up on my home and office networks easily.  If there was ever a transition from 3G to WiFi in the city, it didn’t make a noticeable difference in my browsing.  Battery life was also quite good– I was able to do quite a few hours of image-heavy web browsing before getting a low power warning.

Browser display is slightly larger on the G1 than on the iPhone– as you can see in the image below, the G1 (bottom) displays only about half the wikipedia article, whereas the iPhone resizes the page so the entire width is displayed, but with smaller text.  It wasn’t an issue for me to scroll over, either with the touchscreen or the trackball, but just wanted to point that small detail out.

Bells and Whistles

This is where the G1 is carving out its niche.  Android is an open-source platform, and already there are legions of coders developing apps for the phone.  You can search apps by category and download them onto the phone.  One of the coolest ones is the barcode scanner app, which I immediately wanted to try.

As you might or might not be able to tell from the pic below, the camera resolution is great– however I forgot to download test photos from the camera to display here.  Sorry!

Here I’m scanning the first thing we could get our hands on– fruit leather snacks from Trader Joe’s. Yum!

All you do is start up the app, then aim the camera at the barcode, and the phone will capture and analyze the image, then pop up a list of prices for the item at various online retailers. You can also use the phone’s in-built GPS to give a list of shops and prices in the local area. The drawback to this app, however, is that the database of items is somewhat limited.  It didn’t find any prices for the fruit leather, which is understandable given that it’s unique to one store. But even at home, there was no price info for a Pilates book I bought off Amazon, which surprised me.  I thought ISBN numbers would be one of the first things recognized by the database.

The app successfully scanned a Kiss My Face hand lotion:

I got mine for $1.99 at Grocery Outlet since I knew that was a good price… and now my RTW bargain shopping sense is validated by the G1!

All in all, the barcode scanning abilities are a fun little utility if you’re a bargain hunter and compusively price check items when you’re shopping.  However, you can’t rely on it entirely just yet– be aware that many more products need to be logged into the database to make it a truly powerful shopping tool.

A couple other apps that I liked–

Ecorio is a carbon footprint calculator that allows you to put in your commute mode, time and distance, then tracks your carbon savings.

There were various versions of mortgage calculators, which I had fun playing with, although according to them, my down payment fund is nowhere near big enough to buy anything bigger than a square of sidewalk concrete.

Amazon has an mp3 store app that allows you to download DRM-free tracks to your phone– kinda like the direct iTunes download on the iPhone.  I didn’t want to buy any mp3s, but apparently this app only works when you’re on WiFi.  You can queue up the tracks you want in the meantime, and the app will automatically download them once you do get to a WiFi connection.

And of course, the games!  Ahh, PacMan…  it’s certainly nostalgic, although nothing like the ancient Atari setup I learned on decades ago.

There are even cool biometric applications that take pictures of your iris to allow you access to the phone.  Talk about Minority Report-level password protection!

Pay to Play

The G1 (in black, bronze, or white) retails for $400 on the T-Mobile site.  With the $220 “instant discount” for purchasing a plan, the handset comes down to $180.  And apparently, T-Mobile offers a “developer handset” for $400 that gives the user access to the full range of software features without having to go through customer service to get the phone unlocked.

It’d be way too expensive for me to get out of my current contract, but if I was not on a contract and looking for a new phone, this would definitely be my top contender.

The Final Verdict

If Santa really wants to get someone a G1 for the holidays, I’m your girl!  (Oh, and all of my family members and friends who saw the phone want one too.)

The G1 is a nifty new phone with great functionality on a stable, powerful platform.  While the hardware is decent (and will be refined in future versions), the draw is really in the new Android OS along with the applications that run on it.

The developers are out there in force, thinking up awesome new apps every day.  If you want a device that will go far and beyond the normal email/phone/music/camera capabilities, the new apps definitely transform the G1 into a powerful and fun personal shopper/concierge/tour guide/entertainment center.  A renaissance phone that does everything, for a renaissance trophy wife?  I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I’d love to hear if you’ve tried the G1, or just want one– please let me know in the comments!  Also, I tried to keep the review fairly focused on major phone features, but if you have a question, I’d be happy to give you more detail about my experience.