T-Mobile G1 - first impressions
T-Mobile must be getting their supply of G1's faster than they thought (either that, or the delivery time estimate they initially gave as a "worst case" estimate), because I got my G1 way faster than I thought I would. I've had it for about six days now, and I've had enough time to have a pretty good idea of what I've gotten myself into...
Here are my impressions thus far. I'll compare and contrast somewhat with the Sidekick, since that's what I've been using the last couple of years, so that's what I've become used to. My experience with the new phone has been, not surprisingly, somewhat of a mixed bag so far.
If you're a new customer, the G1 will cost you $180 with a two year contract. If you're an existing T-Mobile customer, and you're eligble for an upgrade, you'll get the same price (plus an $18 "upgrade fee") if you take a two year contact extension. The price with no contact extension is $450. It's worth the two year committment almost no matter what your circumstances are, because the early termination fee is $200, so you still end up (effectively) paying only $400 for the phone even if you cancel before the two years is up. If you're an existing customer, but are not eligible for an upgrade (because you got a previous upgrade deal too recently), you're kind of stuck - depending on when you last upgraded, you'll probably get a discount, but it will still cost more than $180. Best bet in that case is probably to call Customer Care and whine at them, they might cut you a deal. (I've been advised a few times in the past, by people at T-Mobile retail stores, that the Customer Care people can make one-time special deals that they're not allowed to make in the retail stores.) Because of the high cost of the unit, it's worth considering the Equipment Protection coverage on it, at least for a while, even though there's a fairly high deductible (I think it was $150 or $200 last time I looked) - otherwise, if your phone should break outside of the warranty period, you'll be stuck paying full retail to get it replaced. The coverage was about $6.00 per month when I last looked. If you take the Equipment Protection coverage, be sure to keep an eye on the retail price of the phone in the future, to see if it's come down enough to make it not worth carrying the coverage (after the deductible is taken into account). Also remember that, if you want it, you must sign up for Equipment Protection within 14 days of receiving the phone - it won't be available to you after that. And remember, when you cancel, that you won't be able to change your mind.
My first disappointment came as soon as I opened the box, and saw the carrying case they provided. What they give you is a carrying sleeve, with no belt clip. This is totally inadequate for someone like me, that likes to have the phone upon my person at all times. I took a trip to the local T-Mobile store, and came away emptyhanded - they told me they had no G1 cases (not even a "universal" case that it would fit into), and suggested that I'd need to obtain one online. But even that didn't work, since they're only offering one "shell" for the G1 (apparently a hard plastic type), and even that won't be available for purchase until the end of the month. Physically, this phone seems somewhat delicate, and you don't want it knocking around in your pocket, even inside of a carrying sleeve. In the end, I went to Staples and found a reasonably sturdy holster that was intended for Blackberrys and iPhones, but which the G1 just happens to fit into. It cost about $20.00.
First order of business, once I got the phone unpacked, was to open it up to install the SIM card and the battery. This was easier said than done. First, it is not obvious how to get the back cover off - I had to look at the "Getting Started" guide to figure it out. Second, the back cover is rather firmly secured, and kind of flimsy. It takes much more force to get it off than you'd think, and in the process I thought I was going to snap it in half (the cover, not the entire phone). It would have been very frustrating to break the phone before I ever got a chance to use it... But eventually, I was successful. I also had to figure out where the miniSD card goes, because I figured that I was going to have to move my miniSD card from my Sidekick to the G1. This was also not obvious, and I also had to consult the "Getting Started" guide to figure out how to do this too. And, it turned out to be unnecessary, because the G1 ships with a 1 gig miniSD card pre-installed.
It's worth noting that the "Getting Started" guide is the only documentation the phone actually ships with. There is a full manual available, but you have to download it as a PDF file from T-Mobile's web site. Oh, and the G1 doesn't come with a PDF reader, and there isn't one yet available as a third-party application. Catch-22... It would be sort of nice to be able to read the manual for the phone, on the phone itself - but no can do, at least not right now. Similarly, after you activate the phone, you will get a text message from T-Mobile that says "We hope you enjoy your new G1", and which gives a web link to the G1 support web site, and says "Click here to go to the site now". But the G1 support site is totally a Flash site, you really can't view it at all without Flash, and the G1 doesn't come with a Flash plugin (I understand there is now one available, or will be soon, as a third-party application), so you can't do that either.
I let the G1 charge overnight, before attempting to switch over from the Sidekick. While this was going on, I had to transcribe all of the information from my Sidekick address book and notepad to paper. They don't give you an easy way to do move your contacts over. You could save your contacts to your SIM and move them over that way, but that only saves a name and a phone number. The contact list on the Sidekick includes all kinds of other information - each contact can have multiple phone numbers, multiple e-mail addresses, home address, birthday, etc., and that would all be lost. So I set about writing down all this info, for close to 70 contacts, because I figured I'd have to key it into the G1. And I couldn't just transcribe it from the Sidekick to the G1, because once you take out the SIM card, the Sidekick won't operate at all - so no way to have both phones turned on at the same time, even if one couldn't make calls. I later discovered there was an easier way, which I'll talk about momentarily.
Once I was ready, and had my SIM installed in the G1, I went to the My T-Mobile web site to cancel my Sidekick data plan, and activate a G1 data plan. There are two to choose from. First is the "standard" G1 data plan, for $24.95/month; this gives you unlimited web browsing, and up to 400 SMS (text) messages, MMS (picture) messages, IM's, and e-mails. That is not 400 of each kind - the total (sent or received) of SMS, MMS, IM's, and e-mails can be up to 400; if you go over, it's an additional 20 cents for each message over the limit. If you go to the "G1 Plus" data plan, for $34.95/month, you get unlimited messaging as well as web browsing. This is a lot more expensive than the "Sidekick Unlimited" data plan, which gives you unlimited web and messaging for $19.95/month. I chose the G1 Plus data plan, figuring I'd see how it went (I do use messaging an awful lot), and maybe downgrade at a later date if possible.
After doing that, I fired up the phone. The first thing it did was to prompt me to log in with my Google account. So I tried to do that, and it thought about it for a while... and failed. So I tried again, and it failed again. As it turns out, the data plan switch takes a while to happen, it's not instant. It was about an hour before I could actually use the phone, and I understand that adding or switching a data plan can take up to 24 hours worst case. So if possible, you should sign up for your G1 data plan ahead of time.
Once my data plan was active, it logged me in - then it barfed because my Google account did not have a Gmail account associated with it. The phone requires you to be a Gmail user, because it uses Gmail for e-mail (as opposed to the Sidekick, that gives you a completely separate e-mail address for your handheld). So I had to sign up for a Gmail account immediately (I did this via a web browser on a regular computer, but could have done it on the G1 - but in either case, it won't let you proceed until you have a Gmail account). And of course, I could not get any of the account names I wanted, so I had to settle for something sort of stupid. Once I did that, I logged into Google again on the phone, and it was up and running.
It turns out that the phone syncs with your Gmail mail and contacts, and your Google calendar. You can use them from the phone and from a regular computer interchangeably - what you do on a computer automatically shows up on your phone, and vice versa. And you don't need to sync all of your Gmail folders to the phone, you can choose a limited subset that you want to have in both places. Like I said, the sync is automatic, you don't need to do anything to make it happen (though you can manually force a sync if you want to).
I ended up entering all of my contact data via the Gmail Contacts web interface (on a PC), which took about an hour. It all appeared on my phone in short order (contact updates made on the PC showed up on the phone within a couple of minutes). If I'd known I'd be able to do that, I would have signed up for a Gmail account ahead of time, and entered all that data from the Sidekick in advance; it would have gone to the phone automatically when I activated it. But I didn't know that ahead of time. Live and learn.
Once I was finished with all that, it was off to the races...
The G1's interface takes some getting used to. You get both a touchscreen, and a trackball. Navigating around using the touchscreen (doing the "touch and drag" thing, sort of like the iPhone - where it's like you've got the virtual screen under your finger and are pushing it around to be where you want it) is exactly the opposite of using the trackball (where you roll the trackball down to make the screen scroll up, and vice versa). There are some things you really want to use the trackball for, though, like moving to and clicking on web links, especially on pages where they're spaced closely together (yes, you can zoom in, but it takes some extra time).
You get three "virtual desktops", and you switch between them by touch-and-drag on the keyboard, or using the trackball. The main (center) desktop includes a big, ugly graphical analog clock, and icons for some common activities (like the Dialer, web browser, etc.). The right desktop is blank except for a Google search gadget (just type into it to do a Google search without starting the browser manually). The left desktop is totally blank. You can add "activity" icons to all three desktops (roughly corresponding to applications, or various built-in functions).
The display swings open to reveal the QUERTY keyboard. There are a couple of problems with the arrangment. First is the swing-out screen. It seems awfully delicate, like you could accidentially snap the display off quite easily (both Sidekicks I've used have had a similar problem, but the G1 seems even more delicate than either of them). Second is the keys - they're large enough, but they're almost flush against the rest of the device, require very little pressure to press a key, and you don't get much in the way of tactile feedback to let you know you've done it - there's a little, not much. Contrast with the Sidekicks, where the keys are a little more raised, keys need a little more travel before they "press", and there's a "click" you can feel when you press a key. You kind of have to get the feel of it, and just be confident that when you press a key, it is pressed - if you're not looking at the screen, you won't know for sure. Also, on both Sidekicks, the keyboard was relatively centered. On the G1, when you're holding it sideways with the screen open, your left thumb is immediately next to the keyboard, while your left thumb has to travel about a quarter of an inch before it gets to the keyboard. It might not sound like much difference in distance, but it really is, until you get used to it. The thing about the keyboard that gives me the most fits, though, is the hard-wired "Google Search" key. In theory, this gives you one-key access to Google's search engine, at any time. But it's right next to the "Alt" key, which you need to press if you want to enter a "/" character, which you'll probably be doing in the course of web browsing. The problem is, about 25% of the time, I accidentally hit the "Search" key instead of the "Alt" key, which stops whatever I'm doing, and submits whatever I've typed to that point as a Google search. Which is basically never what I want to do (and is really frustrating if you're typing a long URL with several slashes in it). I need to see if there's a way to disable that key entirely.
In the web browser, there is a "virtual cursor" that is sort of where you would be clicking if you pushed down on the trackball, but that cursor is invisible unless you have a link highlighted. In some instances, you can scroll up and down, trying to get to a web link, and you'll find that the display just scrolls very rapidly and it doesn't let you click any links. This is because the "virtual cursor" isn't near enough (horizontally) to any of the links, typically because it's near or beyond the right side of the screen. This was totally confusing the first time it happened to me, I thought that Android (the phone's application platform) had gotten confused. But really, all I needed to do was move over to the left a little bit. Perhaps they'll add a "visible cursor" option to the next release.
The sound quality of the phone is decent, and it includes a feature that I always wanted on the Sidekick - a "virtual keypad" where you can dial a phone number by just touching a keypad displayed on the screen. On the Sidekick, in order to dial a phone number that was not in your contact list, you had to flip open the keyboard, and use the keyboard's number keys to dial (this is why I have so many contacts in my address book...), or by using the trackball to mouse around on the graphical keyboard. This isn't necessary on the G1, though you can do it if you want to.
The phone supports voice dialing, which is good. But only from the handset, which is stupid. You can't voice dial from a Bluetooth headset. And the times when you're using a headset are exactly the times you'd need voice dialing the most. I really hope they fix this.
The G1 has my "favorite" phone gripe, unfortunately, which is that the "normal" ringtones and notification tones (like calendar reminders) aren't nearly loud enough, and the vibrate feature on the phone isn't strong enough. It's actually worse on the G1 than it was on the Sidekick. On the Sidekick, if you missed a notification tone, at least it would "chirp" every 5 minutes until you acknowledged it, so eventually you'd realize that you missed something. On the G1, you get one shot - if you miss the tone the first time, that's it. You'll see a notification icon on the screen next time you look at it, but no more audible notifications will occur.
The network speed is decent, and it "feels" faster than the Sidekick (though the Sidekick has other problems, like a chronically overloaded back-end web service, that makes the experience of web browsing somewhere between "sort of annoying" and "extremely painful", with page load delays of 30 to 60 seconds per page not being unusual). The G1 is 3G-capable, though Pittsburgh's data network is still EDGE, and they warn that multimedia will be slow on EDGE networks. But you can still do things like watch YouTube videos on the G1 without all that much more loading delay than you might see on a PC with broadband Internet. The Sidekick couldn't do this (play video) at all.
The phone supports Wi-Fi in addition to EDGE/GPRS, so if you're at home or in a coffee shop with free wireless Internet or something, you can use Wi-Fi. It works, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're just out of cell service range, or unless you're on an old GPRS celllar data network - using Wi-Fi doesn't "feel" all that much faster than just using EDGE, and using Wi-Fi chews up the battery faster than not doing so.
The G1 comes with a 3 megapixel camera, and it takes decent photos in daylight. Unfortunately, it takes a while (several seconds) to get the camera application even running from the time you push the button, then it wants to autofocus which takes several more seconds, so it can be a good 15 to 20 seconds from the time you push the camera button until the time you've captured an image. Neither camera (the G1, or the Sidekick) works well other than in daylight. If you're indoors with normal room lighting, it's not so great. If you're in low-light conditions, don't even bother...
It also comes with an MP3 player. It works, but it's clunky and sort of confusing to use. It shares a problem with the Sidekick - once you start a song or a playlist playing, it's really hard to figure out how to stop it. If using your phone as a music player really matters to you, you'll be happier with an iPhone, for sure...
One surprise was a lack of what I considered to be very basic productivity appplications - no notepad application (I'd become used to using my Sidekick for making quick notes all the time), and no to-do list. Fortunately, there are several of each type of application in the Android Market, and you can download whatever one you like best. From the simple "AK Notepad" application that just takes quick text notes, to "WikiNote" which lets you organize the notes on your handheld as a wiki. Right now, all the applications in the Android Market are free to download, there are lots of them, and many are even open-source (as opposed to the Sidekick, where the downloadable applications were few, and you had to pay for them all). Anyone can download the Android SDK, make an Android application, and put it up on the Android Market. Of course, the problem is, since anyone can do it, lots of people do... To say that most of the available applications lack "professional polish" would not be inaccurate... Some of them are quite primitive, some barely even work, and some will even crash your phone. Since developers can't charge for applications yet, there's not much motivation for professional application development for Android. The few "professional" applications out there are either limited demos (for which you have to buy the full version of the application, outside of the Android Market), or are done by organizations to promote their own web sites or services (like the Accuweather and WeatherBug applications). There's a user rating system in the Android Market where you can rate the quality of an application - but since everyone can download anything for free, people can (and do) give very low ratings to an application for dumb reasons, like they just don't understand what the application is for. I've seen this happen with some developer-oriented tool applications (where you basically have to be a developer to make any use of all of them), or things like an implementation of Conway's "Game of Life" on Android - many users rated it at one star (out of five) because they just didn't understand what it was. So don't put much stock in the rating system.
One thing that's disappointing about the downloadable applications is that they don't seem to sync their data with the data service. The only things that sync their data are Gmail, Contacts, and Calendar. The rest of the applications, as far as I can tell, your data isn't backed up anywhere. For instance, on the Sidekick, I had an outliner/list-manager application. Anything I entered into the outliner was backed up on the Sidekick back-end service. So if I had to "hard reset" my phone, or if my phone broke and I had to get a new one (or if I switched between Sidekick models, as I did at one point), this would mean that I lost all the data in the phone. But it would automatically restore everything from the back-end backup, so within a few minutes, all of my outliner data was restored to the phone. If this happened with the G1, I think all I would get back would be my mail, contacts, and calendar - any data that was being stored by any application, appears that it would just be lost. Hopefully, this issue (having to "hard-reset" or "factory reset" the phone) won't be be a problem on the G1 (it was something I had to do on the Sidekick at least a couple times per month, when it would hang...).
One application in the Android Market is something called "Terminal Emulator", which has a somewhat deceptive name. On the G1, the Android platform runs under Linux, and the "Terminal Emulator" application will actually give you a Linux shell prompt on your phone... You can't get a root (i.e., system administrator) shell prompt, though, and that's probably just as well. There were some hacks at one time to get around this, but as quickly as they were discovered, system updates were pushed out to the phones to correct them. It's not a full shell, it's some kind of BusyBox-like thing (the system's footprint on the phone is necessarily small, so it's not a full Linux distribution), so lots of things just aren't there. Still, it was freaky to be able to get a shell prompt and run "ls" to see what files were on my phone, run "ps" to see what processes were running on the phone, and so forth. For the first few days after I got it, if you went into a Terminal Emulator shell, and typed "reboot" ... well, it would reboot the phone. After a few days, though, they pushed out a system update, and now that doesn't work anymore.
The worst thing about the phone, by far, though, is the battery life. The battery life is, IMHO, just awful. I think the info on T-Mobile's site claims that it gives up to 5 days standby time. That's gotta be if you're not using it at all, and have everything turned off (GSM radio off or at least turn off syncing Google tools, Wi-Fi off, Bluetooth off, screen never on, etc., etc.). I am not getting anywhere near that. Admittedly, I am using it, but I'm not really using it any more than I was the Sidekick (other than perhaps because it just does things faster than the Sidekick did - the Sidekick limited how much you could actually use it, because it was so slow). I can say though that I've seen it go from a full charge (after charging overnight) in the morning, to looking at the battery level four or five hours later and seeing it was already down to 70%, without having even used the phone at all (either for voice or data). Before I got a PDA phone, I had a little Nokia phone that would go a good 7 to 10 days between charges if I didn't use it heavily. So it was sort of culture shock when I got the Sidekick and found that I had to charge it every couple of days even if I didn't use it. And now with the G1, I absolutely have to charge it every night, and there have been days where (again, using it no more than I used the Sidekick) where it started from a full charge in the morning, to being down to 15% by mid-afternoon, having to charge it again, and being down to about 40% again by evening. This thing is very power-hungry. At least it charges from a USB charger, so if you are sitting at a computer all day, you can plug it into your computer using any A-to-MiniB USB cable, and it will charge. When it's charging, it seems to recover about 1% of charge every minute or so, so almost no matter how much the battery is drained, you can get back up to 99% (seems to be as far as it will register...) within about 90 minutes. At least that's something.
There's probably more I could tell you, but these are the highlights. This post is getting kind of long...
Bottom line: There's a lot of promise here, and for someone who doesn't mind being on the "bleeding edge" of technology, it's a reasonable choice, and it's actually kind of fun. But be prepared for a bit of a learning curve, and for things working in ways you might not be used to. For everyone else, for people who want to buy a phone and want it to "just work" and not have to learn very much about it, it might be prudent to wait for the next version. Especially if you buy now, it'll be at least two years before you're eligible for a full upgrade discount again, which means that when the next version comes out, you might not be able to get it, at least not at a reasonable price....
Here are my impressions thus far. I'll compare and contrast somewhat with the Sidekick, since that's what I've been using the last couple of years, so that's what I've become used to. My experience with the new phone has been, not surprisingly, somewhat of a mixed bag so far.
If you're a new customer, the G1 will cost you $180 with a two year contract. If you're an existing T-Mobile customer, and you're eligble for an upgrade, you'll get the same price (plus an $18 "upgrade fee") if you take a two year contact extension. The price with no contact extension is $450. It's worth the two year committment almost no matter what your circumstances are, because the early termination fee is $200, so you still end up (effectively) paying only $400 for the phone even if you cancel before the two years is up. If you're an existing customer, but are not eligible for an upgrade (because you got a previous upgrade deal too recently), you're kind of stuck - depending on when you last upgraded, you'll probably get a discount, but it will still cost more than $180. Best bet in that case is probably to call Customer Care and whine at them, they might cut you a deal. (I've been advised a few times in the past, by people at T-Mobile retail stores, that the Customer Care people can make one-time special deals that they're not allowed to make in the retail stores.) Because of the high cost of the unit, it's worth considering the Equipment Protection coverage on it, at least for a while, even though there's a fairly high deductible (I think it was $150 or $200 last time I looked) - otherwise, if your phone should break outside of the warranty period, you'll be stuck paying full retail to get it replaced. The coverage was about $6.00 per month when I last looked. If you take the Equipment Protection coverage, be sure to keep an eye on the retail price of the phone in the future, to see if it's come down enough to make it not worth carrying the coverage (after the deductible is taken into account). Also remember that, if you want it, you must sign up for Equipment Protection within 14 days of receiving the phone - it won't be available to you after that. And remember, when you cancel, that you won't be able to change your mind.
My first disappointment came as soon as I opened the box, and saw the carrying case they provided. What they give you is a carrying sleeve, with no belt clip. This is totally inadequate for someone like me, that likes to have the phone upon my person at all times. I took a trip to the local T-Mobile store, and came away emptyhanded - they told me they had no G1 cases (not even a "universal" case that it would fit into), and suggested that I'd need to obtain one online. But even that didn't work, since they're only offering one "shell" for the G1 (apparently a hard plastic type), and even that won't be available for purchase until the end of the month. Physically, this phone seems somewhat delicate, and you don't want it knocking around in your pocket, even inside of a carrying sleeve. In the end, I went to Staples and found a reasonably sturdy holster that was intended for Blackberrys and iPhones, but which the G1 just happens to fit into. It cost about $20.00.
First order of business, once I got the phone unpacked, was to open it up to install the SIM card and the battery. This was easier said than done. First, it is not obvious how to get the back cover off - I had to look at the "Getting Started" guide to figure it out. Second, the back cover is rather firmly secured, and kind of flimsy. It takes much more force to get it off than you'd think, and in the process I thought I was going to snap it in half (the cover, not the entire phone). It would have been very frustrating to break the phone before I ever got a chance to use it... But eventually, I was successful. I also had to figure out where the miniSD card goes, because I figured that I was going to have to move my miniSD card from my Sidekick to the G1. This was also not obvious, and I also had to consult the "Getting Started" guide to figure out how to do this too. And, it turned out to be unnecessary, because the G1 ships with a 1 gig miniSD card pre-installed.
It's worth noting that the "Getting Started" guide is the only documentation the phone actually ships with. There is a full manual available, but you have to download it as a PDF file from T-Mobile's web site. Oh, and the G1 doesn't come with a PDF reader, and there isn't one yet available as a third-party application. Catch-22... It would be sort of nice to be able to read the manual for the phone, on the phone itself - but no can do, at least not right now. Similarly, after you activate the phone, you will get a text message from T-Mobile that says "We hope you enjoy your new G1", and which gives a web link to the G1 support web site, and says "Click here to go to the site now". But the G1 support site is totally a Flash site, you really can't view it at all without Flash, and the G1 doesn't come with a Flash plugin (I understand there is now one available, or will be soon, as a third-party application), so you can't do that either.
I let the G1 charge overnight, before attempting to switch over from the Sidekick. While this was going on, I had to transcribe all of the information from my Sidekick address book and notepad to paper. They don't give you an easy way to do move your contacts over. You could save your contacts to your SIM and move them over that way, but that only saves a name and a phone number. The contact list on the Sidekick includes all kinds of other information - each contact can have multiple phone numbers, multiple e-mail addresses, home address, birthday, etc., and that would all be lost. So I set about writing down all this info, for close to 70 contacts, because I figured I'd have to key it into the G1. And I couldn't just transcribe it from the Sidekick to the G1, because once you take out the SIM card, the Sidekick won't operate at all - so no way to have both phones turned on at the same time, even if one couldn't make calls. I later discovered there was an easier way, which I'll talk about momentarily.
Once I was ready, and had my SIM installed in the G1, I went to the My T-Mobile web site to cancel my Sidekick data plan, and activate a G1 data plan. There are two to choose from. First is the "standard" G1 data plan, for $24.95/month; this gives you unlimited web browsing, and up to 400 SMS (text) messages, MMS (picture) messages, IM's, and e-mails. That is not 400 of each kind - the total (sent or received) of SMS, MMS, IM's, and e-mails can be up to 400; if you go over, it's an additional 20 cents for each message over the limit. If you go to the "G1 Plus" data plan, for $34.95/month, you get unlimited messaging as well as web browsing. This is a lot more expensive than the "Sidekick Unlimited" data plan, which gives you unlimited web and messaging for $19.95/month. I chose the G1 Plus data plan, figuring I'd see how it went (I do use messaging an awful lot), and maybe downgrade at a later date if possible.
After doing that, I fired up the phone. The first thing it did was to prompt me to log in with my Google account. So I tried to do that, and it thought about it for a while... and failed. So I tried again, and it failed again. As it turns out, the data plan switch takes a while to happen, it's not instant. It was about an hour before I could actually use the phone, and I understand that adding or switching a data plan can take up to 24 hours worst case. So if possible, you should sign up for your G1 data plan ahead of time.
Once my data plan was active, it logged me in - then it barfed because my Google account did not have a Gmail account associated with it. The phone requires you to be a Gmail user, because it uses Gmail for e-mail (as opposed to the Sidekick, that gives you a completely separate e-mail address for your handheld). So I had to sign up for a Gmail account immediately (I did this via a web browser on a regular computer, but could have done it on the G1 - but in either case, it won't let you proceed until you have a Gmail account). And of course, I could not get any of the account names I wanted, so I had to settle for something sort of stupid. Once I did that, I logged into Google again on the phone, and it was up and running.
It turns out that the phone syncs with your Gmail mail and contacts, and your Google calendar. You can use them from the phone and from a regular computer interchangeably - what you do on a computer automatically shows up on your phone, and vice versa. And you don't need to sync all of your Gmail folders to the phone, you can choose a limited subset that you want to have in both places. Like I said, the sync is automatic, you don't need to do anything to make it happen (though you can manually force a sync if you want to).
I ended up entering all of my contact data via the Gmail Contacts web interface (on a PC), which took about an hour. It all appeared on my phone in short order (contact updates made on the PC showed up on the phone within a couple of minutes). If I'd known I'd be able to do that, I would have signed up for a Gmail account ahead of time, and entered all that data from the Sidekick in advance; it would have gone to the phone automatically when I activated it. But I didn't know that ahead of time. Live and learn.
Once I was finished with all that, it was off to the races...
The G1's interface takes some getting used to. You get both a touchscreen, and a trackball. Navigating around using the touchscreen (doing the "touch and drag" thing, sort of like the iPhone - where it's like you've got the virtual screen under your finger and are pushing it around to be where you want it) is exactly the opposite of using the trackball (where you roll the trackball down to make the screen scroll up, and vice versa). There are some things you really want to use the trackball for, though, like moving to and clicking on web links, especially on pages where they're spaced closely together (yes, you can zoom in, but it takes some extra time).
You get three "virtual desktops", and you switch between them by touch-and-drag on the keyboard, or using the trackball. The main (center) desktop includes a big, ugly graphical analog clock, and icons for some common activities (like the Dialer, web browser, etc.). The right desktop is blank except for a Google search gadget (just type into it to do a Google search without starting the browser manually). The left desktop is totally blank. You can add "activity" icons to all three desktops (roughly corresponding to applications, or various built-in functions).
The display swings open to reveal the QUERTY keyboard. There are a couple of problems with the arrangment. First is the swing-out screen. It seems awfully delicate, like you could accidentially snap the display off quite easily (both Sidekicks I've used have had a similar problem, but the G1 seems even more delicate than either of them). Second is the keys - they're large enough, but they're almost flush against the rest of the device, require very little pressure to press a key, and you don't get much in the way of tactile feedback to let you know you've done it - there's a little, not much. Contrast with the Sidekicks, where the keys are a little more raised, keys need a little more travel before they "press", and there's a "click" you can feel when you press a key. You kind of have to get the feel of it, and just be confident that when you press a key, it is pressed - if you're not looking at the screen, you won't know for sure. Also, on both Sidekicks, the keyboard was relatively centered. On the G1, when you're holding it sideways with the screen open, your left thumb is immediately next to the keyboard, while your left thumb has to travel about a quarter of an inch before it gets to the keyboard. It might not sound like much difference in distance, but it really is, until you get used to it. The thing about the keyboard that gives me the most fits, though, is the hard-wired "Google Search" key. In theory, this gives you one-key access to Google's search engine, at any time. But it's right next to the "Alt" key, which you need to press if you want to enter a "/" character, which you'll probably be doing in the course of web browsing. The problem is, about 25% of the time, I accidentally hit the "Search" key instead of the "Alt" key, which stops whatever I'm doing, and submits whatever I've typed to that point as a Google search. Which is basically never what I want to do (and is really frustrating if you're typing a long URL with several slashes in it). I need to see if there's a way to disable that key entirely.
In the web browser, there is a "virtual cursor" that is sort of where you would be clicking if you pushed down on the trackball, but that cursor is invisible unless you have a link highlighted. In some instances, you can scroll up and down, trying to get to a web link, and you'll find that the display just scrolls very rapidly and it doesn't let you click any links. This is because the "virtual cursor" isn't near enough (horizontally) to any of the links, typically because it's near or beyond the right side of the screen. This was totally confusing the first time it happened to me, I thought that Android (the phone's application platform) had gotten confused. But really, all I needed to do was move over to the left a little bit. Perhaps they'll add a "visible cursor" option to the next release.
The sound quality of the phone is decent, and it includes a feature that I always wanted on the Sidekick - a "virtual keypad" where you can dial a phone number by just touching a keypad displayed on the screen. On the Sidekick, in order to dial a phone number that was not in your contact list, you had to flip open the keyboard, and use the keyboard's number keys to dial (this is why I have so many contacts in my address book...), or by using the trackball to mouse around on the graphical keyboard. This isn't necessary on the G1, though you can do it if you want to.
The phone supports voice dialing, which is good. But only from the handset, which is stupid. You can't voice dial from a Bluetooth headset. And the times when you're using a headset are exactly the times you'd need voice dialing the most. I really hope they fix this.
The G1 has my "favorite" phone gripe, unfortunately, which is that the "normal" ringtones and notification tones (like calendar reminders) aren't nearly loud enough, and the vibrate feature on the phone isn't strong enough. It's actually worse on the G1 than it was on the Sidekick. On the Sidekick, if you missed a notification tone, at least it would "chirp" every 5 minutes until you acknowledged it, so eventually you'd realize that you missed something. On the G1, you get one shot - if you miss the tone the first time, that's it. You'll see a notification icon on the screen next time you look at it, but no more audible notifications will occur.
The network speed is decent, and it "feels" faster than the Sidekick (though the Sidekick has other problems, like a chronically overloaded back-end web service, that makes the experience of web browsing somewhere between "sort of annoying" and "extremely painful", with page load delays of 30 to 60 seconds per page not being unusual). The G1 is 3G-capable, though Pittsburgh's data network is still EDGE, and they warn that multimedia will be slow on EDGE networks. But you can still do things like watch YouTube videos on the G1 without all that much more loading delay than you might see on a PC with broadband Internet. The Sidekick couldn't do this (play video) at all.
The phone supports Wi-Fi in addition to EDGE/GPRS, so if you're at home or in a coffee shop with free wireless Internet or something, you can use Wi-Fi. It works, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're just out of cell service range, or unless you're on an old GPRS celllar data network - using Wi-Fi doesn't "feel" all that much faster than just using EDGE, and using Wi-Fi chews up the battery faster than not doing so.
The G1 comes with a 3 megapixel camera, and it takes decent photos in daylight. Unfortunately, it takes a while (several seconds) to get the camera application even running from the time you push the button, then it wants to autofocus which takes several more seconds, so it can be a good 15 to 20 seconds from the time you push the camera button until the time you've captured an image. Neither camera (the G1, or the Sidekick) works well other than in daylight. If you're indoors with normal room lighting, it's not so great. If you're in low-light conditions, don't even bother...
It also comes with an MP3 player. It works, but it's clunky and sort of confusing to use. It shares a problem with the Sidekick - once you start a song or a playlist playing, it's really hard to figure out how to stop it. If using your phone as a music player really matters to you, you'll be happier with an iPhone, for sure...
One surprise was a lack of what I considered to be very basic productivity appplications - no notepad application (I'd become used to using my Sidekick for making quick notes all the time), and no to-do list. Fortunately, there are several of each type of application in the Android Market, and you can download whatever one you like best. From the simple "AK Notepad" application that just takes quick text notes, to "WikiNote" which lets you organize the notes on your handheld as a wiki. Right now, all the applications in the Android Market are free to download, there are lots of them, and many are even open-source (as opposed to the Sidekick, where the downloadable applications were few, and you had to pay for them all). Anyone can download the Android SDK, make an Android application, and put it up on the Android Market. Of course, the problem is, since anyone can do it, lots of people do... To say that most of the available applications lack "professional polish" would not be inaccurate... Some of them are quite primitive, some barely even work, and some will even crash your phone. Since developers can't charge for applications yet, there's not much motivation for professional application development for Android. The few "professional" applications out there are either limited demos (for which you have to buy the full version of the application, outside of the Android Market), or are done by organizations to promote their own web sites or services (like the Accuweather and WeatherBug applications). There's a user rating system in the Android Market where you can rate the quality of an application - but since everyone can download anything for free, people can (and do) give very low ratings to an application for dumb reasons, like they just don't understand what the application is for. I've seen this happen with some developer-oriented tool applications (where you basically have to be a developer to make any use of all of them), or things like an implementation of Conway's "Game of Life" on Android - many users rated it at one star (out of five) because they just didn't understand what it was. So don't put much stock in the rating system.
One thing that's disappointing about the downloadable applications is that they don't seem to sync their data with the data service. The only things that sync their data are Gmail, Contacts, and Calendar. The rest of the applications, as far as I can tell, your data isn't backed up anywhere. For instance, on the Sidekick, I had an outliner/list-manager application. Anything I entered into the outliner was backed up on the Sidekick back-end service. So if I had to "hard reset" my phone, or if my phone broke and I had to get a new one (or if I switched between Sidekick models, as I did at one point), this would mean that I lost all the data in the phone. But it would automatically restore everything from the back-end backup, so within a few minutes, all of my outliner data was restored to the phone. If this happened with the G1, I think all I would get back would be my mail, contacts, and calendar - any data that was being stored by any application, appears that it would just be lost. Hopefully, this issue (having to "hard-reset" or "factory reset" the phone) won't be be a problem on the G1 (it was something I had to do on the Sidekick at least a couple times per month, when it would hang...).
One application in the Android Market is something called "Terminal Emulator", which has a somewhat deceptive name. On the G1, the Android platform runs under Linux, and the "Terminal Emulator" application will actually give you a Linux shell prompt on your phone... You can't get a root (i.e., system administrator) shell prompt, though, and that's probably just as well. There were some hacks at one time to get around this, but as quickly as they were discovered, system updates were pushed out to the phones to correct them. It's not a full shell, it's some kind of BusyBox-like thing (the system's footprint on the phone is necessarily small, so it's not a full Linux distribution), so lots of things just aren't there. Still, it was freaky to be able to get a shell prompt and run "ls" to see what files were on my phone, run "ps" to see what processes were running on the phone, and so forth. For the first few days after I got it, if you went into a Terminal Emulator shell, and typed "reboot" ... well, it would reboot the phone. After a few days, though, they pushed out a system update, and now that doesn't work anymore.
The worst thing about the phone, by far, though, is the battery life. The battery life is, IMHO, just awful. I think the info on T-Mobile's site claims that it gives up to 5 days standby time. That's gotta be if you're not using it at all, and have everything turned off (GSM radio off or at least turn off syncing Google tools, Wi-Fi off, Bluetooth off, screen never on, etc., etc.). I am not getting anywhere near that. Admittedly, I am using it, but I'm not really using it any more than I was the Sidekick (other than perhaps because it just does things faster than the Sidekick did - the Sidekick limited how much you could actually use it, because it was so slow). I can say though that I've seen it go from a full charge (after charging overnight) in the morning, to looking at the battery level four or five hours later and seeing it was already down to 70%, without having even used the phone at all (either for voice or data). Before I got a PDA phone, I had a little Nokia phone that would go a good 7 to 10 days between charges if I didn't use it heavily. So it was sort of culture shock when I got the Sidekick and found that I had to charge it every couple of days even if I didn't use it. And now with the G1, I absolutely have to charge it every night, and there have been days where (again, using it no more than I used the Sidekick) where it started from a full charge in the morning, to being down to 15% by mid-afternoon, having to charge it again, and being down to about 40% again by evening. This thing is very power-hungry. At least it charges from a USB charger, so if you are sitting at a computer all day, you can plug it into your computer using any A-to-MiniB USB cable, and it will charge. When it's charging, it seems to recover about 1% of charge every minute or so, so almost no matter how much the battery is drained, you can get back up to 99% (seems to be as far as it will register...) within about 90 minutes. At least that's something.
There's probably more I could tell you, but these are the highlights. This post is getting kind of long...
Bottom line: There's a lot of promise here, and for someone who doesn't mind being on the "bleeding edge" of technology, it's a reasonable choice, and it's actually kind of fun. But be prepared for a bit of a learning curve, and for things working in ways you might not be used to. For everyone else, for people who want to buy a phone and want it to "just work" and not have to learn very much about it, it might be prudent to wait for the next version. Especially if you buy now, it'll be at least two years before you're eligible for a full upgrade discount again, which means that when the next version comes out, you might not be able to get it, at least not at a reasonable price....