November 5th, 2008 | by geo |
 Update:It’s a negative. There’s only one port on the device for headset/charge/usb. This means I can’t keep my phone charging and use a wired headset for long conference calls. argg! (BTW I don’t like the bluetooth headsets b/c the battery is always dead - I forget to charge it.)
Yesterday I was robbed on a train by 3 pro’s. It was perfectly timed, and happened in the middle of the day when “all is normal.” I was sitting with my head down scrolling through emails on my iphone and SNATCH. Train doors close, good bye iphone.
So I went to T-mobile and got the new G1 for $179 + a 2 year contract. I was already on an unlimited data and voice plan so the net increase in my bill was only $5. (You have to buy the unlimited voice/data/text plan with a 2 yr deal unless you want to hand over $400.)
I’ve been living with the G1 for about 24hrs and here’s my *limited* initial feedback.
The not so good….
 Activation was “ok.” You have to sign in with your Google account on activation, before you can even make a phone call (sound familiar, apple/at&t/itunes?) For whatever reason my login wasn’t activating, and so that meant a trip back to T-Mobile and another 30 minutes waiting to fix it. I heard some others were having the same problem, but it must be rare or else we would have read the headlines by now.
Contacts –> Google wants you to sync with your Google contacts by default. You can sync to your computer with some plug-ins, but out of the box the option is Google. I have a mac, and address book has a built in sync tool for yahoo, google, mobilme and other address books. I had a problem with this also. The Google sync that is built into Address Book didn’t work for me…at all. I cleaned up my contacts and instead used AtoG for a somewhat clean, manual upload. Some fields were still missing, but I have my contacts loaded and functional, and I’ll just do an AtoG periodically as needed to update my contacts in Google going forward.
The battery has the weakest battery life I have ever used. I woke up this morning for a meeting, and by 1PM I had to do a recharge. I was using Google maps, email, browsing etc… heavily, but it burnt out pretty fast. Too fast!
I miss the multi-touch iphone functionality a little bit, but that goes away pretty fast after a few hours.
Only 1 gig memory (that’s ok because I mostly upload or stream data vs. store it now)
The Good…
 Usability rocks. I found it very easy to navigate the device, find things, browse the web, make phone calls etc. I really like the “notification” bar at the top that let’s you respond to anything immediately from one place. It’s also nice to have the option of using the trackball or touch screen.
The keyboard is solid. I can type well and it beats the iphone hands down…missed this!
Gmail and calendar push are top notch. Gmail is like texting on this device, super fast and you get it right away.
The speakers are excellent
Browsing the web is also very fast. It might be the 3g connection, but the browser is also very capable of delivering content quickly.
It’s only been 24 hours and I’m sure I’ll have more feedback, but at first glance this is a killer deal. A great phone for the price and T-mobile is solid worldwide. I’ve used T-mobile now for the past 8 years internationally and they do a great job.
BTW - Jari, my first choice at the T-Mobile store was the Nokia 5800 but they didn’t have it 
But, I change devices about every 6 months now so maybe soon.. 
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2 Responses to “My new G1 Google Phone”
By jari on Nov 7, 2008 | Reply
Sorry to hear about the thieves. What do you think about security/sw install etc features or Android?
By geo on Nov 7, 2008 | Reply
I’ve only installed a few third party apps thus far (accuweather, Wikimobile, & College Football live.) These were signed from the android mkt. There is the option to install non-signed apps. For these, I’d be cautious, although I know permissions are controlled well by the OS. Android does tell you what core functionality the apps have access to during install (i.e. GPS, address book, phone etc.) and you have to allow this access to install.
I do like the “pattern password” login - this is slick & with my previous phone being stolen I definitely want password entry going fwd.