A full review of Google’s Android G1 Phone

The T-Mobile G1 Google smartphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, remains firmly in the shadow of the iPhone—for now. The phone, which goes on sale next week in the US and next month in Britain, was released too early. The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects. It’s not a bad phone, but the software and hardware needed more time in the oven to bring them to a golden brown crispness.

The G1 would come off much better if it wasn’t competing with the 3G iPhone and iPhone OS 2.1. Admittedly, it’s not clear that Google would have been able to sign up carriers back when the original iPhone was released back in the pre-3G and pre-App Store days, back when Google assembled the three dozen firms that form the Open Handset Alliance, without the iPhone as leverage. While Android’s development predates the release of the original iPhone, phones based on the OS will be pushed onto the market in part because of Apple’s exclusive carrier deals; carriers left out need an alternative.

The G1 is burdened with a lot of issues that have little to do with the phone itself, but we’ll see if we can get past that to explore the general inadequacy of the phone.

The hardware
You notice the G1’s ordinariness as soon as you unpack the phone, which comes wrapped in a small, neatly designed box. The cables are the kind you find accompanying any phone, which somehow makes the G1 appear bland even before use.

Android’s Maps program integrates multiple Google Maps views, and uses the GPS receiver for position.

The G1 guides you through a simple and well-designed setup process for creating accounts and filling in basic parameters. Oddly, despite the inclusion of a WiFi radio, there’s no option to add existing WiFi accounts during setup. Instead, the phone defaults to using T-Mobile’s limited 3G network, available in a few dozen cities right now. (Both data plans for the G1 include unlimited T-Mobile HotSpot use, which includes several thousand locations in the US)

Previews of the phone, produced by reviewers at national publications (like Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal) led me to expect a somewhat better piece of gear than what the G1 turned out to be. The G1 has a slightly rubberized case that’s comfortable in the hand, but the fit and finish isn’t all there.

The phone’s slide-out keyboard doesn’t have a smooth motion—it slams into place. The display portion wobbles slightly and doesn’t lock solidly into open or closed positions. The bottom portion of the phone, when in closed portrait mode, has a slight raise and tilt, and feels exactly right. HTC crammed five buttons and a trackball nubbin into that area.

When butterflied open, the raised and tilted portion winds up on the right side of the keyboard, and irritates while you type. The keyboard is quite nice, with all the letters and numbers available, along with keys for period and the @-sign, plus a dedicated Google search key. It’s quite similar to a one-letter-per-key BlackBerry.

Ports and buttons seem to be scattered around the phone, based on where they happen to fit, rather than having been placed through a well-thought-out design; HTC may have based this on a previous model to produce it so fast. Owners of HTC phones may be used to having volume up/down buttons in a reasonable place (the upper left side of the phone in portrait mode), but the compact USB jack is at the bottom, the camera button at the lower right, and the microSD slot cover is partly hidden when the phone isn’t opened.

There’s no standard headphone jack either, although the unit comes with a set of uncomfortable microphone/earbuds that use HTC’s proprietary USB audio connector to hook into the phone. An ungainly USB-to-2.5mm adapter is available, but not included.

The earbuds have good audio quality when listening to music. There’s a large rectangular bolus in the cable with a thumbnail for adjusting volume, a button for controlling call and music behavior, and a built-in microphone.

In use, the G1 doesn’t feel overly large unless you’re holding an iPhone in the other hand. But the slide-open keyboard makes the G1 more practical for large quantities of typing. As a 100wpm touch-typist, I’m still uncomfortable with the iPhone’s glass keyboard; I could type well on the G1 keyboard immediately.

A built-in speaker produces decent sound and can pump out at extremely high volume. The speaker is on the back, so it’s easy to muffle if you’re playing back YouTube or using it as a speaker phone when resting it on a table.

The out-of-the-box brightness was far too dim, obviously set to about 35 percent of maximum to preserve battery life. At its full brightness, video playback from YouTube was far more attractive.

The built-in three-megapixel camera produces extremely sharp, high-quality photos, even at a range of a few inches. Its auto-focus and exposure adjustments are fantastic. A third-party bar-code scanner had no trouble instantly recognizing and decoding a photo of a UPC printed on a book, for instance. However, the best hardware feature of a smartphone should not be its camera.

A photo taken with the G1’s camera.

The phone comes with a 1 GB microSD card installed, which is used by default to store photos, music, and other items. Plugging the phone into a computer via USB mounts the card, and its contents can be copied without special software. This is a meager amount of storage compared with the iPhone’s base 8 and 16GB models, but a 4GB microSD card can be had for as little as $14; T-Mobile maybe should have opted to eat a few dollars and include that amount of storage.

Although I didn’t have a G1 for long enough to test its battery performance during long phone calls or other typical drains, but the battery life seemed adequate. The unit lasted about a day with heavy data use, downloads, and video playback from YouTube, although that was with the inadequate default brightness.

Unlocking the T-Mobile G1: The Definitive Word

One of the G1’s five most obnoxious flaws (okay, there were more than five) is that it’s locked to T-Mobile, which seems antithetical to the whole openness deal. Since T-Mobile is subsidising the phone so heavily, it originally sounded like T-Mobile’s usual unlock policy wouldn’t apply, and a spokesperson wasn’t sure when we asked yesterday. Good news though: The official word from T-Mobile is if your account has been active for 90 days, they’ll unlock the G1 for you, just like they would with any other phone.

T-Mobile branded phones operating on the T-Mobile network may only use T-Mobile SIM cards. To use a T-Mobile branded phone on another wireless carrier’s network with a non-T-Mobile SIM card, you must first request a “SIM Unlock” code from T-Mobile. Conversely, if you have a phone from another North American wireless carrier, you may need to request a “SIM Unlock” code from that carrier before being able to use a T-Mobile SIM card on the T-Mobile network.

* SIM Unlock Codes will only be provided after your account has been active for 90 days. Only one unlock code may be provided per customer every 90 days.

Yes, even if you pay $US399 for a contract-less phone, you’ve still gotta have an active account for 90 days to have T-Mobile unlock it.

Of course, as we noted before, if you’re just interested in unlocking the G1 you really won’t have to worry about this at all: Developers can (and probably will, we’re betting within a couple of days after the launch) totally put an unlocking application in the Android Market—it won’t be blocked or pulled down. Definitely a prudent and laudable move on T-Mobile’s part, since trying to fight hackers on a phone almost explicitly designed for it would be retardo to the tenth degree. See, it really is up to devs to make Android awesome.

Google G1 Android Phone: 1.5 million pre-orders

More than 1.5 million people in the US have pre-ordered Google’s first mobile phone, according to reports.

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	Wanted by millions: Google’s T-Mobile G1 Android phone

The device, known as the G1, is made by Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, and will be available on the T-Mobile network. It runs Android, an operating system designed in part by Google that aims to bring the desktop computing experience to mobile devices. The G1 gives one-touch access to popular Google online services, such as its email service, YouTube video-sharing site and Google Maps.

According to news website Pulse2.com, T-Mobile sold out of its initial US allocation of G1 handsets, which were earmarked for existing T-Mobile subscribers, leading the network operator to triple its order with HTC, and meaning that about 1.5 million G1 phones have already been sold through pre-orders. Further handsets have been earmarked for sale through high-street retail stores when the phone hits shops in the US on October 22.

It means that about 1.5 million G1 phones have already been sold through pre-orders, with about another two million devices earmarked for purchase in high-street retail stores.

The G1 features a touchscreen and a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, as well as internet browsing via 3G and Wi-Fi, music downloads, and the ability to buy and install additional software, programs and games on the phone from the Android Market application store.

It will hit UK shops in November, just in time for the lucrative Christmas shopping season. Although T-Mobile in the UK has not started to take pre-orders for the phone, it is allowing customers to register their interest in the device, which more than 25,000 people have done so far. A spokesperson for T-Mobile said that it would probably start to take pre-orders a coule of weeks ahead of the G1’s release.

Although some technology experts have suggested that the estimate of 1.5 million pre-orders is too high, there’s little doubt that expectations of the G1 are high ahead of its launch. First impressions of the G1 were largely positive, with many technology experts seeing the potential of the Google operating system if not the design of the handset itself. But, as analysts have pointed out, the launch of the G1 needs to be a success if Google is going to establish the Android platform as a potential “iPhone killer”.

“Google needs the G1 to be a hit,” said Anders Bylund, an analyst with Motley Fool. “Given all the hype around the Android platform, a weak or disappointing first example could turn a lot of prospective buyers off entirely.”

The G1 is the latest in a long line of touchscreen hansdets aimed at toppling the iPhone. More than 1 million iPhone 3G handsets were bought in its first weekend of sale, and Apple is on course to hit its target of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of the year

TMobile G1 Phone, Google’s Android-Powered Cell Phone, Unveiled

NEW YORK — The first phone that harnesses Google Inc.’s ambition to make the Internet easy to use on the go was revealed Tuesday, and it looks a lot like an iPhone.

T-Mobile USA showed off the G1, a phone that, like Apple Inc.’s iPhone, has a large touch screen. But it also packs a trackball, a slide-out keyboard and easy access to Google’s e-mail and mapping programs.

T-Mobile said it will begin selling the G1 for $179 with a two-year contract. The device hits U.S. stores Oct. 22 and heads to Britain in November and other European countries early next year.

The phone will be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third-generation wireless data network. By launch, that will be 21 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami.

In other areas, people will be able to buy the phone from T-Mobile’s Web site. The phone does work on T-Mobile’s slower data network, but it’s optimized for the faster networks. It can also connect at Wi-Fi hotspots.

The data plan for the phone will cost $25 per month on top of the calling service, at the low end of the range for data plans at U.S. wireless carriers. And at $179, the G1 is $20 less than the least expensive iPhone in the U.S.

Android, the free software powering the G1, is a crucial building block in Google’s efforts to make its search engine and other services as accessible on cell phones as they already are on personal computers. The company believes it eventually might make more money selling ads that get shown on mobile devices than on PCs, a channel that will generate about $20 billion in revenue this year.

Both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also are investing heavily in the mobile market in hopes of preventing Google from extending the dominance it enjoys in searches initiated on PCs.